Decision Making with businessThink

I recently read businessThink and got a few good tips out of it. The premise of the book is to remove guesswork out of decision making by following 8 main rules:

1. Check your ego at the door before it shuts out great ideas

2. Create curiosity to uncover opportunity

3. Look for more than one solution

4. Get evidence to the problem or of taking on the opportunity

5. Calculate the investment and return of your decision by using questions such as:

    How do you measure your evidence?

    What’s your evidence (your metrics) now?

    What would you like them to be?

    What is the value of the difference?

    What is the value of the difference over time (month, quarter, etc.)?

6. Explore the possible ripple effect to your decision

7. Slow down for potential problems, or past problems

8. Find the cause behind problems by asking why 3 to 5 times until the real reason is discovered

But finally, the book makes a great point since the above list could bog you down in analysis: make a decision!

Sometimes people will disagree with your decision, but you have to know when to move forward. And to help get to a decision, make a grid with the steps needed, the decision for that step, when it needs to be decided, who needs to make the decision, and what they need in order to make the decision. However, be careful to only have the right people involved in the decision making process and try to keep that number of people as low as possible.