What we talk about when we talk about decisions

What we talk about when we talk about decisions

A wise man once wrote ‘What’s in a name? that which we call a decision. By any other name would stay as sweet…’. Decisions is the backbone to modern work. In fact improving the process with which organizations make decisions bears the highest growth potential. Decision making is important, so much that the Harvard Business Review dedicated their entire Winter 2015 issue to decision making. The magazine focuses on decision making from a leader perspective and states that leaders are made or broken by their decisions. This is true but let’s take this one step forward. Every single employee is made or broken by the decisions they make, every day. Modern work is all about: decide, commit and deliver.

But what is this decision we are talking about? As Mr. Shakespeare states so well in the introductory sentence a decision is the name for many things we do in business but we might not always consciously think of these things as decisions. As a matter of fact, this blogpost is the product of a decision. The decision to write a blogpost about what decisions are. Let’s move from the meta level now to concrete examples. As a sales rep you are making decisions every morning when you decide which customer to approach with which strategy, as an office manager you make decisions as to where you order office supplies, as developer you decide where you want to host your servers, as marketing specialist you decide every time you tweak an ad campaign. CEO’s, well their job title basically reads something along the lines of makes hard decisions all the time.

In summary, a decision is anything from an idea, a challenge we want to solve or something that we are going to do.

All these decisions are guided by insights, knowledge and gut feeling. Decisions today are made in a completely unstructured manner. There is no process for decision making. This is the reason why we slave away in endless meetings and have to read even more mails to find a way to come to a decision.

Amazingly, we have become so technically advanced but still resort to old ways of bringing a large amount of people together. In order to make an informed decision there are certain things that need to happen. People need to be consulted, alternatives have to be discussed and constructive conflict might arise. In order to reach a decisionanalytics often play a role that are pulled in from some third tool. In order to allow those things we need to come together in emails and meetings and then somehow the decision is reached in the end.

How can you bring more efficiency to your decision making process?