What is the best decision making process that successful people use to make some of the most important decisions for their life or business? The outcome and quality of our life largely depends on the decisions that we make. What we have today, who we’re surrounded by is a the consequence of all the decisions we’ve made up until this point. If you’re not success or where you want to be in life, a major part of that has to do the the quality of decisions you’ve made. And those who are successful, happy, and living a meaningful and fruitful life, they’re reaping the benefits of making quality decisions early on in their life.
It’s no mystery that making quality decisions has a great impact on our future. But the real question is, exactly how do we go about making those decisions? Some of the most successful people in the world have made difficult decisions to get to where they are. How did they do it? What was their process like? No two decisions are ever truly the same, nor are the circumstances surrounding them. However, there are some foundation ideas that act as guides for most of these decisions.
1) Identify Your Desirable Outcome
Before you even make a decision, think about what you want to come out on the other end. What is the ultimate goal of making this decision? Identifying exactly what it is that you want to achieve, and what decisions ahead are necessary to be made in order to achieve it is an important step. Without knowing what the outcome will be, it’s hard to make an educated decision.
2) Collect Relevant Information
Be sure you can separate the facts from your feelings. Give yourself the time and space to think clearly and gather relevant information needed to make the decision. You don’t want to make decisions that are purely based on emotions, gut feelings, and/or thin facts. You want to make sure the facts and evidence you’ve gathered is substantial enough to make the decision. And should someone ask you “why” you made that decision, you can logically and confidently support your argument.
3) Discover Alternatives
Normally this step is call “Identify alternatives”. We didn’t like the thought process of someone who’s simply trying to “identify” based on given facts. Identifying simply means you’re looking at the current facts and making a decision based on only the information that’s available. To discover means you’re looking beyond what’s available, what’s possible, and forces you to see the missing pieces of information. At this stage, you need to examine the facts and evidence gathered closely and try to come up with alternative solutions. Allow yourself the freedom to be creative with the solutions. You might surprise yourself.
4) Weighing Each Alternative Decisions
Now that you’ve discovered a handful of alternative decisions and solutions, it’s time to put them on a scale. Examine each closely and determine their feasibility, pros/cons, tangible/intangible costs involved, risks, opportunity cost, and etc. In addition, think of the consequences of each alternatives, and decide which consequences you can live with. And from that, determine which alternative decision or solution will help you achieve your chief aim.
5) Get A Second Opinion
Depending on the magnitude of the decision, you may need a second expert opinion. And now is the best time to get that opinion because you already have all your facts, evidence, and alternatives laid out and can better present the information to your trusted adviser. Be sure that the person you’re seeking a second opinion from is qualified to make that decision, and that they don’t have stake in it. Otherwise, their opinion on the matter won’t be subjective and will be skewed.
6) Make The Decision
You now have the clarity you need in order to make the decision. All that’s left is to make the decision, perform the necessary actions to carry it to completion, and see how your decision unfolds.
7) Review & Improve
After your decision has been made, come back to it at a later time and review everything. You’d be surprise the new found insights you’ve developed from making that decision. Look at the process you went through, the information you’ve gathered, the alternatives you came up with, and the criteria you used to weigh those alternatives. Now that everything has unfolded, you’ll be able to determine if the decision you made was the best one possible. And the next time you encounter a similar decision, you’ll be even better equipped to make the decision.
