Decision-making can be improved by a solid action plan - Personal Experience

I always lacked solid decision-making skills that caused unnecessary anxiety in complex situations. I decided to tackle this problem methodically and not just randomly. I decided to get assessed for my decision-making skills and then make an improvement plan. Below is the Mindtools.com’s assessment of my decision-making skills where I scored 60.

Your decision-making process is OK. You have a good understanding of the basics, but now you need to improve your process and be more proactive. Concentrate on finding lots of options and discovering as many risks and consequences as you can.
The better your analysis, the better your decision will be in the long term. Focus specifically on the areas where you lost points and develop a system that will work for you across a wide variety of situations.

This was a moment of relaxation for me since my decision-making skills were not so terrible. The test clearly indicates that I needed to improve the process on a holistic level and be more proactive in making decisions.

The goal of the improvement plan was to enhance and improve my decision-making skills through improving my analytic abilities and agility.

Improvement/Action Plan

Following are few of the major points that I made part of the improvement plan;

• When deciding, clearly understanding the situation

• Assess the risks and benefits related to the problem; analyze the degree of their correlation and relevance with the problem

• Evaluate alternatives in terms of cost-benefits/impacts

• Reduce reliance on ‘gut instinct’ in the process, and work from experience, benchmarking, calculation and analysis of the problem

• Imagining that the decision would be evaluated by a professional, for instance, a manager or analyst. This would not only create an automatic sense of responsibility in the process of decision making, but the flow of ideas and alternatives would be steadier. However, the pressure associated with this imaginative responsibility is to be shunned down, or it can sabotage the effort to improve the process.

• Detach and eliminate the biases and opinions related to a problem, person, or event. The focal point of the whole process should be ‘problem solving’ instead of finding stigmas attached to people or events. Hence, this would require emotional independence and stability.

• Assess the long-term impact of the most favorable option

• Every problem and its scenario is unique, thus, every decision must be based on the problem, and not the prior decision. Moreover, outside help can be sought out when a problem needs expert opinion or general opinion.

I started to implement the action plan by keeping each aspect in mind while deciding. The results were surprisingly positive as I was considering realistic effects and causes of a variable in any given situation. Sometimes, it is not so bad to take risky decisions while at times, even the most calculated decisions can cause us to fall. It depends upon us as to what we want from ourselves and others around us.