effective DECISION making

The characteristics of an effective decision-making model require your managers to blend analytical with intuitive thinking whilst being logical and consistent. Therefore, their decision-making must be natural and not dependent on external aids. It must work as a muscle memory to match dynamic working environments and be recognisable and auditable across your organisation.

When the emergency services arrive at an incident, responding officers are confronted with a highly dynamic and developing situation involving multiple risk-critical elements across various changing environments. Their operating environment is one of uncertainty, with limited time to think and act, and one from which the outcomes of poor decision making could have disastrous consequences.

Within this risk environment, the officer must first create situational awareness to understand what has happened and what could happen. Only then can they identify their goal-orientated outcomes, set their objectives and develop plans to achieve them. They must be able to communicate those plans effectively and quickly to others and then create a suitable structure through which they will deliver their plan. They must be able to monitor and review progress against plans and respond immediately to changes in the risk environment to resolve the incident safely and effectively.

The incident commander will constantly be required to make risk-critical decisions throughout this process. Unfortunately, dynamic environments do not afford them the luxury of pausing to create a decision-making tree, nor the opportunity to go through ten stages of an analytical decision-making programme on their laptop.

Instead, they must do it intuitively; they must do it rapidly and continuously. They must do it logically and in a standardised way that can be quickly followed and understood by their colleagues and those from other emergency services. They must do it knowing that should they be questioned in legal proceedings on their decisions making, they can demonstrate that a robust and effective decision-making process was used.

Your managers constantly choose what is to be done, who is to do it, and when, where and how it is to be done. Decision making is a prerequisite for every managerial function, and your organisation’s speed of growth and prosperity are dependent on the quality and timing of its decisions.

Whilst the management and staff of your organisation may not be operating as emergency responders, there are parallels between your business operating environment and that of the emergency services, for example:

• You operate with many policies, rules, and regulations to implement and follow.
• You work to tight deadlines with limited delivery time and system-imposed time constraints.
• You must keep your staff, the public, the environment and equipment safe.
• You must meet legal requirements – H&S Act, Human Rights Act, Employment law Etc.
• Your managers are faced with moral/ethical dilemmas.
• Your operations are affected by the external physical environment – weather, infrastructure, and logistics.
• You need to achieve performance targets – KPIs and contractual constraints.
• You operate in a dynamic environment – subject to changes at short notice with the potential for rapid escalation of situations.
• You operate with risks associated with physical, financial, legal, reputational, political and environmental harm.
• You operate against performance measures and incurrence of penalties.

Tactical decisions are used to implement strategic objectives; they tend to be short/medium term, less far-reaching than strategic and will account for the majority of daily decision making tasks of your middle and senior managers. 

The focus of the methodology for decision making development and implementation delivered by Develop Decisions Consultancy Ltd (DDC) is the application of tactical decision making skills, tactical decision model development and the underlying decision making principles developed by the UK emergency services operating in dynamic, high-risk environments with limited information.

A fire officer will be required to resolve; a fire in a building, a road-traffic collision or a chemical spillage, perhaps all on the same day. Each incident presents the officer with very different and sometimes unique challenges; however, their decision-making process will be the same no matter what the nature of the incident. Emergency services cannot train for every possible type of incident; instead, they train to implement decision-making principles that can be applied to all scenarios. A decision-making process that is both structured yet flexible and adaptive to all circumstances. These principles are not solely within the emergency services’ confines but applicable across the whole business environment.