tools to help improve your decision making - fast!
Decision-making in a company can be difficult. Often, power can be disproportionately distributed amongst a board of directors, and conscious or unconscious biases can impact the quality of the decisions being made. For a CEO or a business owner, the goal is to extract the maximum value from the board as possible in the decision-making process. For other companies, there can be endless debates and personality clashes as board and committee members disagree on the right next steps. This can be exhausting for all involved, and meetings which are supposed to bring about positive change for your business can feel like a battle.
Luckily, there are several models which help provide some much-needed objectivity into the decision-making process, challenge the line of thinking of your board members, and may even improve your team building too!
Here are some of my favorite decision-making models to help transform your decision-making processes:
1. The Myers-Briggs Decision-Making Model (Z-Model)
Famous for their personality testing, the Myers-Briggs Z-Model provides a decision-making tree, taking users through different perspectives of considerations before making a decision. The order of this “flow” is shaped like a Z, with each point of the Z representing a lens through which decisions should be made:
Sensing: Gather the facts and then ask yourself What do the facts tell us? Focus on the concrete, current data and explicit details of the situation.
Intuition: Think about alternatives and implications of the decision. Ask yourself What might be the future consequences? Look at the big picture, hidden patterns, and future possibilities.
Thinking: Think about the options you have and ask What are the objective criteria to make this decision? Apply detached logic, cause-and-effect reasoning, and systemic consistency.
Feeling: Think about the impact on people. What impact will this have on others? Consider human values, relationships, and how the decision aligns with corporate culture and stakeholder harmony.
This is a very simple model which can be used again and again. Whether you are proposing a unique investment to your investment committee, or approving a high-value merger, this model can be a process mainstay, helping to challenge your board's thinking.
2. De Bono's Six Thinking Hats Methodology
This system helps groups separate emotion from logic, creativity from information, and brings structured, parallel thinking to the boardroom table:
Blue Hat: This hat represents process control. What are we thinking about? What is the goal of our decision-making?
White Hat: What are the facts that we need to bring to this decision, or what additional facts do we need?
Red Hat: What are our instinctive gut reactions or emotional feelings that we bring to this decision?
Black Hat: Look at a decision's potentially negative outcomes. Look at it cautiously and defensively. Try to see why it might not work.
Yellow Hat: What are the benefits, what are our best hopes, how can we look on the bright side of this decision?
Green Hat: What if anything was possible? What creative innovations might be possible as a way of breaking through in this decision?
In practice, executing a "Six Hats" session can reduce boardroom debate time, ensuring the full board view decisions through the same lens simultaneously, it strips away adversarial posturing and ensures that even the most deeply entrenched skeptics or optimists contribute productively to every angle of the issue.
3. The WRAP Framework
Popularized by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, this framework offers a series of practical tools designed to counteract common cognitive biases:
Widen your options: Expand the set of options being considered. This is a challenge to ensure you are not anchoring on one piece of information and ignoring potential alternatives. There may be better options.
Reality-test your assumptions: The challenge is to fight confirmation bias (the tendency to seek validation of preexisting beliefs). Take a step back and think about the reality of the impact of the decisions you are making.
Attain some distance before deciding: Board meetings can involve intense, high-level discussions and sometimes emotions run high. Instead of making a decision in this emotion-filled environment, take some time to get some distance before deciding. They introduce the 10/10/10 rule: ask yourself how you think you will feel about this decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.
Prepare to be wrong: The aim here is to avoid being overconfident about the way your decisions will unfold. Instead, take the opportunity to plan for both good and bad potential scenarios.
One of my favorite decision-making models, this can be applied literally anywhere, anytime. As simple as it is effective, the WRAP framework can extend throughout your organization into all processes. Whether it’s determining the details of a special project or being used to make a transformative business decision, the WRAP framework can be used to great effect in any situation.
4. Harvard Business School: 5 Key Questions
Developed by Joseph L. Badaracco, this framework is specifically tailored for managers and boards navigating complex, "gray-area" problems where analytical data alone fails to provide a clear answer.
What are the net, net consequences of all the options?
This is an evidence-based question to highlight who the winners and losers will be following a decision. It goes beyond a simple cost-benefit analysis to deeply consider who will be hurt or helped in both the short and long term.
What are my core obligations?
In the boardroom, this question helps make directors aware of their governance and fiduciary duties, but also their deeper moral duties to all stakeholders in their particular role as either a non-executive or executive member of the board.
What will work in the world as it is?
This targets practicalities and resilience. Leaders must recognize political realities, limited resources, and human limitations to choose the solution most likely to succeed in the real world.
Who are we?
This question asks you to step back and think about the decision in terms of organizational identity, collective values, and culture. Which path best reflects the defining stories and ideals that your company stands for?
What can I live with?
The final question demands personal reflection, aligning the decision with your ultimate values and judgment. Can you comfortably explain this choice to someone you deeply respect and trust?
This structure can operate as a moral and legal safety net for your board. Ensuring decisions are legally and ethically sound, whilst also in-keeping with your businesses values. Deployed as a one off thought providing exercise or as a procedural tool to challenge all decisions, this tool can ensure that your business is on track to acheive its mission.
Improving cohesion and maximizing potential
The implementation of these decision-making models in your business will take a large amount of coordination and effort, however the reward can be high. These models can not only help to improve the quality of decision-making within your company, but they can help foster cohesion within the board, leading to a higher-performing team overall. The adoption of a decision-making tool could be the change you have been looking for
References
1. The Myers-Briggs Z-Model:
Myers, I. B., & Myers, P. B. (1995). Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. Davies-Black Publishing.
2. De Bono's Six Thinking Hats:
De Bono, E. (1985). Six Thinking Hats: An Essential Approach to Business Management. Little, Brown and Company.
3. The WRAP Framework:
Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2013). Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. Crown Business.
4. Harvard Business School 5 Key Questions:
Badaracco, J. L. (2016). Managing in the Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Tough Problems at Work. Harvard Business Review Press.