Better Decision Making - A Structured Approach

By Kevin Moriarity

You have an important decision to make. What do you do? Do you spend a large amount of time analyzing the situation, make a decision, and are still not sure you're making the right move? Do you decide in a flash and aren't confident you made the right choice?

Most decision making is done by taking a quick look at a small portion of the relevant alternatives and factors. Oftentimes we rely on emotional gut instinct and make a decision with just a moment's deliberation. For most of our day to day decisions (what should I have for lunch?), this is appropriate. In fact, if we deliberated at length on every decision, life would grind to a halt and we would never get anything done.

Snap decisions were necessary for early humans. Our innate decision making style is based on the fact that we usually had to decide to act instantly lest we become injured or die.

In the modern world, the decisions we face are rarely life or death. Many decisions, especially the momentous or complicated ones, benefit from a slower, structured and thorough process.

Our innate decision making process actually impedes our ability to arrive at an optimal decision when we have to carefully consider many choices, opinions, and factors. This is where a structured approach is indispensable. A structured process allows you to consider many alternatives, perspectives (opinions) and factors and helps put the influence of your emotional side into perspective. This will often confirm your gut feeling and give you more confidence in your decision. It also opens your mind to other alternatives and approaches.

For example, let's pretend that you want to decide which college to attend.

First, state your objective. What is the desired outcome of this decision? Often, stating the objective differently opens up new alternatives and factors. For example, if I change my objective from "go to college" to "obtain education", I now have other alternatives to consider:
trade schools or apprenticeships.

State your alternatives. Most decisions have many alternatives. However, it is easy to get locked into just a couple. Brainstorm your alternatives. Consider alternatives such as your ultimate dream solution, ideas that you may have eliminated due to cost, alternatives that you don't even think you can achieve. Consider adding the best and worst case alternatives, cheapest and most expensive options. Try not to censor yourself at this stage. Allow the process to weed out the poor choices.

If you have more than two alternatives, a valuable technique is to put the alternatives into pairs and choose between two at a time. For example, if you have three alternatives (A,B, C), first choose between A and B, then A and C, then B and C - only two at a time. Score one point for each alternative when you choose it. The alternative with the most points is your preferred solution. This technique gives you a more accurate ranking of your alternatives because people have an easier time choosing between two options at one time. The power of this technique increases with the number of alternatives you have to consider.

If the paired alternatives process did not reveal a clear winner, it's time to list the pros and cons for each alternative.

Who or what will influence your decision?
The "Who" will be called your decision's perspectives. Who will have a say in your decision? Who will have a stake in the outcome of your decision? Each of your perspectives may have a different opinion on which factors are pros and which factors are cons.

The "What" will be called your decision's factors. What criteria will I use to decide? For example, in the college decision relevant factors would be: tuition, school reputation, number of students, distance from home, and many more.

Record, for each alternative, which factors are pros and which factors are cons. For an in-state public college, tuition could be listed as a pro, while for a private college, it could be listed as a con. Simply list the alternative at the top of a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle and list the pros on the left and the cons on the right.

If the pro / con process does not reveal an obvious choice, it's time to do a deeper analysis.
Take the factors that are relevant to your decision and assign a desired value to each of them. It helps if you can think of the factors in simple terms: the factor target as a number, or a Yes / No answer, or as a value on a scale from 1 - 5. This is not completely necessary, but it does allow you to objectively compare the factor's desired value with the alternatives' actual values in a methodical way. For example, you can use a scale to assign a value to something like "college reputation", with 1 being lousy to 5 being best in the country.

Not all factors are equal. Rank each factor as to its importance in the decision. In our college example, the tuition might rank higher in importance than the quality of the sports programs.
Next, record what the actual values are for each factor, for each of the alternatives you are considering. For some factors, each perspective may have a different score for each alternative.

Lastly, look at the factor's desired values and the alternative's actual values and determine the best fit by perspective. This process will tell you which alternative is preferred by perspective. If your decision's perspectives prefer different alternatives, you have a solid basis to discuss the differences and arrive at the appropriate choice. If you're lucky, everyone agrees on the same alternative. If so, congratulations!

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