We can’t agree on the best decision

Business seems to be getting ever more complex, so it’s no surprise that sometimes it is difficult to cut through the complexity to decide what the best way forward is.  And even when a decision is ultimately made, getting people to back it can be problematic when they don’t have emotional ownership of the decision itself.

One of the central themes of this book is that people have fundamentally different perspectives of the world, because of their different beliefs, values and filters.  In reality, most business decisions benefit from these differences: a decision that has been made after being exposed to a variety of different criteria is more likely to be robust than one that has been taken with blinkers on.

The way to cope with the paradox that we both suffer from, and benefit from, diversity is to implement a decision process that deals with the underlying essence of the components of the decision – rather the specific interpretations and impacts for different people.

The decision drivers tool does this, and has been used successfully in a variety of different situations to:

• provide a coherent structure for the decision-making process;
• actively engage key people in the process (rather than have anything imposed on them) so that they own the ultimate decision;
• form an audit trail of the rationale for the decision so that others can understand the business logic and deploy it themselves.

• Using decision drivers