Business and leading people can both be hard and easy.
Getting stuck in a mental rut is also easy, and no wonder as making a similar decision based on past experience makes a lot of sense. It saves time, allows you to move onto the next task. But it also can increasingly become dangerous without some benchmark or checking from time to time.
The Harvard Business School published a book on Decision Making, 5 Steps to Better Results.
After your first step (buy the book) the 5 steps are:
1. Establish a context for success which is about setting the stage for making a good decision and involving the right people in the process
2. Framing the Issue Properly to make sure you are tackling the right question with the right constraints on an outcome
3. Generate alternatives through brainstorming and other techniques
4. Evaluate alternatives
5. Choose the best alternative
The book also covers a range of other issues that are really useful in considering ways to get to a smarter more considered organisation and team.
When I was a child, my father would take us to school. Sometimes he would go a completely different way to normal and make us late. When asked why he was taking the longcut, he would reply, “you can’t get stuck in a rut”.
My children also complain when I take a longcut. When I tell them “you can’t get stuck in a rut” their response is, “yeah, but carts are from the olden days when Grandad was a boy, there is no such thing as ruts now”. I do remind them that my Dad also got to enjoy sealed roads in cars…
