“Management is all about choices, success in management depends on good choices.” – Roy Daya
• CRISIS! Your team finds a possible solution and you have to decide if to implement it or not… whichever you decide you must decide NOW!
• You know you cannot ignore the crisis but the risk of the proposed solution seems almost as high if it goes wrong…
What should you do?
Step 1 – Getting Choices
• When you are faced with only one solution you have no real choice. Step 1 is to get some more choices.
• Sometimes you start with several choices but most of them get “narrowed-down” almost immediately. At the end you end up with the least bad choice as the only alternative to doing nothing.
• You can only choose when you have more than one plausible choice!
Step 2 – Getting GOOD Choices
• To get good choices you need a larger choice pool to choose from.
• You need 2 kinds of people on your team:
– Creative and fast thinking people to come up with many creative choices and alternatives.
– Deep thinkers to sort the potentially Good choices from the ones that are not viable.
Step 3 – Evolution
• Create at-least 3 teams.
• Each one will mature a solution with details and scenarios and will challenge the other solutions.
• Bring each team as a consulting team to help the second team answer criticisms of the third team to their solution.
• Make each team present the pros and cons of their solution and weather it is a real viable solution to the problem.
Step 4 – Exposure
• Bring in a panel of experts and let them meet each team and:
– Improve the choice
– Spot hidden risks
– Rank choice according to their experience and expertise.
Step 5 – Make a decision
• Review the summary of the 3 or more GOOD choices and make a decision.
• You might decide to not implement any of them or to try implementing a hybrid solution.
• The choice is yours.
• I will not advise you what to choose…
• I will not analyze every possible choice to extreme depth…
• I will help you to better define the problem and simplify complex situations and logical dilemmas.
• I will brainstorm with you and your team and will create a large pool of possible choices that your team can work with.
• I will make it possible for you to make a good choice by choosing from more than one good option.