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People say that decision making is a science as well as an art. It helps when you have a PROCESS to apply this ‘left-brain+right-brain’ OR ‘qualitative+quantitative’ OR ‘factual+judgemental’ subject of decision making.
NOTE- ExecutionMiH.com has not yet started a section on decision management, but it is part of our authoring plans. This field-tip is a kind of pre-cursor to our encyclopedia on this subject. We will not detail on the components of a decision making process, but only the imperatives of a good decision making process.
Every business leader develops heuristics and instinctive methods to take a decision. If you ask a senior executive to define a process she uses to take a decision, you will not get a defined response. Some organizations use advanced models and frameworks to take decisions, but largely these methods don’t have a well defined place and sequence in the decision making process. These techniques end up getting used at different points and with varying level of discipline.
Field Tip Statement- A FLEXIBLE, ADAPTIVE, FACT-BASED AND RESULT-ORIENTED decision making process can make your decision making more EFFICIENT, CONSISTENT and RESPONSIVE.
Now let us break-down this field-tip.
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FLEXIBLE- A decision making process needs to be flexible in terms of allowing you to remove or add components depending upon the type, complexity and criticality of the decision you want to make. Some decisions need a quick and ‘in-spirit’ adherence to the process and some of them need extensive by the book application. For example, one will treat Product launch decision with far more thoroughness compared to launching a local promotion campaign.
ADAPTIVE- A decision making process needs to change with the context and the environment. For example, let’s say that an organization has gone through a major acquisition and is going through the business integration. In this scenario, you decision making process can have significant changes, as any decision will also need to account for the impact on the acquired organization. This may lead to some more stakeholders and sign-offs.
Another scenario of an adaptive business process is the speed of decision making. Sometimes the situation demands speed over thoroughness. The decision making process should have scope of adapting to this change. For example- the DM process may include that in the situation of the need of speed, the head of business can take an executive decision, instead of driving consensus.
SYSTEMATIC- A DM process should work on doing first things first. A typical DM process will follow the sequence of ‘problem or opportunity statement’ followed by information gathering, followed by brain storming, short listing of ideas etc. This sequence will be influenced by the best practices in decision management also aligned with human tendencies in decision making.
RESULT-ORIENTED- The core purpose of a decision making process is to have a timely and best possible decision given the environment and constraints. A DM process will have ways to help people avoid decision paralysis or mixed accountabilities.
…decision making process can make your decision making more..
EFFICIENT- A decision making process should help you to make decisions faster. After initial learning phase, an organization should be able to make decisions faster and with less effort.
CONSISTENT- A DM process should have your decisions aligned to your strategic priorities, values systems and culture.
RESPONSIVE - A DM process will enable you to respond to any situation – anticipated or unanticipated
Tips to follow a Decision management process
Avoid bureaucracy- A DM process should not add another dimension of red-tape in an organization. For example- One does not need to have ‘DM process quality management’ role.
Review and Change Manage- You should review the effectiveness of our decisions taken through the DM process, and constantly review the process for improvement opportunities.
No scenario based DM process- An organization has to make thousands of different decisions for different scenarios. A DM process should not be built tailor-make for a given decision scenario (for example a DM process for Vendor acquisition). The DM process should be more based on the type of decision (financial, Process, People..), the level (operational, managerial and strategic) and complexity (High, medium or Low complexity..) |
