Decision Making

“Successful leaders have the courage to take action while others hesitate.”

John C. Maxwell

We make decisions every day. These decisions come to define our life and some of them may have a profound effect on the journey we take. However, making decisions is not an easy task and sometimes you may find yourself pondering on alternative courses of actions for hours, days or even months.

The recent increase in the complexity of our lives, both personal and professional, has made decision making even more critical and time consuming. Fortunately, we have also progressed significantly on decision making tools and now have a comprehensive toolbox, established philosophies and guidelines to use which can make decision making process and problem solving easier than ever before.

This course teaches a series of proven techniques that simply help you to decide. Broadly the course can be divided into three sections:

1. What actions can you take and how to choose the best one?
2. Is the action you are about to take going to improve the situation?
3. How to make optimal decisions as a group?

A series of important philosophical principles are also presented in this course. These concepts help to raise the awareness of delegates on the impact of their decisions on others, how personal benefit may not always be to their best interest and so on.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

What is Decision Making?

• What are the characteristics of a good and bad decision maker?
• How much analysis do you need to do?
• What is involved in decision making process?

How to Choose Actions

• How to choose between a set of options where each has its own advantages and disadvantages
• How to make a quantifiable comparison between alternative options
• How to systematically compare related options
• How to systematically compare unrelated options

How to Analyse the Impact of Your Actions

• How to use a measure to compare pros and cons
• How to carry out a force field analysis
• How to compare the benefits versus the costs of taking different options
• How to systematically analyse a cascade of decisions where one leads to another
• How to visualise your decision making process
• What tools can you use to increase your creativity when making decisions so you can come up with more options?

How to Decide in Groups

• What are the implications of deciding in groups?
• Why thinking in groups can sometimes be so frustrating?
• What can you do to increase the efficiency of your meetings?
• How to prevent dominant people from take over the meeting or the decision making process
• How to encourage newcomers or those who are shy to present their views without fear of criticism
• What tools can you use to streamline the process of group decision making?
• How to avoid groupthink, where participants are so eager to reach a decision without causing conflicts that they end up choosing a wrong solution

What are the Principles of Decision Making?

• Do you always have to make sure you get a better bargain than others?
• What are the philosophical implications of complexity when making decisions?
• What is the best way to plan your course of action and what principles you need to be aware of?
• What can you learn from game theory when making decisions?

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 Day

Course Level: Beginners & Intermediate

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:

• Use good decision making processes to get the best out of your decisions
• Choose the best available option based on a number of criteria using a trade-off analysis
• Use a series of systematic comparisons to identify the most ideal decision
• Make a decision using quantifiable pros and cons to evaluate the impact of your decision
• Systematically analyse the implications of taking an action so you can decide whether to go ahead with it or not
• Make decisions based on problem analysis using a common currency and calculate the net benefits
• Graph your decisions and the corresponding outcomes visually and calculate the best course of action
• Take advantage of many age old principles, guidelines and heuristics to make the wisest decisions
• Make optimal decisions in groups by using everyone’s inputs and prevent individuals from dominating the decision making process
• Use a structured method to collect and process opinions of a panel of experts while avoiding common group discussion issues
• Use a simple technique to encourage group participation and increase the likelihood of free expression of ideas

Decision making is a skill and to become better at it, you must simply practice over and over again. When making decisions, the biggest problem people experience is getting stuck and not knowing what to do. This usually happens either due to lack of research and data or because of looking only at a narrow part of a search space. Both of these issues can be addressed using a set of decision making tools. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of these systematic tools and tend to rely on intuition instead to make decisions. This approach often leads to sub-optimal results.

This course aims to raise delegates’ awareness regarding decision making process, techniques and tools and teaches them how to use each tool in different situations. Since the delegates can practice the technique during the course under the tutor’s observation, they have a better chance of learning the techniques correctly and use them efficiently and immediately after the course.

The course also focuses on decision making & problem solving principles discovered in a number of critical fields such as game theory and economics. A knowledge of the logic of decision making helps to deepen the understanding of decision making as a whole. This further helps the delegates to understand what each can tool can do for them and also understand the limitations of each technique.