This is a guest post by Paul Enfield on how you have to take risks, to get the rewards. It’s about taking a leap of faith.

Learn what the Osborne-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process, or CPS for short, is and how it can help you solve problems.

There is something amazingly powerful about taking decisive action. It’s like flipping a switch and deciding it will be so. It’s a completely different experience than waffling or wading through the jungle of indecision.

“Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.”– Napoleon Bonaparte

If you have five minutes to think about something, you actually have a lot.

You can improve your decision making by adding criteria and weight. The key is making the criteria explicit. This is effective for personal decision making, and it’s especially effective for group decision making. It works well for personal decision making because it forces you to get clarity on your own criteria. It works well for group decision making because you create a shared set of criteria. When people know what’s valued, it’s easier to understand and weigh in on the decisions.

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“Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.” – Tony Robbins
You can make more effective decisions when you know what the key elements are.  When you make important decisions, there are a few key factors to keep in mind.
For example, you should rationalize and understand the problem itself.  You need to know the problem you’re solving.  You should also set boundary conditions for the solution.  Success is often a spectrum so you should set boundaries so that you don’t limit yourself to something that’s impractical …

I found an interesting article about contextual decision making. It’s “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making,” an article in Harvard Business Review. The idea is about tailoring your decision making approach based on the context. You can use the Cynefin Framework to figure out which context you’re operating in, so you can choose the most effective response. The five contexts are simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. The key is to determine whether to categorize, analyze, probe or act.

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If you need to be persuasive, you need to know this secret.  It’s how people who influence without authority improve their effectiveness.  The secret is … character trumps emotion trumps logic.  If you win the heart, the mind follows.  On the other hand, if you win the mind, the heart doesn’t always follow.  For an example of character, think about the impact of the right people in the room asking the right questions. 
When you know this secret, it all makes sense.  You didn’t need more data …

What are four common ways of making decisions?  How do you choose the most effective decision making approach?  In Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler write about the four most common decision making methods and how to choose the most effective approach.
Key Take Aways Here’s my key take aways:

Don’t use command when you need consensus.  Don’t use command for important decisions that need buy in.  Consensus would be more appropriate.
Use consult to make …

To make more effective decisions, develop disagreement rather than consensus.  Disagreement provides alternatives and makes you think more deeply about the issue.  In fact, if you don’t have disagreement, you’re not ready to make a decision.  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about encouraging disagreement rather than consensus to helps make more effective decisions.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Don’t make a decision unless there’s disagreement.   Find the concerns.  Before you make a decision, first find …

"A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows public opinion." — Chinese Proverb
How will you measure whether your decision will be effective?  To make the most effective decisions, you need to know what to measure. You also need to select among alternatives of measurement so that you can truly understand what’s at stake. 
In  The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management , Peter F. Drucker writes about how you need to figure out the most appropriate and relevant measurements.
Key …

How do you make more effective decisions?  Do you start with the facts?  To make effective decisions, you first start with opinions.  You gather facts based on what’s relevant.  You then test opinions against reality.   In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter F. Drucker writes about making more effective decisions.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Know that decisions are judgments
Start with opinions over facts
Know the criteria of what’s relevant
Test your opinions against reality

Decisions are JudgementsDrucker writes that a decision …

There’s two different kinds of compromises in decision making.  One compromise results in a decision that gets you towards the solution.  The other compromise results in a decision that is worse than where you started from.  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter Drucker illustrates
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Half a loaf is better than no bread.
Half a baby is worse than none.

I think metaphors are great for illustrating points.  I think these metaphors are easy to relate …

Putting decisions into place usually requires compromises along the way or dealing with unforeseen events.  If your decision depends on everything going perfectly well, you’re in trouble.  If you don’t know the minimum your decision needs to accomplish, then you can end up taking compromises too far.  To make effective decisions, you need to know the boundaries.  You need to know what good like in terms of a continuum, from the minimal solution to the ideal.  Most importantly, don’t depend on the decision that requires everything to go right.  In …

“Remember, a real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.” — Tony Robbins
All talk, no action?  Good ideas, but no results?  A common problem is a lack of action commitments.
If you don’t break your decisions down into effective actions with owners, don’t expect results.  If you have owners for actions, but you haven’t equipped them for success, don’t be surprised when things fall through.  Turning decisions into effective actions requires thoughtful work assignments.
In The Essential Drucker: The Best …

How do you make more effective decisions?  As a leader, how do you know whether to build consensus or to simply make the decision based on input?  In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins writes about effective decision making using consult-and-decide and build-consensus techniques.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Choose the right decision making approach for the situation.  Choose the most effective decision making approach for the situation.
Don’t let time pressure drive you to consult-and-decide.  Don’t simply use consult-and-decide under time …

Expert judgment is the ability to make predictions and avoid problems in a given domain.  How can you test the judgment of somebody on your team?  You can observe them over time, or you can accelerate the process by asking them about a topic they are passionate about.  In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins writes about how to test a person’s capacity for expert judgment.
Key Take Aways Here’s my key take aways:

Expert judgment is the ability to …

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How do you get a group to make better decisions? In Social Psychology: Theories, Research, and Applications, Robert S. Feldman writes how cooperative controversy is an effective technique for enhancing group effectiveness.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Wear a hat. The most effective technique I’ve found to help a group use cooperative controversy is to “wear a hat.” The team puts on their Devil’s advocate hat and beats the idea up toether. We then wear another hat to work together to figure out ways we can …

Why do we resist taking advice? In Software Architect Bootcamp, Raphael Malveau and Thomas J. Mowbray, Ph.D. write about the friction around giving and getting advice.
Discouraging Others is Natural
Malveau and Mowbray write:
“When people come up with new ideas, it’s human nature to try to talk them out of it. The tendency occurs because (pychologists say) one tries to help a person avoid being discouraged by discouraging him or her verbally. While this makes no logical sense, most people engage in this behavior unconsciously. It is natural human behavior. In order …

Experts don’t make decisions the same way novices do.  It’s an entirely different process.  Experts draw from experience.  They rapidly test patterns against mental simulation to find a fit.  In Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, Gary Klein explains how experts make reliable snap decisions over novices.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) is a quick scan of potential outcomes.  RPD quickly evaluates courses of actions by imagining how they’ll be carried out, not by formal analysis and comparison.
Be skeptical of formal decision making methods.  Be skeptical …