Are You Confident You Will Make the Right Call on Major Decisions?

Greetings Decision maker,

Have you ever written out a list of pros and cons as part of making a decision? Sometimes this kind of exercise reveals that one side of the list is a lot longer than the other and brings confidence to a decision. However, this method usually doesn’t cut it when facing a major or complicated decision where the stakes are high and multiple facets of the issue often have their own long lists of pros and cons.

Major and/or Complex Decisions

In this email, you’ll gain an in-depth approach to ranking your options for cases where you’re making truly major and/or complex decisions using an eight-step technique called "Avoiding Disastrous Decisions." It’s best used together with the Making the Best Decisions method from the previous email, since the Avoiding Disastrous Decisions strategy focuses only on trade-offs between different options rather than all the other aspects of making the right calls. I make sure that all of my consulting and coaching clients use these two techniques together on truly major and/or truly complex choices, and I encourage you to do the same.

So what decisions am I talking about? Ones such as:

A major pivot in strategy
A merger or an acquisition
Hiring a key employee
Deciding which new bet-the-company product to launch
Choosing a critical supplier
Moving your headquarters
Making a major career move
Starting a new business
Choosing a business partner

Here are the key elements of this strategy:

Decide the decision criteria
Weigh importance of criteria
Grading your options using the criteria
Check with your head and your gut
Stick to your choice.

To use this technique effectively, read the blog on Avoiding Disastrous Decisions.

The "Avoiding Disastrous Decisions" strategy should be used every time you need to make a critical decision, by yourself or as part of a team. Using this technique will allow you and your team to be confident about the quality of your decision making and maximize the chance that you’ll make the right call.

If you’d like case studies and in-depth guidelines for applying this strategy as an individual or a team, see the Manual on Avoiding Disastrous Decisions. It walks you step-by-step through two case studies - one for a group and one for an individual - making really important decisions. You should use the manual with this web app, designed specifically for use with the technique.

Use This Technique at Work and at Home

While you should definitely use this technique for critical decisions at work, it’s also a valuable tool for personal decisions. If you’ve already read my bestseller, The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide, you’ve learned how my wife and business partner Agnes Vishnevkin and I used it to save ourselves some serious heartache when buying a house in Columbus, Ohio, in the Fall of 2015. We would have certainly made the wrong choice if we didn’t use this method. This picture is our back-of-the-napkin calculations that we did at a neighborhood diner one evening to make the right choice, and the difficulty of doing this on paper was a big reason why we developed a web app to use with this technique.

I’m also preparing for the webinar I’ll give on October 15 from 2 to 3 PM Eastern Time on 5 Key Questions to Avoiding Business Disasters and Making the Most Profitable Decisions, which shares the essential take-aways from my forthcoming book, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. Hold the date in your calendar and put this link to the webinar in your calendar event, and please sign in at 1:50 to make sure you have no technology glitches.

Never Go With Your Gut Book Endorsement

Here’s another endorsement for Never Go With Your Gut: in the last email, I shared a prominent business leader’s endorsement, and now here’s a prominent nonprofit leader’s endorsement.

As a leader of a quickly growing national public charity dedicated to serving tens of thousands of North America’s most vulnerable children, it initially seemed counterintuitive to "never go with my gut" in making critical business decisions. Childhood is so very fleeting, and these children need our aggressive best efforts. Yet, Dr. Tsipursky’s research-based, step-by-step guidebook describing the 30 cognitive biases too often embedded in management presents a compelling alternative to instinctual or intuitive decision-making. With chapter-relevant exercises, encouragement to keep a robust journal and detailed strategies for "debiasing" business (and personal) decision-making, Never Go With Your Gut will not only change the way you do business, but help drive toward greater success.

Next Time in the Wise Decision Maker Guide

Next time in the Wise Decision Maker Guide - which hits your inbox every first and third Tuesday, so October 15 for the next one - you’ll get a technique to minimize failures and maximize success when implementing your decisions. After all, you can make the best possible decision, but if you don’t implement it well, you’ll be in trouble.

Help Me Serve Your Needs

What kind of critical decisions have you faced in the past where this technique might have been helpful? What about future decisions that you might face? Email me back to let me know and ensure that I develop future content that is most suitable for you!

Look forward to hearing from you!

P.S. Want to make even better critical decisions than you’d get from this technique? As a follower of my work, you get exclusive access to pre-order benefits for my forthcoming book, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters, not available to those who aren’t active fans. Just pre-order the book on Amazon in any format, then enter your order information into this pre-order form, and you get: 1) A secure spot for the November 7 live webinar discussion of Never Go With Your Gut, available only for those who pre-ordered the book, and only while space is available, and 2) A digital version of the book that you can start reading right away.

P.P.S. If this email was forwarded to you, I invite you to sign up to future editions of the Wise Decision Maker Guide, twice-monthly emails with knowledge, strategies, and skills that to protect yourself and those you care about from decision disasters and maximize success in business and other life areas.

Decisively Yours,

Gleb