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Decision-making is essentially about choosing between two or more alternatives. It is simple by definition yet could be far reaching in outcome. Consider the case of Daar communications that mobilized and committed unprecedented millions of naira into the launch of her Daarsat. A move they believed would overtake Multi-choice's DSTV thus ending her decades of dominance in that sector. Daarsat today is history, as it died as fast as it was launched, losing mind bugging millions of naira.
Also,GE (General Electric) under Jack Welch made a tough decision to shut down businesses they were neither first nor second in the market to focus on sectors that are not commoditized. It paid off. That singular decision was instrumental in transforming GE from about $12 million into a $400b business.
Nigerian born Chimamnda Adichie, after spending the required gruesome years of studying medicine , her next move was what many would refer to as "crazy". Without blinking, she dumped medical practice to pursue another course in literature. Within years of her career as a writer she cruised on to become an international superstar after her work "purple hibiscus" earned her an orange prize for literature.
The stories above exemplify how a simple decision can have a strong "make or mar" effect on an individual or organization. Decision-making is a big deal. Your future depends on it to take form.
So,how exactly does one make a great decision? Whether it is a personal decision or corporate one,there is no hard and fast rule to it. There are times when you have to make decision on your feet using basically your intuition or lessons from past experiences and there are other times it gets really comp!ex. For a complex problem a more structured approach to decision-making is required. It involves both reasoning and intuition.
If there is no clear cut strategy for making critical choices, decision-making becomes more or less a betting game, a roll of the dice. The "S.M.A.R.T technique" developed by Samuel Mba could be a useful guide in arriving at superlative decision in a complex situation.. It simply posits that every great decision is SMART. "S" being the acronym for substantiated, mapped, applicable, responsive, and tested respectively. In no order of importance is presented below the idea behind the SMART technique.
Substantiated
This is all about discovering the foundational issues surrounding the object of focus. Actually,whether your decision is about solving a problem or developing a key strategy, Sound decisions are founded on established realities. Your first step towards a great choice is to engage in "information mining". This is all about digging deeper to unearth the underlying truth and letting the hard facts become the compass for your decision-making. Substantiating an issue involves probing and taking a hard intellectually robust, unbiased and non-prejudicial look at the situation in order to discover "truth and reality".
For instance, Coca cola successfully invented "new coke" The intention was to create a coke that tastes better than its rival Pepsi with the hope that it would help her recover her fast eroding market share to Pepsi. She did succeed in achieving a better tasting "new coke" as research indeed put it ahead of Pepsi in taste. However, the millions of dollars spent both in the invention and promotion couldn't turn the numbers in favor of "new coke". It still continued to trail Pepsi in the market. Why? What the management didn't realize is that the market was not influenced by "taste" but by "perception". In this case, the substance of the issue coca cola management failed to capture is : "perception" not "taste" dictates market share.
Determining the substance of an issue is often about being able to accurately summing up a complex issue into one core word or phrase that illuminates the reality. That is establishing the center of gravity of the matter.
Mapped
When an issue is truly substantiated, many critical issues will most likely be identified. To map them means segmenting the issues according to their relevance and generating the alternatives that deals with each of the outlined issues. Daar mentioned above for example, could have identified and segmented Pricing, Content and perception as being among other key growth drivers in the satellite Tv industry and then come up with a more competitive alternatives than just hoping to beat DSTV by offering customers a higher number of TV channels at a lower price.. Under the content segment or category for instance,Daar communications could have identified that Nigeria by demography is largely a youthful population with a strong crave for European league and would have worked to come up with that "killer idea" that would upset DSTV's market share in their favour using the gravity of football. This is where HiTv, another competitor was smarter in this regard and by a singular move of clinching the premier league right of broadcast they didn't only erode DSTV's market share without breaking a sweat they tightened the noose on DSTV's decades of monopoly and threatening even their very existence in the Nigeria market.
Applicable
Most boardroom or personal decisions are big on everything except implementation specifics. It tells you what it is to be achieved and how it will impact the organisation but often leaves the "hows" of execution to the line players to figure out. In their book "Execution" Larry Bossidy, former chairman and CEO,Honey International and Ram Charan author of "what the CEO wants you to know" write "If a strategy does not address the hows, it is a candidate for failure". If your objective is to achieve a decision that fetches real result then you must be willing to subject your choices to a robust and reality centered dialogue and debate. Things like: What do I/we want to achieve? Do I/we currently have the capacity to execute it? Who will do it? How will it be done? How will they be judged? How would the reward look like? What challenges are likely to emerge? What will our solution to the challenges be? These are all critical part of the implementation process. It is the implementation detail with eye on reality that brings the desired result. "An astonishing number of strategies fail because leaders don't make a realistic assessment of whether the organization can execute the plan" says Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan quoted above.
Responsive
Every choice has its own consequences. They only defer in dimension. The ability to anticipate future outcomes (intended and unintended) associated with a decision and articulating the appropriate responses is what makes,a decision a lot more effective. Adopting Suzzy Welch's "10:10:10 principle" may be of immense benefit here. This principle is all about envisaging and comparing how your decision would feel and look like in ten minutes, ten months and ten years. The aim is to help you see whether you are not sacrificing future realities for present gain, and whether you can see future realities in the present.
Brian Tracy in his book "Eat That Frog" asserts, "The mark of the superior thinker is his or her ability to accurately predict the consequences of doing or not doing something....."
Consider things like: what will the competition or other stakeholders reaction to your decision be? What are you going to do about it?
TESTED
Making assumptions is a legitimate and acceptable human practice. However, it would be sheer naivety to implement an unverified assumption. "Before you begin scrambling up the ladder of success, make sure that it is leaning against the right wall" says Stephen Covey an internationally respected leadership authority, family expert, teacher, organizational consultant and author. Always remember that, it is the validity or accuracy of your assumptions that gives live to your decisions. Assumptions verification begins with you developing the courage to expose your assumptions to a robust and candid dialogue. A brutally truthful session that has the power to challenge even the most seemingly plausible assumption until every reasonable doubt is cleared.
With every sense of modesty, the smart technique is not a perfect option but I believe it has a tremendous potential to elevate the quality of your decisions if and only if you dutifully and intelligently apply it to the later.
