How many schools teach you how to make decisions? Outside the forces and the blue-light services, how many employers do? By the time most of us face the big decisions, we are already set in the bad habits we’ve developed by simply seeing how other people have done it before us.
A while ago, I pulled together a toolkit for young people who are facing their first big decisions with not a lot of practical help. The more I thought about it though, the more I realised that there are plenty of not so young people out there who would also appreciate a few pointers. You might be newly promoted to management or co-opted into a project for your life-experience. If you’re in new territory where people want your decisions, this is for you.
Vanilla base, bring your own toppings
The Starter Kit is for people who are facing complex business decisions for the first time. It contains a basic, practical set of tools and advice on making good business and personal decisions.
There is lots of advice out there. I just don’t think it’s pointed at people like you. The many Business Studies textbooks are for established managers and Business Studies students. The stuff on the self-help shelves is very focussed on the author’s single issue; being creative, green, emotionally intelligent, etc. There’s not much that tells you how to start or offers generic decision-making skills.
The whole point of my approach here is that it gives you skills that work for any decision. It’s all about the practical processes for making good decisions. It’s not concerned with the topic of your decisions, nor the biases you should promote or discourage to influence the results. You bring your own beliefs, ethics, intentions and history into the mix. What the final product looks and tastes like is up to you. I give you a vanilla base. You bring your own toppings.
The Starter Kit
As a Starter Kit, it starts with the basics and builds up. We begin with the first thought when you need to make a decision, how much time do you have. Then we go into finding what options you have and choosing the best one. These are the two key things to worry about when you’re new to decision-making. They’ll get you through the quick choices and the day to day stuff.
For the big decisions, the projects that need some thought and planning, we go into a bit more depth. Six Dumb Questions looks into the context of what’s going on around you, who you’re deciding for and what they want, why it’s the best choice. Mapping lays it all out in a picture of the rational net of connections between what resources you have, the things you do and the results you want to achieve.
Finally, the Idea Test is an assurance piece that tests your decision to see if it’s right, worthwhile and practical.
Deadlines
Someone wants you to do something big, so what’s the first thing you do? Plan to make your decision. Time is going to be a key factor in your plan. It’s always worth taking the time to pause and think before you jump in with a decision.
Quick Decisions – The Options Estimate
The quick decision is often made at a time of crisis. The best examples come from the military. They get to make urgent decisions in very stressful situations, so they’ve developed a pretty good method to help them cope. The Options Estimate takes you through the essentials of what your task is, what things will help or hinder you, finding a set of options and how to choose the best one.
Deadlines and options get you past the knee-jerk reaction or gut feeling approaches. They give you a rational framework on which to build your decisions. We then consider how to improve the quality of the decisions you will make.
Six Dumb Questions
There are six questions you should ask of every change initiative. The questions may appear dumb, but the answers should be clever. It’s easy to ask the questions, not so easy to get good answers. Ask them at the start, before you’ve invested too much resource and emotion. If you do ask them late into the project, you can at least improve the present situation and learn valuable lessons for next time. Six dumb questions test the why, what, who, where and how of a good (or bad) decision.
Mapping
Mapping takes us into the detail. The map shows the nets of cause and effect between the resources we use, the things we do and the objectives we achieve. In simple terms, it’s the link between means, ways and ends from the solution, through business activities, outcomes and benefits to the organisation’s overall concerns. It confirms that the system you intend to introduce will actually provide the results you are seeking.
The Idea Test
Once a decision is taken, we have many tools and methods to see it is made concrete. We set tasks, milestones and deadlines to ensure the right activities are done at the right time. But what tools and methods do we use to create the decision in the first place? Here is a way of testing new ideas against your strategy, goals and context. Before running away with a brilliant new idea, it needs to be checked to see how good it really is and how well it fits with who we are and what we do. It contains four filters to take us from hypotheticals to practicality.
The Irrational Stuff
I’ve taken you through some rational tools and methods to help you make sound decisions. However, we don’t live in a totally rational world so you can’t rely on rational processes like benefits mapping alone. People always get in the way of the best intentions, so you just have to live with them. There will always be people involved so apply psychology as necessary.
Sponsorship is key in any business project. It is a recurring theme that you must have the right senior sponsor with the right commitment. It doesn’t matter how clever you are, if your boss doesn’t understand or care or loses interest then you will struggle to succeed.
Be realistic in the objectives you set. Don’t try to do too much or too little. When people put measures on their objectives, they tend to shrink them so the intention to become market leaders goes from, “Let’s have 10 – 20% growth in five years” to, “Let’s sell three more things by the end of the year”.
Two of the dumb questions are, “Who’s it really for? What do they actually want?” Stakeholder analysis answers the question, “What’s in it for me?” Sometimes it isn’t obvious or openly admitted so look for the hidden agendas that people keep to themselves.
Will your corporate culture take the business change? Is it the sort of thing your people actually see themselves doing?
Are your people capable of delivering it? It’s no use having an e-learning package for induction and training of casual staff if their level of computer literacy isn’t up to using it.
If the organisation as a whole is sound in these areas, what about the actual work groups themselves? People will always bond into groups, cliques and gangs. The culture in one business unit may be very different from another.
Remember that everyone has other things to do and allocate work accordingly. People are already busy doing their day-jobs. The time they give to planning and workshops should be treated as an investment and agreed before you start. Then you have to stick to it when managers start asking to have their people back at their jobs.
Conclusions
I want you to make good decisions that get good results (for a given definition of ‘good’). Hopefully, the Starter Kit shows that good decision‑making is a learnable skill built on structured thinking, so new decision‑makers can approach choices with confidence, clarity and realism. The “vanilla base” gives you a good generic foundation, but the quality of your decisions depends on how you apply your own judgement, ethics and understanding of the context and people around you. With the Starter Kit, anyone stepping into unfamiliar responsibility can make decisions that are not only rational on paper but workable in practice.
Appendix – Reading List, moving on from the basics
This post draws on a number of other management methods, tools and techniques. Some are referenced below. The list is by no means definitive but serves as a suggestion of areas to consider. I haven’t always named specific sources. There so much out there and it’s constantly changing. Search on the terms and follow up the ones that look interesting to you:
- Business Policy and Strategy models – PESTLE, SWOT, Porter’s competition model, Deming PDCA cycle, Boyd OODA loop
- Change Management – various models, e.g. Kanter et al 1992
- Group Dynamics – Adair, Belbin, Cyert & March
- Performance Management – Total Organisational Excellence, Oakland 2001, The Performance Prism, Neely, Adams & Kennerley 2002
- Programme Management – AXELOS Managing Successful Programmes, Management of Portfolios
- Sustainability – UN Sustainability Development Goals
- Benefits Management – the rest of this website, the books listed below
There are presently few useful reference works on Benefits Management. Here are some that you might find worth studying:
- Jenner, S “Managing Benefits”, APMG International, 3rd edn (2024) –The training manual if you want to become a Benefits Management practitioner
- Serra, C “Benefits Realization Management”, CRC Press (2017)
- Jenner, S “Realising Benefits from Government ICT Investment: a fool’s errand?”, Academic Publishing International (2010)
- Bradley, G ” Benefit Realisation Management: A Practical Guide to Achieving Benefits”, Gower (2010)
- Ward, J. M., Murray, P. and Daniel, E., “Benefits Management Best Practice Guidelines”, ISRC-BM-200401, Information Systems Research Centre, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield (2004)
- Thorp, John, “The Information Paradox”, McGraw Hill, revised edn (2003)