Make Good Choices
Some Decision Making Resources
First Round go hard with their headline “The 6 Decision-Making Frameworks That Help Startup Leaders Tackle Tough Calls” but while the article is very helpful for product and feature-based decisions, there’s not a lot there for individuals to use when weighing up their own complex choices, or even for a startup founder when making the big calls. It’s a good reference guide for work and team based calls for sure and worth the read.
A stand out quote is this …
“You can have more decisions than decision-makers, but if you have more decision-makers than decisions, that’s when you run into problems.”
RACI
And they give a great reminder in two models about RACI and one about ‘explain’ where you share the decision and the logic. Pretty much guaranteeing you legendary leadership status if you do these two things as hardly anyone does and they make a world of difference.
RACI is typically used on projects and CIO have a great overview here, but in a nutshell:
“The RACI matrix is a responsibility assignment chart that maps out every task, milestone or key decision involved in completing a project and assigns which roles are Responsible for each action item, which personnel are Accountable, and, where appropriate, who needs to be Consulted or Informed.”
Everyone in the room and on the project then knows exactly who is involved, what’s expected of them and of the others on the project. Hugely helpful!
EXPLAIN
Explain is the next one – it was at the end of the SPADE model they reference and it’s often overlooked. Especially when decisions are made with a few people in isolation yet the impact is felt much wider. Sharing the background, context and expected outcomes really brings people on the journey with you, and can tease out anything that may have been overlooked, and build alignment for the decision too.
FREE ‘decision making’ EBOOK
The other resource is an ebook that one of the Bolstur Founders (Melissa) has written as an extract from her upcoming book Careering. She shares a couple of tactics for anticipating early what might go wrong and planning ahead for the tough personal decisions and for the professional ones too. She talks about one tool that’s really cool for when you’re deciding if you ‘JFDI’ and make a big life change - it’s Tim Ferris’ Fear Setting. He is a cool cat and used this tool to help him decide to chuck in his corporate gig and gather experiences around the globe … and, well, just look at him now!
Read all about it here https://www.careering9.com/decision-making.html or hit the download button below.
