The Art of Decision Making and its Importance in Business

Businesses are complex systems that require a lot of maintenance. Add to the stresses of management the need to observe, track and make decisions regarding your appropriate markets, and you have a real recipe for disaster. How can you make sure that your business keeps track of all of the market variables and so that you can make decisions while keeping your costs low? You don't want to have to create expensive systems or employ more people to ensure that everything is going to plan, so what can you do?

Instead of doing all that, you can implement a new framework which will replace the need to invest more of your business's money into unnecessary expenses, and increase your ability to make decisions using informed data.

Choose an objective and pursue it

If you have a whole set of objectives you would like your business to achieve, and not a lot of time to pursue them all in, you're going to need to take decisive action. The first thing you need to do is acknowledge that you're not going to be able to do everything. This is not accepting defeat, however.

Instead, you are selecting the two or three objectives which - upon attainment - will have the largest effect on your business's progress. Once you have those selected objectives in mind you need to simply wipe the others out of your mind. They are not important now, and what you need to do is act quickly and decisively. Acting quickly and roughly is better than acting slowly and precisely.

Consult

To help you in making decisions quickly, you may find it useful to consult somebody else. A very high percentage of judgement errors could be avoided if we asked for one other opinion. If there is nobody else to consult around you quickly then you can use this excellent tip: ask an anti-you - what would they do in this situation? By asking that question you can quickly and ruthlessly eliminate a large swab of your options, and make an intelligent decision in a short amount of time.

Implement

At this stage, you've planned out your range of options, consulted anti-yous to see what you shouldn't do. Now comes the difficult point where you simply need to let go and choose one of your good decisions to act upon. This will be a difficult task because there are very rarely ever ‘perfect-fit' solutions to your problems.

In the real world, you're more likely to come across decisions which will require quick fixes where all of the available options to you have pros and cons, and it will be your task to weigh-up those ups and downs to ensure that whatever decisions you come to, you can live with the consequences.

In the end, the fact that in reality there is no perfect decision should make life easier for you because it gives you the peace of mind that you couldn't have made a wrong choice. The crucial thing is that your business has the resources and processes in place to be able to cope with the changes you are about to put into effect. This goes back to the words at the beginning of this article: businesses are complex systems, and while you're trying to come to a quick and roughly right business decision, you'll also need to ensure that you have in place the implementation plans for a range of possibilities so that you have a solid structure by the time you have decided upon your winning solution. If you feel like your business could be improved with the help of outside consultation, speak to 2-Europe.