5 Top tips to improve your decision making in ONE short summary!

Tip 1 – Recognise your gut-feel… then put it aside for the moment.  Gut-feel or intuition is an important part of how we operate but it can be so powerful that it prevents us from thinking clearly.

Tip 2 – Separate the facts from the assumptions.  You can’t run a business or get through life without making some assumptions but make sure you ‘label’ those assumptions correctly and don’t confuse them with ‘facts’.  Be open to changing your assumptions when new or better information comes along.

Tip 3 – Is it a problem or a conflict?  Problems can be solved with logic but often what we face in business are emotional conflicts.  Acknowledge and ‘speak to their values’ before their logical brain.  When emotions are driven by ‘values’ and people use words like ‘honesty’, ‘trust’, ‘loyalty’, ‘fairness’, don’t be surprised if your attempts at logical problem-solving and ultimately decision making get rejected.

Tip 4 – Develop more than one solution.  Avoid the temptation to stop thinking when you get to the first acceptable solution in decision making.  Keep thinking until you generate several different options and ask how each of them can be turned into the ‘best’ solution.

Tip 5 – Test your decision before taking action.  See if you can test your best and second-best options before locking them in.  

Want more info on decision making in your business, email Trent trent.moy@halide.com.au or comment below.  Next week we’ll provide a short summary.  Let us know how you are getting along applying these skills for better decision making.ONE

Tip 5, Week 5: Test your decision before taking action

OK – you have thought through a complex issue and made a decision about what to do.  Good work.  But as you know, sometimes the best plan goes pear-shaped when we try to implement it.  The drawing looks OK but the reality on-site is more complicated.  

Ideally, you will have more than one option or solution when making decisions.  Plan A and Plan B could both work but you won’t really know until you try them.  Is there some way that you can test both Plan A and Plan B before actually getting locked-in to either of them?

Here are some tips for testing decisions:

• You don’t have to go it alone.  Making decisions is not easy.  Talk through your options with a few people that you trust and get their perspectives.  If you have a role-model or mentor that you can’t actually talk to (like a famously wise but dead person that you admire) then just imagine the advice that they would give you.
• Explain your decision to a rubber duck or your dog.  Remarkably, when we explain something step-by-step to something that can’t interrupt or speak back to us, we discover what we confidently know and what we might need to rethink.  And it’s safe… the rubber duck or dog won’t judge us or tell anybody else.  A simple decision making tool.
• Stare into the future. Ask how each option will appear to other people in the future.  For example, how will this look to my children, my partner, myself in 10 years’ time?
• Go for a small trial or experiment before big bang.  Give yourself room to modify your decision based on the experiment. 
• Can you do some research? Look at whether you can do an online survey, a social media poll, or perhaps undertake some focus group research through an external agency. This research could be to new or existing customers. You can also do A and B testing easily in social media marketing. 

Summary – How to make better decisions

In this series we have looked at a few tips for better decision making.  The good news is that we don’t have to make perfect decisions, we can develop the skills of making better decisions through practice. 

Remember, the enemy of a good decision is not an imperfect decision (or even a poor decision)… the real enemy is not deliberately making a decision at all.

Want more info on decision making in your business, email Trent trent.moy@halide.com.au or comment below.  Next week we’ll provide a short summary.  Let us know how you are getting along applying these skills for better decision making.

Tip 4, Week 4: Develop more than one solution

There’s an old joke about finding something you have lost in the last place that you would look… because nobody finds something and then continues to look for it.  But the same thing happens when we are going through the decision making process – once we come up with a solution that seems reasonable, we stop looking for other solutions.

In other words, when we are making decisions, we settle for the ‘first acceptable option’ rather than thinking through all the possibilities and choosing the ‘best possible option’.  One of the reasons why we settle for the first option may be that we form an unreasonable emotional attachment to the first good idea we have as being the best idea.  That’s true – it is the best idea we have had (so far) but it may not be the best idea we are possible of having.

When a group of people have to work through a decision, we can fool ourselves into thinking that we will come up with the best solution simply because lots of people can generate lots of ideas.  But sometimes we generate lots of ‘first acceptable options’ which (because we are attached to our own ideas) we then need to explain and defend.  The more we explain and defend, the harder it is to start thinking from the beginning.

Here’s a tip (or two):  When decision making, draw five circles on a sheet of paper and write one possible option or solution in each circle.  Then, around the outside of each circle, write down a few bullet points that respond to the statement, “This option would be a winner if I or we can….”

Why draw circles rather than just list your ideas?  Because when we create a list it has an order – from first to last.  The circles help us to realise that all of our ideas are (just for the moment) equally valuable. Drawing five circles can also push us to think of other options rather than stopping at one or two options.

The reason for then writing down the ways in which each idea can become a winner helps us to see that we might need to be creative and that the best option may not be the easiest option.

Don’t be surprised if this leads you to linking some of your ideas together, or developing a new option that was not part of your original five. If you think you will have more than five circles, draw them all.

Need more help on how to develop more than one solution, email Trent trent.moy@halide.com.au or comment below.  For more great tips, stay tuned for our final Tip in this 5-week series, next week.

Tip 3, Week 3: Is it a problem or a conflict?

Humans are good at solving problems.  If you look at the advances we have made with technology, medicine, aviation safety, etc, you can see that we really are quite clever at solving complex problems.  By ‘problem’ I mean the sort of thing that can be solved by thinking clearly (and sometimes creatively) about causes, effects, and solutions.

However, in running a business many of the difficult decisions that we have to make are not related to logical problems.  Those decisions relate to ‘conflicts’ or they relate to a problem that has been complicated by a conflict.  A conflict involves emotions, not logic. 

Think about some emotional conflicts you, or your staff, may experience in your work week:
“Those idiots just told us that our delivery is running late, yet again – I should never have trusted them”;
“Why haven’t you spoken to that customer and resolved their complaint yet?”;
“I told her that I would re-do the job and she is still unhappy”; 
“All those casual staff want to do is look at their phones rather than work.”

These comments are all hints that your business has emotional conflicts, not just logical problems. (You may have had an emotional conflict with a customer or staff member before reading this article).

Because most of us don’t want to be counsellors or UN peace negotiators, and we have no time or interest in ‘playing games’, we can often misread situations as straightforward problems that can be solved.  We skip over the importance of the associated emotional conflict and downplay the effect it is having on the issue.  And we can under estimate the effect of our own emotions on the quality of our decisions.

One of the most difficult type of conflicts to resolve is when somebody feels that their values (fairness, integrity, loyalty, honesty, transparency etc) have been ignored or stomped on.  Those values are the fuel that feeds the fire of our emotions.  We need to deliberately connect our values with the values of other people before we move on to trying to logically solve a problem. 

Here’s a tip:  When faced with a complex decision, see if you can spot the conflicts as well as the problems.  You can’t resolve other people’s emotional conflicts for them, but your chances of negotiating a successful outcome will be better if you can acknowledge and ‘speak to their values’ before speaking to their logical brain.

Want more info on resolving problems and conflicts, email Trent trent.moy@halide.com.au or comment below.  For more great tips, stay tuned for Tip 4 next week.

Tip 2, Week 2: Separate the facts from the assumptions in decision making

It sounds like an obvious thing to want our decisions to be based on facts rather than just assumptions.  But when you look at why jobs take longer than expected, business plans don’t go to plan, and misunderstandings happen with customers, it’s often because assumptions have been made in the decision making process.

Assumptions are powerful because they simplify the decision making process.  In some cases, making an assumption, or set of assumptions, might be a very sensible thing to do.  Some examples may be assuming the way your competitors price a piece of work or their final tender bid, assuming the expected working life of a particular piece of equipment, or making assumptions of how many wet weather days to allow in a contract.

The trick with using assumptions is to clearly ‘label’ the assumptions as assumptions.  In this way we won’t confuse them with facts.  The facts are unlikely to be completely wrong or to change, but my assumptions are less certain – I have to remain open to those assumptions being wrong or being corrected by better information down the track.  Ideally, I have to be on the lookout for how I can improve my assumptions.  And I need to be aware of the way in which customers, suppliers, staff, subbies and other people all have their own sets of assumptions.

Making a good decision sounds simple – you evaluate the problem, think of all the possible options and then pick the best option… and do it.  But as we know that’s harder than it looks.

Tip 1, Week 1: Recognise your gut-feel… then put it aside for the moment

When we are faced with decision making, most of us have a gut-feel or intuition about what to do.  Part of what we call ‘gut-feel’ is based on experience – we recognise prior patterns and remember what has worked and what has not.  It’s like our brain takes a shortcut and avoids over-analysing all the possible choices.

That’s handy when the risk of making a ‘bad’ decision is low, such as choosing a parking space that is in front of you or continuing to drive around looking for a better spot.  But we also use it when the risk is high:  Is that wire live?  Can I trust that person?  Should I go and see the doctor about that chest pain?  Is now the time to borrow more money?

Gut-feel is handy but good decision making requires more than just gut-feel:

• Firstly, we tend to remember when we got it right and forget when we got it wrong. It’s a bit like remembering your wins and forgetting your losses.  I am responsible for my wins, but other people or things are to blame for losses.  We like to think we are smarter than we really are.
• Secondly, gut-feel is easily influenced by our emotional ‘reading’ of a situation. Is someone being a smart-arse or are they trying to help?  Is that deal fair or is someone being ripped off?  Do I have time to deal with this now?  I have too much going on – I’ll make this decision later.
• Finally, gut-feel is a shortcut. Research into human thinking indicates that in a world where there is a pressure to make quick decisions and work fast, we use those shortcuts too often.  There are many situations where we need to slow down our thinking, perhaps talk to other people, and make a more balanced decision.

So, gut feel is useful and it is hard to make it go away.  But it can also lead us astray.

Here’s a tip:  When faced with important decision making, write down or make a quick voice recording of your gut feel… and then put it aside while you think about it a bit more carefully.  Doing this allows your brain to acknowledge your gut feel as an important part of making a decision.  It gives your brain permission or freedom to explore other options.  You can also do this when a group of people need to agree on a decision – get everybody to write down their gut-feel – before giving themselves permission to think of some other possibilities.

Want more info on gut-feel and decision making in business or life, contact Halide, email trent.moy@halide.com.au or comment below.  Better decision making can lead to a better business and marketing strategy.

For more great decision making tips, stay tuned for Tip 2 next week.