It's Your Move: Creating Valuable Decision Options When You Don't Know What to Do

Business opportunities of moderate to even light complexity often expose decision makers to hundreds, if not tens of thousands, of coordinated decision options that should be considered thoughtfully before making resource commitments. That complexity is just overwhelming! Unfortunately, the typical response is either analysis paralysis or "shooting from the hip," both of which expose decision makers to unnecessary loss of value and risk. This tutorial teaches decision makers how to tame option complexity to develop creative, valuable decision strategies that range from "mild to wild" with three simple thinking tools.

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The simple, routine decisions we often face usually present us with a few mutually exclusive options. Do we get the vanilla ice cream or the chocolate? Do we travel to Disney World for vacation or the dude ranch in Alberta? Do we take the scenic route to work today or the timeliest route? We usually address these decisions by weighing in our mind the net effect of the relative pros and cons of each choice without generally worrying that the consequences will be beyond our ability to handle should they turn out contrary to our preferences, even significantly so.

Business decisions often present us with a more complex situation, however. In these cases, we frequently face multiple coordinated decision options in which the possible combinations of options approach hundreds if not thousands. How do we possibly consider the pros and cons of all those options without getting mired in analysis paralysis or, throwing our hands up in frustration, shooting from the hip to deal with the consequences reactively as they arise? The answer is: we don't have to resort to either extreme.

The purpose of this short tutorial is to show you how to use three thinking devices called the Decision Hierarchy, the Strategy Table, and a Qaulitative Description table to frame creative decision strategies that effectively reduce the decision complexity of business case analysis. It gives you the ability to create the right combinations of decision options for analysis without testing all of them or simplistically guessing at the best pathway to take at too high of a level of consideration.

The tutorial addresses the following issues:

* Why do you need this tool?
* Use a Decision Hierarchy to partition decision categories and identify decision options
* Use the Strategy Table to create spanning sets (or thematic threads) of global value
* Develop qualitative descriptions (rationales) of decision strategies for effective interdepartment communication
* What you should and should not do next

The tutorial also includes a downloadable template for creating your own creative decision strategies.