Managing An Organization : Organizational Decision Making

Decision making is the topic for this part of our guide to organizational management…

Decisions, big and small, need to be made every day, and for an organization to be effective, its managers need to be able to constantly solve problems and make decisions that are of benefit to it.

It is critical to first prioritize issues and problems based on the issues potential effect on the organization. Those that stand to have the greatest impact should be dealt with first, and all problems need to be addressed in a systematic way prior to a decision being made.

Jumping to conclusions should be avoided as first impressions rarely give the whole picture - obtaining and assessing all the information available being the best way to prevent doing this. Such information should ideally be from more than one source to prevent bias and should be verifiable in some way.

Brainstorming possible solutions with one or more individuals, after receiving all relevant information, can provide a few different perspectives, which can be beneficial to coming up with an elucidation that will work. Potential options can be wide-ranging in the beginning and narrowed down and tweaked until the best possible fix is determined.

Having identified a set of options and solutions, feedback and suggestions on them, along with alternatives, should be sought from consultations with others. For the most part, group decisions (particularly where the group contains people who the end decision will affect) are preferable to those made by individuals as a pool of knowledge, skills and experience can be drawn upon.

Available assistance in the decision-making process can come in the form of Pareto Analysis, Paired Comparison Analysis, Grid Analysis, PMI, Six Thinking Hats, Starbursting, and Decision Trees, to name but a few. These techniques should not be relied upon solely to make a decision, but should be used to guide the process and offer a more scientific-approach. This is of particular importance where the decision-maker is a little too close to the issue to see the bigger picture.

The final step will be to weigh the positive benefit of each proposed solution against any negative impact such decision may incur, as few solutions can be implemented without some draw-back. The best solution will be the one that offers the most positive benefit, with the least likelihood of negative side-effects.