How to make a decision?

Making decisions is a vital part of life. Everyone has to make a decision and we talk about decision making process in organization we find that A manger's job deals with two things - deciding, doing. His task is to focus more on the deciding part, making decisions and then guide the workers in processes of implementing those decisions. It looks simple, but the reality is quite different.

Both decision making and implementation can be done in two ways:
1. Individually
2. Team Effort

Individual Decision Making And Individual Implementation	Individual Decision Making And Implementation by a Team
Team Decision Making And Individual Implementation	Team Decision Making And Implementation by a Team

Let each Quadrant in the above table be called Qij, where 'i' represent the number of row and 'j' represent the number of column, then in the above table

Q11 represents an artist or a craftsman who takes his own decisions and implements them.

Q12 represents a sports team where the captain or a coach takes a decision which is implemented by the entire team.

Q21 represents an air force mission where a team of Senior Air force personnel decide upon the targets and a pilot executes the mission by destroying the target.

Q22 represents majority of all processes in an organization. In this scenario, the top level or middle management comes to a consensus and the decision is then implemented by a team of workers.

As we move from one Quadrant to the other in the order in which each is explained, the complexity increases and the decision making process becomes difficult.

Why does the team decision making process become difficult?

A team  decision making process become difficult because it involves the following:

      1.      Situation Analysis

                      -      Valuing

                      -      Priority Setting

      2.    Problem Analysis

                      -     Information Gathering

                      -     Problem Definition

      3.  Solution Analysis

           -    Getting Ideas

           -   Decision Making

      4.  Implementation

           -  Involving Others

           -  Planning

Again the complexity increases as we move down the team decision making process with the most complex task being that of driving the team to implementing the decision effectively.  Also, decision making is a dialectical process. It has Points and Counter points. Unless it is a dialectic process it cannot be matured, enriched and improved.

Let me break a myth here, decision making does not become complex because of the problem solving required to be done to implement and complete the process. In fact, decision making is only a part of Problem Solving.

Coming to problem solving the first question that arises is what are the types of problems?

According to Sam Pitroda, problems can be classified as:

  1. Rich people's problems
  2. Poor people's problems
  3. Problems with simple solutions
  4. Problems with complex solutions

According to Sam, most of the problems and most of our efforts are in the direction of solving Rich men's problems. We tend to ignore the poor men's problems. He further adds that problems are not simple or complex; instead their solutions are. The most simple looking problem can have the most complex solution and vice-versa.