Many, many organizations suffer from “poor decision-making disease.” Don’t pretend you’ve never heard of it before – chances are you’ve seen it run rampant in most business environments. Lurking within these organizations are poorly made decisions that defy common logic. They are based on personal preference, fear, sunk costs, history, legacy and consensus. They provide outcomes that produce more-of-the-same results, even when those results have plagued the organization in the past.

The solution offered by most management consultants: take the emotion out of decision-making. Make it about data and statistics; a clear, rigid, structured process that only allows us to produce the right answer. We’ll chart, graph, weigh our options, make tradeoffs and in the end we’ll have an objectively generated solution – perfect for the organization, right? Well, until the execution phase…

The bottom line is we’re all human and therefore it’s impossible to take the emotion, subjectivity, fear, peer pressure, and even personal preference out of our decision-making habits. However, we believe the more people understand their (and other stakeholders’) biases and emotions the more they are able to work with them for a better outcome.

This workshop begins by dissecting the issue to be certain the correct problem is solved (how often do we solve a symptom rather than the real issue?). From there, we provide a decision-making framework that is flexible and relies on several types of data collection – from various stakeholders, ethnographic observation, end consumers, as well as the quantitative data available to the organization. We’ll look at the decision-making environment and assess how much risk is acceptable. And finally, we conclude with a discussion of how to implement the solution, create a detailed plan, and revise the solution to preempt possible execution pitfalls.

Ideal Participants:
This workshop is relevant for all levels of an organization – anyone who makes business decisions on a daily basis (which is basically all of us). Project teams may find it beneficial to attend this workshop together.

Our Selling Ideas workshop is the perfect follow-up to this course.

If you’d like to learn more about deploying this program in your organization, email Theran. To register for this, or any of our open enrollment classes, check out our calendar.