Make or Break : A Man of Decision

Whether in personal life or professional life, each one of us ought to make decisions. In fact, decision making inaugurates right in formative years. Which toy to choose, what to eat, what to play, what to study, how much time to allocate to play or study and so on. Every child is born the alike, but these little decisions cultivate their personality subsequently. 

 

The organizational processes are rather more convoluted that need strategic decision making. Thus, learning systematic decision making lead us to train ourselves to assimilate necessary and relevant input pertinent for decision making, process the information accurately using adequate available information and then yield the desired output in the form of contemplative decision.

The decisions results could be positive or negative, but 'A Man of Decision' is the one who learns from his mistakes. Here are the few strategic steps or guidelines to effective decision making adapted from the several readings on Effective Decision Making.

1. Reflect on your experiences: Reflection is a very effective exercise in any story of enhanced experiences, so is here for being effective decision maker as well. Reflect on how much time you usually spend to finalize decision, did you analyzed the worst case scenario or best case scenario. Ask yourself questions? How effective I was in the past to take decision in a stressed environment? Do I always seek feedback on several alternatives before making the decision? Am I meticulous towards every aspect of my work? Am I generally a logical thinker, or rather an emotional person? Am I capable of making decision for the problem? Reflection on your past experiences would help you to ponder over the good and bad decisions you made and the contributing efforts that lead to those decisions.

2. Be prepared for the worst: Have you ever found yourself in a situation that one decision leads to dejection and other to ­­complete misery? The wise decision in such circumstances is to take the decision the end of which is less unwelcoming.

"Start with an end in Mind" -Steven Covey

3. Set your Limits: The organizational decisions must be made within a limited time. The opportunity will knock your door once and if you do not avail it, it's gone. The usual example is the hoarding of the smart phones in the market. Realizing the increased demand for varied features of smart phones, Samsung and Apple are two incorporations that outshined all other in 2012. Blackberry depicted the downfall for the obvious reason of not matching the market demand.

4. Systematic Decision Analysis: Train your mind to always list few things before coming out with the solution. Can you make this decision by yourself or this situation is beyond your limits? What is the cost involved if I alter it later on? List all resources that you have and the ones you will need in terms of men, money, material, machine and management (5Ms). Yes, last but not the least, do you have adequate authority to implement the decision?

Conclusively, reflecting on your own past experiences on the decision making process depicted in figure above, keeping all strategic information contained in four points listed above in this blog would help train your mind to effective decision making in future. After all, only a man of decisions survive at upper management.