Steps for Identifying Decision-Making Objectives

What are you trying to achieve by making a decision?

The following four steps can be used to help identify your decision making objectives.

1. Specify the objectives you want to reach.
What are you trying to achieve by making a decision? Make sure that as many people as possible with a stake in solving the problem are asked to specify their objectives, you may conclude you’re actually facing two or more problems, or that more than a few stake holders don’t understand the problem, or that different groups hope to see the problem solved in different ways.

2. Define—as specifically as possible—the performance level that represents a successful outcome.
Do you want a solution that boosts sales? By what percentage? For all regions? Be as precise as you can be.

3. “Paint” a picture of what things will look like when the problem is solved.
Invite stakeholders to describe the desired future state in as much detail as possible. Let imaginations a creativity run loose. Her, too, you may find significant divergence from one person to another. You may resolve differences by compromise, by straight selection of one view over another, or by determining that you in fact have two or more problems at hand.

4. Make sure your agreed-on objectives and outcomes are not in conflict.
You may have determined that part of your solution to customer complaints about telephone orders is to have all of your phone-order reps take an additional three weeks of training. Another part of the solution is to reduce standards for each rep’s completed orders per hour from eight to seven. But can you have the lower staffing levels due to training and the fewer customers handled by each rep at the same time? Will customers then complain more about long waits to have their orders taken? If yes, goals may have to be adjusted.

Once you have created a list of objectives, it’s time to think about the possible courses of action you may take to achieve those goals.

ACTION POINT: Use the four steps above to identify your decision making objectives.