How do you make good decisions for your organization, family, and community? What past decisions have worked well for the long run, and what decisions would you rethink?
Whenever this topic comes up with my family, they remind me of the time that I unilaterally and impulsively made the decision to buy a purple minivan or the time I decided to purchase the hair cutting kit to save money on my sons' haircuts. Both decisions proved to be disasters.
Today, as I thought about decision making that worked well and not-so-well, I thought about what matters with regard to good decision making.
Collective vision
Vision honored and created by the entire group is essential to great decision making. If your collective vision doesn't include all stakeholders, is outdated, and not detailed enough, it's likely to be insufficient for good decision making. Before making any decision for the group, review the vision, and, if needed, update that vision.
Prioritize what matters
Often poor decision making doesn't make the time to prioritize what matters most upfront. For example, if school administrations make decisions without prioritizing the most important people and goals, the decisions made will not be successful. This is true for any group. Make a list of the priorities and keep that priority list visual throughout the decision making process.
Use good process
Don't rely on same-old-same-old processes for decision making; find or create better decision making processes for these modern times. At conferences, I've learned about super decision making processes. With colleagues, I utilized those processes for good decision making, and was very satisfied with the outcome. Too often people don't choose a valuable, inclusive, modern decision making process upfront. When this happens, people rely on outdated processes that typically result in poor decisions. Good process matters.
Consider incremental change
Sometimes problems are too big or too confusing to solve all at once. In cases like this, it's best to dissect the problem, and solve the most important parts of the problem first. For example, say you have a family member with an addiction problem. The first priority might be putting into place actions that keep everyone safe including the addict. Once people are safe, you may begin dealing with strategies to help mitigate the addiction issue. To think you can solve big problems all at once obstructs your ability to solve the problems at all. Taking an incremental approach can lead you step-by-step to the solution.
Assess, reflect, and revise along the way
No matter how good the decision making process you use is, you will have to assess, reflect, and revise along the way. Nothing about problems is static, and that's one reason why you have to continually re-evaluate and revise your solutions. Also, as we implement solutions, we learn more and that affects what we do. This reality has been ever so clear during this pandemic. At first, few to none understood the pandemic. As decisions were made and implemented, we learned more which resulted in revision to decisions. That process of of changing responses continues as we learn about this pandemic, and if we take this process of assessing, reflecting, and revising seriously, we will save lies and mitigate illness and pandemic spread.
Acknowledge and celebrate successful solutions and decisions
Once a problem is over or reaches a positive conclusion, you need to acknowledge what happened and, if possible, celebrate a decision well made or a problem successfully solved.
How we make decisions and solve problems truly matters. Too often people don't take the problem-solving, decision making process seriously, and this stymies the progress we can make to uplift good living in many ways. If you are making decisions with others in any way, I suggest that you take these elements seriously. As I observe and assess decisions and problems in my own sphere over time, decisions and problems that were not made or solved well ignored many of these elements.