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Why risk making a bad decision when making great decisions is just so simple?

Your business success depends on the decisions you make.

But it can be tough to make a decision.

Even tougher to make the right decision. Tougher still to get your decision carried out successfully.

But when you get better at decision-making, you set your business on the road to greater success.

As a business leader your job is to avoid the pitfalls of bad decision making.

IN A NUTSHELL

When making important decisions avoid your decision-making auto-pilot and be sure to seriously sense-check your decisions

Start here with 4 helping hands or read on for the full Business Breakthrough

Beware, bad decisions are just so easy to make…

…and if the big corporate businesses often get the big decisions wrong, aren’t we also more likely to be guilty of bad decision making?

A 2010 McKinsey Consulting study showed a profound lack of good decision making on the big acquisition deals in the corporate world.

KEY FACT

A KPMG study of corporate mergers showed that 83% of these large business decisions failed to boost shareholder value, when compared with other results in the same industry.

600% better than analysis…

The McKinsey study investigated 1048 business decisions over 5 years, and most of these decisions involved rigorous analysis before the decision.

McKinsey proved that a good decision making process matters 600% more than good analysis.

“Superb analysis is useless unless the decision-making process gives it a fair hearing” – Lovallo and Sibony

Here's the proven solution for you...

Use a simple 4-step sense-check to escape your instinctive and yet naturally flawed decision-making.

You have a great excuse for making bad decisions…

Have you ever been on, or even heard of, a training programme on great decision making? Unlikely.

And yet decision-making is a vital business skill – just like recruiting, selling or planning are business skills.

And as a business leader your decision making skill ultimately determines how successful you are.

Success requires a better decision-making process…

Chances are you make decisions naturally without thinking about your decision-making process.

Chances are you’ve done alright so far, so it’s a safe bet your next decision will also be alright!

STOP making big decisions the way you’ve always made decisions

START by widening your options before you make a decision.

Here's your checklist for brilliant decision making

Want better than ‘ALRIGHT’ results for your business?

If you want your business results to improve beyond ‘alright’ it’s a good idea to improve the quality of your decision making process.

So how do you protect yourself against bad decision-making?

What stops you making great decisions?

Here are the 4 hazards you must avoid if you want to make great decisions:

1
Stop looking so narrow
2
Stop being so biased
3
Stop being so emotional
4
Stop being so confident

In a brilliant summary of the research and literature on decision-making, Chip and Dan Heath call these 4 hazards ‘the four villains’ of flawed decision-making.

These 4 natural, instinctive and automatic flaws get in your way.

The Heath brothers provide a solution:

"

“We can’t deactivate our biases, …we can counteract them with the right (decision-making) discipline.”

Chip and Dan Heath

1. Stop looking so narrow – widen your options

A narrow decision-making question is: “Should I hire Julie or not?”

You widen your options when you are able to choose between Julie, Adam and Elliot
You widen your options further when you seriously consider outsourcing the work instead
You also widen your options when you consider investing in technology to avoid hiring anybody
You widen your options further when you apply the magic of ‘AND’ rather than the tyranny of ‘OR’ – hire someone part-time AND implement the better use of technology

Widen your spotlight…

One of the reasons corporate mergers fail is because the decision is ‘do we merge or not?’ It’s a ‘whether or not’ decision.

The decision is too narrow.

The odds that your decisions will be better improves as you widen the beam of your decision-making spotlight, widen the area you light up.

BEFORE YOU DECIDE ASK:

What would you do if the obvious option was unavailable? Force yourself to look for options.
How else could you spend the time or money? Multi-track more than one decision option (1 or 2 more not dozens) at the same time
Who else has solved your problem? Copy their decision-making process.
Who else could be involved in the decision? Involving more people widens options – yes this makes decision making more complex but it also means the people involved are more likely to implement successfully with you.

2. Stop being so biased – reality-test your analysis

The Heath brothers put it so well:

“At work and in life, we often pretend that we want truth when we’re really seeking reassurance: “

"Do these jeans make me look fat?”

Bias (without realising) leads you to giving unjustified weight to information supporting your view.

It’s why Sun readers choose the Sun to confirm their Conservative views.

Other readers choose the Mirror to support their Labour bias.

"

“Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong. People go out and they’re collecting the data, and they don’t realize they’re cooking the books. We can’t deactivate our biases, …we