The very act of deciding seems a bit like the piece of soap in the bathtub: the more you want to get a grip on it the more it slips away. Much is talked today about VUCA conditions, and decision-making in complex adaptive spaces with highly uncertain outcomes, volatile ingredients and complex relationships are a different animal all together to deal with. Many leaders that we worked with, when asked to portrait their decision-making process in a way that it could be followed or repeated by others, tend to come up with a list of actions rather than a solid decision-making process. That made us curious. We ventured more into the terrain of choice-making.
The weird thing is that even in ‘normal’ conditions people are not aware of how they make choices. Some people pose their questions attentively, gather relevant information superbly and then “wing” it with the actual act of deciding. And then come up with a perfect explanation in hindsight.
So, starting to establish a baseline around decision making, let’s consider basic steps, drawing on the Lectical Decision Making Assessment and Russo & Schoemaker (Winning Decisions):
- Framing: the general goal of the decision maker including the way they think about the knowledge upon which they base their decision
- A realistic approach to gathering intelligence
- Coming to Conclusions: organising and analysing the information and a way to coordinate different perspectives (weighing)
- An approach to communicating and implementing the decision made
- Learning from Experience, including a way to measure the decision’s effectiveness so adjustments can be made
Outlook: In some next blogs I intend to bring in more and more layers of decision making, exploring input from different topics, authors, influenzers and frameworks: Dave Snowden, Gary Klein, Bonnitta Roy, Gerd Gigerenzer, Andy Clarke; Lectica.org; concepts/models/ methods: Framing, Cognitive Biases; Intuition; Sensemaking; Cynefin Framework, OODA Loop, Risk vs. Uncertainty, Heuristics, Constraints, Learning, Failure, Innovation, Theory of Change….
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