Faced with challenges in business, So what?cont.

Now we are back to analysing or tackling complex business problems. Recall that in my last article I introduced the 8 power house to analysing complex business problems in their order of preference:

Understand — Define – Guide— Brainstorm — Develop – Evaluate – Decide –Plan –Re evaluate.

Having listed them in the previous article, I’ll be taking us through the step-by-step process of applying these power house in order to achieve results.

Ps: If you haven’t read the previous article you can scroll up to read through so as to get a wing of this.

Before we get started I will like to state that Decision making is “Contextual”. You can be in the same industry, have similar problems but not arrive at the same answer. You can explore issues similar to yours, look through the decisions made but don’t be too quick to apply the exact same thing because the context may be different. So always make sure to make decisions that aligns with the context of your own organisation or whatever issue you are faced with.

Now, let’s get started.

1. Understanding the situation: A problem you don’t understand you can’t solve effectively. When trying to understand the situation, you want to consider things like the 5 W’s. What, When, Why, Where, Who and How

‘What” is the problem? what are we trying to tackle?

“When” This answers the question of period, when did this happen? Knowing this helps you infer to a large extent when making certain judgement on the issue

“Who”- The people, organisation involved. Something happened, now the question is to whom. Even when there a couple of people or organisation involved, we must learn to sieve out the object of interest.

“Where”- This helps us understand the location we are dealing with.

“How”- To what extent?

When You are done answering the above question to gain clarity of the problem at hand, now you want to

2. Define the decision problem: Here, you want to identify the right problem. You see I used the word “Right” because there could be others masking as the problem but your ability to answer the first step correctly and state the problem is very important.

3. Your Objective: What Is your vision? What is the goal? What would you want to achieve at the end of this analysis. As much as you can always get your objective right because being clear on where you want to go with this analysis helps a lot. Ask yourself this question- where do I want to see myself when this decision is made.

4. Alternatives: The circumstances surrounding the problem helps narrow down the objective. Once you are clear on the goal, you want to list out alternatives that best describes the goal.

5. Criteria: These are your considerations, limitations, parameters. It helps decide which alternatives best meet the objective.

6. Evaluate: Here you are placing your Alternatives against the criteria to which the decision should be made. This is where you eliminate and the best man wins. Which is the high, medium or low in terms of order of preference and how it connects with the goal and problem situation. A thorough evaluation done will most likely lead you to a conclusion that best meets the objective.

7. Decide: Now it’s time to take a decision. For an effective decision making, do not have similar thinking people make a decision when that decision is clearly going to have an impact on a variety of people.

8. Plan: You need to develop a plan, a means to bring the decision to fruition. And if at this point you discover you have made some errors on your way to making a decision pr you need to make some adjustments then be ready to Re-evaluate your plan. A leader/manager that stands out is one who is teachable and ready to go back to the drawing board not minding how long it had taken to get here because the point of fulfilment is when you get it right.

#MEMBA11