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When You Don’t Know What to Do...
By Roberta Guise, MBA

No-one is immune to it. At some time in our lives, each of us will find ourselves at a crossroads, stuck, trying to figure out what to do next. Some of us never get unstuck, and instead let the issues pile up and gather the proverbial dust.

Tom, a real estate broker colleague, recently told me that he’s been on the fence for too long. For years, he’s gone back and forth on the question of which branded brokerage to align himself with.

Doing nothing can be risky
Tom admitted that he’s paying the price for his indecision in lost income. For any of us, unresolved issues can be a mere nuisance, or at the other extreme hurt professionally and financially, leave us feeling unfulfilled, even destroy relationships.

Decision-making is both art and science. Businesses with teams of people who need to make strategic decisions have available to them such formal and sophisticated tools as Pareto diagrams, decision trees and Edward de Bono’s novel Six Hats. (De Bono E., Six Thinking Hats: An Essential Approach to Business Management, Little Brown & Co, 1985.)

Because small business owners and individuals generally don’t have the luxury of teams to work with, I’ve created a simplified process, with seven steps you can follow for making a decision about most situations and dilemmas that you are likely to face.

We often think that we should make decisions using rational thinking. In fact, you’re more likely to make the right decision if, as De Bono suggests, you use a variety of thinking styles or “hats”: engage your analytical side, let your emotions and intuition kick in, look for everything that can go wrong and conversely go right, and be sure to keep your eye on the big picture, not just the details.

Before you throw yourself into the decision making process, do these three things:

1. Be certain you know the situation you’ll be deciding on.
2. Accept that you will be making some kind of a change.
3. Make a commitment to yourself that you’ll carry out the change.

What to do

1. Write down the problem. This can be trickier than it seems. Hamlet’s famous question, “To be or not to be,” is deceptively complex. Let’s say, for example, that you’ve lost enthusiasm for your work, and you assume that you’re bored because you’ve been doing it for so long. More than likely your boredom is a symptom masking as the problem.
   
    The real problem could be that you’ve narrowed your professional niche so tightly that work has become repetitive, not unlike that of an assembly line worker. Or the problem could be in the type of clients who use your services or buy your products. You offer high value, and all they want is low prices. To compete, you’ve offered discounts. Over time this mismatch has caused you to burn out.
   
   Be certain, then, that you’re tackling an issue that’s indeed the problem.
   
   
2. Assess your goals and vision. If you haven’t yet articulated where you want your business to be in 3 years, now is a good time to do it. Create a word picture of what your business and personal life look like 3 years from now. Ask questions such as: how much revenue will I be generating? What kind of satisfaction and fulfillment will I get from my business? Is my business structured and functioning the same as now, or differently?
   
   
3. Assess where you’re strong and not so strong. Write down your strengths and weaknesses (things you can control). Write down opportunities and challenges (things you can’t control). Ask yourself whether the situation you need to decide on is controllable, uncontrollable, or perhaps a bit of both.
   
   
4. Write down alternative courses of action. It’s easy to forget when faced with a dilemma that we have choices and can act in any number of ways. Here is where you can twist and turn the choices using de Bono’s thinking styles I mentioned earlier. Don’t prioritize them yet — that comes in a moment.
   
   
5. Write down the positive and negative consequences. Each choice has an upside and downside. List the likely pros and cons of each course of action.
   
   
6. Rate each alternative. Prioritize your choices by assigning a number to each one. For example, you can assign #1 to your top choice and #5 to the lowest. Again, use the various thinking styles to flex your thinking as you weigh the pros and cons of each choice.
   
   
7. Decide! Map out a realistic plan of action, and carry it out. And be sure to have contingency plans that take into consideration risks you know are out there.

You can never truly know until after the fact whether a decision you’ve made was the “right” decision. This shouldn’t be cause for concern, however, because if you based your decision on understanding the key facets of an issue, you’ll more than likely hit the bullseye.

Copyright © 2004 Roberta Guise, MBA.

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