Step one

Aim: Develop a company-focused decision-making model that creates and supports the link between the strategic direction of your organisation and the outcomes of your managers’ daily decisions at all levels.

To understand the transformational journey of change your organisation needs to undertake to be more effective in tactical decision making, we first need to understand your current practices. This involves a series of exercises and reviews in which you’ll consider how your existing roles and working environment impact and direct your decision making.

Let’s begin by understanding the characteristics of an effective decision-making process. How do these characteristics manifest themselves in your managers’ everyday decision making? Then let’s ask some preliminary questions to analyse how your managers process information and make decisions.

Characteristics of an effective decision-making process:
• It focuses on what is important.
• It is logical and consistent.
• It acknowledges both subjective and objective thinking and blends analytical with intuitive thinking.
• It requires only as much information and analysis as is necessary to resolve a particular dilemma.
• It encourages and guides the gathering of relevant information and informed opinion.
• It is straightforward, reliable, easy to use, and flexible.

Decision making is a reasoning process that can be rational or irrational and based on explicit or tacit assumptions. To maximise the benefits and advantages of rational and intuitive decision-making, we must combine the benefits of differing concepts. Whilst academic studies for decision making in business offer a list of the characteristics of an effective decision-making process, it is from within the emergency services that we find a means for combining the different elements into a viable and practical decision-making methodology. In addition, they mitigate against known decision traps associated with each concept.

Consider the managers you have at your organisation’s middle and senior levels. They must make many vital decisions daily, the outcomes of which should effectively align with your strategic objectives. Those decisions should provide the optimal solution for a given task while efficiently using all available resources. Decisions that, when reviewed later, can be systematically broken down into recognisable stages and then individually analysed to identify good practice and organisational learning.

Now when considering the managers you have at middle and senior levels within your organisation, ask yourself these questions:

What are the key factors driving their decision-making methodology?
Do they follow any laid down and organisationally recognisable decision process?
From what sources are they drawing when making decisions?
How much of their decision making is driven by previous experience; how much by a process?
How much by gut feeling?
Is it more intuitive than process driven?
How easy would it be for them to break down their decision making and explain each stage to you?

When your managers ask someone a question; for example, what would they do to achieve a particular outcome? How much attention do they give to the answer, and how much is given to understanding the thinking process that led them to their response?

By focusing on an answer, we risk overshadowing the need to understand how an individual arrived at that answer. By using a decision-making model to break down and analyse the individual or group’s thought process, we can gain a much greater insight into their knowledge, skills, and capabilities to resolve problems, as well as identify failures in a work process along with the group or individual development needs.

Stage one is about understanding your current managerial decision-making processes and your decision-making environment, then creating an organisational-specific tactical decision-making model that meets the characteristics of an effective decision-making process. One that is structured and standardised across your organisation yet flexible and adaptable to fit any scenario.

Source: Chapter 6: Managers as Decision Makers – SlideShare. https://www.slideshare.net/NardiinObada/chapter-6-managers-as-decision-makers