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Sweet temptations: ‘Decisions about immediate gratification are a category of their own’. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy
Sweet temptations: ‘Decisions about immediate gratification are a category of their own’. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

Ten ways to make better business decisions

This article is more than 9 years old
There are some choices that you need to mull over while others should be based on gut instinct, says Robbie Steinhouse

Decision making is often seen as a simple, clearly defined skill. It might be hard to master, but once you’ve got it, you’ve got it. In reality, however, different decisions require different mind-sets and different skills.

Here are 10 types of decisions and how to deal with them.

1. Giants. Those big, life- or career-changing decisions. Do I buy this business? Should I take this job offer? The most important thing here is to go through a proper, structured decision-making process, one that you use regularly and feel comfortable with. This will involve gathering information, forming and weighing options, making a wholehearted decision and planning how you will implement it. Let this process take the time it needs. Doing so allows the decision to evolve: reality tends to amend options or add new ones as you go along. It also makes the challenge less daunting: beginning with some subtle initial steps (before committing yourself) can you get you moving along the path.

2. Giants where you have no time to decide. Do you really have “no time” to make such a major decision? With most decisions, you nearly always have more time than you think, though other people may tell you otherwise. Their agenda is a quick answer; yours is the right answer. Buy time.

3. Quick decisions on home ground. By this, I mean decisions that really do need to be made quickly, but are in an area about which you are well informed. Many minor workplace decisions fall into this category. My advice here is simply to trust your gut feeling, which is actually a storehouse of acquired wisdom.

4. Quick decisions about new people. Even if you’ve never met someone before, you have a huge amount of stored knowledge, courtesy of both evolution and your life experience, about your fellow human beings and the messages they give off. As above, trust your initial gut feeling.

5. Quick decisions away from home. If the decision involves topics of which you have little experience, gut feeling isn’t enough. Try and create some time to think things through consciously.

6. Chocolate cakes. Decisions about immediate gratification are a category of their own. Give yourself a tiny space to consider the consequences of your action. If it is a regular problem, have a “counter-example” to hand: “Last time I ate one of these I felt sick”.

7. Decisions with too much time. The opposite of the “snappers” above. This kind of decision can end up taking up far too much brain-space, and lead to long and pointless ruminating. Give yourself a deadline for action.

8. But what if... Some decisions can overwhelm people by arousing fears of negative consequences if they go wrong. Address the fears, and see if they are rational or not. If they aren’t rational, stand up to them. If they are rational, what can you do to minimise risk? Research shows that we are hard-wired to worry more than is objectively justified about future loss, so reason needs to take control here.

9. Disasters. Sometimes a decision, however well arrived at, goes wrong. All decisions are made with imperfect information, and the world is fast-changing: a wise move one day can simply turn out to be wrong the next. A new decision has to be made, to reverse the original one. Don’t panic and rush: follow your standard decision-making process and give it the space and time it needs, allowing it to reveal new options. Don’t beat yourself up afterwards, either. Be proud you took remedial action.

10. Dilemmas. Some decisions really do seem to be impossible, with no course of action available that doesn’t have unpleasant consequences. Gut instinct may rebel against either of them, so you have to reason this out. Buy time.

Give yourself as much “wiggle room” as you can: some unexpected benefit might crop up. Dilemmas often involve conflicting values, for example loyalty vs integrity. In these cases consider which value is more important to you and follow that path.

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Robbie Steinhouse is author of Making Effective Decisions. He is founder of nlpschool.com and also author of Brilliant Decision Making, Think like an Entrepreneur and How to Coach with NLP.

This content has been sponsored by E.ON, whose brand it displays. All content is editorially independent.


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