You can make more effective decisions when you know what the key elements are. When you make important decisions, there’s 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 or something that’s impossible.

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 …

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 Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Know what to measure.  To make the most effective decisions, …

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 …

To make effective decisions, first figure out what would be the right thing to do.  That’s your starting point.  There’s a good chance you’ll have to compromise along the way, but first figure out what the right solution would be before you start trimming it down.  You can’t make the right compromises if you don’t first know what right is.  In The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter Drucker writes about starting with what’s right to avoid giving away what’s important …

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 …

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 of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management, Peter Drucker explains how to turn decisions into actions.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my …

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 …

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 …

Satisficing isn’t about finding the best fit.  It’s about finding a good enough fit for the current situation.  In Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, Gary Klein writes about satisficing.  The key here is that satisficing means figuring out what a satisfactory outcome would be and then finding ways to achieve it.  Klein goes on to point out that this is how experienced fire ground commanders can quickly make effective decisions under extreme time pressure. Rather than explore all possible options and evaluate their trade-offs, they quickly run a …