How to Make Decisions

A Model for Making the Best Possible Choices

By the Mind Tools Content Team

Some decisions are so simple that you're barely aware you're making them, while others are time
consuming, high risk, and can leave you feeling anxious.

Decisions can make or break a project or an entire business. And they often involve complex and
unpredictable interpersonal issues, too.

What Is Decision Making?

Decision making is a process of choosing between possibilities. It is often part of problem solving. The
more complex the decision, the more factors you'll need to consider before deciding on a course of
action. There are many tools and strategies that can help you to make decisions more thoughtfully and
effectively.

What Are the 3 Types of Decision Making?

Strategic: Long-term, high-level decisions determine the direction of an organization and require a lot of
forethought.

Tactical: These decisions translate strategic direction into action, focusing on how and why work gets
done.

Operational: Daily, routine decisions put strategic and tactical goals into practice.

Decision makers at all levels benefit from building strong decision-making skills.

What Can Prevent Effective Decision Making?

Lacking relevant information: When you don’t fully understand a situation, it’s hard to make a good
decision about it.

Misidentifying the problem: Be clear that your decision addresses a root cause, not just a symptom.

Failing to consider risks: Assess the consequences of each course of action before choosing one.

Letting bias cloud your judgment: View your choices with objectivity and seek stakeholder feedback.
What Are the 7 Steps of Decision Making?

To avoid making a bad decision, you need to bring a range of decision-making skills together in a logical
and ordered process. We recommend the following seven steps:

Investigate the situation in detail.

Create a constructive environment.

Generate good alternatives.

Explore your options.

Select the best solution.

Evaluate your plan.

Communicate your decision, and take action.

Quick Tips on Decision Making

This process will ensure that you make a good decision in a complex situation, but it may be
unnecessarily complicated for small or simple decisions. In these cases, jump to Step 5.

If you need to make a quick decision under pressure, see our articles, OODA Loops and The TDODAR
Decision Model.

Take our How Good is Your Decision-Making? quiz to find out how well you're doing now!

Let's look at each of the seven steps in detail. Each step features a list of related Mind Tools resources to
help you further.

Step 1: Investigate the Situation in Detail

Decisions often fail because key factors are missed or ignored from the outset. So, before you can begin
to make a decision, you need to fully understand your situation.

Start by considering the decision in the context of the problem it is intended to address. You need to
determine whether the stated problem is the real issue, or just a symptom of something deeper.

Look beyond the obvious. It may be that your objective can be approached in isolation, but it's more
likely that there are a number of interrelated factors to consider. Changes made in one department, for
example, could have knock-on effects elsewhere, making the change counterproductive.

How Can Mind Tools Help Your Decision Making?

Take a look at our tools and resources for each step of the decision-making process.
Investigative Tools:

5 Whys

Root Cause Analysis

Inductive Reasoning

The CATWOE Checklist

Six Thinking Hats

Step 2: Create a Constructive Environment for Your Decision

Can you give your decision the attention it needs? Spend some time preparing yourself before diving in
to the facts and figures.

Remember that most decisions will affect other people too, so it helps to create a constructive
environment in which to explore the situation together and gain support.

This is especially true when you have to rely on other people to implement a decision that you're
responsible for. You'll need to identify who to include in the process and who will be part of any final
decision-making group, which will ideally comprise just five to seven people.

Enable people to contribute to the discussions without any fear of the other participants rejecting them
and their ideas. Make sure that everyone recognizes that the objective is to make the best decision
possible in the circumstances, without blame.

Collaboration Tools:

Personal Preparation for Great Decision Making

Stakeholder Analysis

Vroom-Yetton Decision Model

Contructive Controversy

Avoiding Groupthink

Step 3: Generate Good Alternatives to Decide Between

The wider the options you explore, the better your final decision is likely to be. Generating a number of
different options may seem to make your decision more complicated at first, but the act of coming up
with alternatives forces you to dig deeper and to look at the problem from different angles.
This is when it can be helpful to employ a variety of creative thinking techniques. These can help you to
step outside your normal patterns of thinking and come up with some truly innovative solutions.

Brainstorming is probably the most popular method of generating ideas, but for more tips on how to
examine your situation from new perspectives, and how to organize ideas into manageable themes and
groups, see the Mind Tools resources in the box, below.

Creativity Tools:

Crawford Slip Writing Technique

Round-Robin Brainstorming

Reframing Matrix

Appreciative Inquiry

Affinity Diagrams

Step 4: Explore Your Options

When you're satisfied that you have a good selection of realistic alternatives, it's time to evaluate the
feasibility, risks and implications of each one.

Almost every decision involves some degree of risk. You'll need a structured approach for assessing
threats and evaluating the probability of adverse events occurring – and what they might cost to
manage. You'll also want to examine the ethical impact of each option, and how that might sit with your
personal and organizational values.

The resources highlighted below offer tried-and-true models to help you.

Analysis Tools:

Risk Analysis

Futures Wheel

Starbursting

Force Field Analysis

Quantitative Pros and Cons

Cost-Benefit Analysis

The Foursquare Protocol

Step 5: Select the Best Solution

Once you've evaluated the alternatives, the next step is to make your decision!

If you have various criteria to consider, use Decision Matrix Analysis to compare them reliably and
rigorously. Or, if you want to determine which ones should carry most weight in your decision, conduct a
Paired Comparison Analysis.

If your decision is being made within a group, techniques such as multi-voting and the Modified Borda
Count can help your team reach an agreement.

When anonymity is important, decision-makers dislike one another, or there is a tendency for certain
individuals to dominate the process, use the Delphi Technique to reach a fair and impartial decision. This
uses cycles of anonymous, written discussion and argument, managed by a facilitator. Participants do not
meet, and sometimes they don't even know who else is involved.

If you're working with an established team, Hartnett's Consensus-Oriented Decision-Making Model is

Decision-Making Tools:

Decision Matrix Analysis

Paired Comparison Analysis

Multi-Voting

Modified Borda Count

Hartnett's Consensus-Oriented Decision-Making Model

Bain's RAPID Framework

Step 6: Evaluate Your Plan

After all the effort and hard work you've invested in evaluating and selecting alternatives, it can be
tempting to forge ahead at this stage. But now, more than ever, is the time to "sense check" your
decision. After all, hindsight is great for identifying why things have gone wrong, but it's far better to
prevent mistakes from happening in the first place!
Before you start to implement your decision, take a long, dispassionate look at it to be sure that you
have been thorough, and that common errors haven't crept into the process.

Your final decision is only as good as the facts and research you used to make it. Make sure that your
information is trustworthy, and that you've done your best not to "cherry pick" data. This will help you
avoid confirmation bias, a common psychological bias in decision making.

Discuss your preliminary conclusions with important stakeholders to enable them to spot flaws, make
recommendations, and support your conclusions. Listen to your own intuition, too, and quietly and
methodically test assumptions and decisions against your own experience. BRAIN BRAN BRAND is a
useful tool for this. If you have any doubts, examine them thoroughly to work out what's troubling you.

Use Blindspot Analysis to review whether you've fallen prey to problems like over-confidence, escalating
commitment, or groupthink. And consider checking the logical structure of your process with the Ladder
of Inference, to make sure that a well-founded and consistent decision emerges at the end.

Evaluation Tools:

10 Common Decision-Making Mistakes

BRAIN, BRAN, BRAND

Avoiding Psychological Bias in Decision Making

Blindspot Analysis

Ladder of Inference

Step 7: Communicate Your Decision, and Take Action

Get them involved in implementing the solution by discussing how and why you arrived at your decision.
The more information you provide about risks and projected benefits, the more likely people will be to
support it.

If people point out a flaw in your process as a result, have the humility to welcome their input and
review your plans appropriately – it's much better to do this now, cheaply, than having to do it
expensively (and embarrassingly) if your plans have failed.