Making Good Decisions In Startups
Making quick and efficient decisions is the golden mantra of success, and your career’s trajectory will heavily rely on this facet alone. To be a Zen master in making decisions, you must shift your decision-making to be a more holistic, inclusive, and relational process so that you can live with uncertainty yet acts with confidence. Here are some pointers, which will help you to become a Zen master of decision-making and propel your career forward.
Focus on purpose and criteria.
Gaining clarity and commitment to a shared (higher) purpose, values, and a positive result is critical at the beginning of the decision-making process. Energy is created when the stakeholders are aware that they share a purpose, which is worth investing their time and imagination.
Clarify the question or issue
Creating greater clarity requires focused thinking. There are many paths to achieve the purpose and desired outcomes. As a decision maker, you need to spend sufficient time identifying and understanding the question or the issue that you are trying to solve.
Expose existing perspectives
In the haste and fervour of making a decision don?t forget to acknowledge that each participant in your decision-making process has an initial viewpoint. Be mature and allow all participants to share their views and use it constructively for creating new perspectives. This should be a nonjudgmental activity that serves to access intuition of the larger group. At the end of the day, this is data on which your final decision will be relying Identify and challenge assumptions.
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Don?t take anything at face value, go deeper into perspectives and uncover assumptions, which may be invisible. These hidden assumptions hold the golden key to effective decision-making. You will achieve greater understanding and innovation by identifying and constructively challenging the assumptions.
Generate purposeful alternatives
Once you have the clarity and exposure to various facets of assumptions, Brainstorming and inquiry can be used to create options. Don’t be satisfied with one, and It is important to get as many alternatives as possible on the table before you decide next steps.
And finally, make a decision.
Making decisions involves, reducing or prioritizing the purposeful alternatives. Many methods can be employed to make healthy choices, each one of them will have a different impact on the stakeholders, you could use consensus, experience or expert opinion to arrive at the final decision.
Your decision must have a clear alignment to the purpose and criteria. Good decisions balance risk and reward, however, perfection or the one right answer is not the goal. Finding an 80 percent right choice and then iterating it on the way should be your aim.
Living the decision
As a decision maker, you will be evaluated on two fronts; the first one would be making a decision, and then how well do you go about implementing the rhetoric.
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The key is to stay humble, for any decision you take will be at best 80%? correct, being grounded will help you in learning from the implementation and improve your professed solution in the subsequent cycles.
With every right decision, a new standard is created, and decision-making becomes a continuous cycle of learning and action for you and propels your career forward.
