The ‘Stanford school’ on decision analysis, decision quality, and decision making in general, has brought us many very useful concepts and techniques. Quite a number of the larger companies have adopted these in some form or another to their advantage. See also wikipedia for a quick introduction.

In the virtual learning bite Decision Clarity we discuss Decision Quality, but precede this by an enhanced view of the decision process by considering the why, what and how. We call this Decision Clarity.

The analogy is baking a cake using a recipe. For this you need the ‘ingredients’ and a good understanding of the ‘steps to follow’ to accomplish the task.

Likewise, we could argue that the ‘ingredients’ of a decision include: timing, facts/information, decision scope, alternatives, values, uncertainties/risks. The steps to follow would be (in short): define process, frame problem/opportunity, evaluate options, decide, implement and learn.

We thus segment the decision process in ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’. ‘Why’ then equates to the problem/opportunity statement, the ‘what’ involves the things to consider and the ‘how’ refers to the steps to go through.

The DQ concept itself remains the same; it is just that we have augmented it with a distinction between process and matters for consideration. The only thing that we would like to add as a critical DQ element is ‘stakeholders’, as many corporate decisions turn out poorly when inadequate attention is given to this dimension.

The Decision Clarity approach is explained in the virtual learning bite Decision Clarity. You can get access to the free version by clicking the link below. For the full version, contact us using the form on this page.