Decision Making Asks for A Strong W H Y

I had a discussion today about our decision making and I was asked by a friend:

“What do I have to do when I feel I need to make a decision and still feel unsure?”

“There is one first answer:  define your decision problem.  Find out WHY you feel you have to make a decision.  What is your personal trigger?”  …..and my friend started thinking for a moment.

Any decision which appears and forces us for change has a trigger:  a trigger fact or a trigger moment.  Let´s look at various categories in your life:

• the grass in the front yard isn´t green anymore and you think about a new gardening project
• now after winter, you feel powerless because you gained some weight and today you start thinking of your grocery list and some potential sport activities
• your teenage kids start developing their own mind and opinions about life and suddenly you think about improving your communication skills to avoid conflict conversations
• your job challenges you because the plan for next week is to build 2 new smaller teams out of 1 big team and your current position is concerned, positively
• you plan a meeting for a decision topic but after 2 days you get the info from the assistant that there´s no way to gather all members for a certain day at a certain time which forces you to decide about a decision which increases the pressure

…… it sounds like very much is going on?

If you reflect now, you might see that this belongs to your daily routine already.  But you won´t sit down and get into detail – instead you start sweet talking about the consequenes and you start mentally connecting the dots to see first advantages of this overall decision szenario:

1. the light green grass triggers you to talk to your spouse about the front yard and you think about teaching your kids how to design and plan a new yard with a fix budget, aiming that they´ll help motivated with the work execution
2. the work plan for the yard suits your new health plan and triggers you to aim at losing weight. This rearrangement would also replace some extra sport activity, precious spare time suddenly is left
3. during your yard work and work-out activity you see yourself outside with a headphone listening to podcasts about better communication skills, which triggers you to think about teaching your kids as well, with the idea to involve both with the gardening contract and agreements
4. in the same moment you think of the new position at work which triggers the motivation to start improving your communication skills in terms of leadership, which will help at work even more than for the home project, or best case:  it´s equally helpful for your life
5. …. but still, there is the issue at work that you can´t push any further without a new solution, a replacement for this meeting and right now nothing else you mentally planned to decide won´t help you.  It´s a single lose dot!

In this moment you spot that for the last decision trouble you do have to sit down and find a new solution.  The trigger to recognize the problem is that it won´t connect to anything else and won´t get solved by itself.

The other triggered decisions fit well into a chain reaction and therefore seem very attractive to do!  They seem to help solving each other hand in hand which easily becomes the WHY for you to decide for all ideas in a row!

Instead of a meeting you suddenly think about the new design of the front yard and using this analogy for the meeting at work suddenly leads to a new solution – the meeting probably only needs a new design, a new shape – not the shape of a table with all team members sitting around, but split the team into smaller colleague-groups and to launch single Emails with split tasks.  You will ask them for immediate performance and feedback within 5 days and announce a skype call with everyone to check the results afterwards.  A new solution!

….. and you thought this problem was a lose dot?  Be creative, connect your daily decisions like a chain reaction and learn from them!

 

BE A DECISION MAKER.  BE OUTSTANDING.

rita jaskolla – Leadership Architect –