Define the Decision Before Making the Decision

Define your next decision by answering these 5 questions.

The first step in the decision-making process is clearly defining the decision you’re going to make. There are some key questions you should be asking as you’re defining the decision:

First, what’s the desired outcome?

Is there a specific metric that you’re trying to drive?

What are the choices that we’re trying to make?

What are the possible choices that we can choose from?

When do we have to decide?

Who is this decision going to affect?

If you don’t go through these steps of defining the decision, you’re going to have unclear objectives, and that may lead you to make a bad choice. If you don’t define all the possible alternatives, you might miss a great opportunity. And last, not being clear about timelines or who’s going to be involved is going to increase risk, it’ll cause confusion, and it’s going to frustrate people in the decision-making process.

Allow me to offer an example of when we clearly defined a decision to be made. In my corporate life, one of the organizations I ran had paper-based payments that we were getting from our business partners, and we wanted to move from paper to electronic.

So we defined the desired outcome: no more paper.

We said, “The choice we’re trying to make is how to best make that shift for our business partners.”

We said, “The possible choices are going paper, electronic, or some hybrid.”

We clearly defined the timeline. We said, “We need to decide by the end of the month. And within six months, we need all the paper to go away.”

And we thought through who is going to be impacted by the decision: our organization, our business partners, as well as ultimately, our customers.

And by going through this step of clearly defining the decision, we were able to successfully make a decision upfront and execute it well on the back end.

So as you go to make your own decisions, think through this set of five questions and drive that clarity of the decision you’re trying to make.

Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!