Making sure that your strategic decisions are good ones is vitally important. Your
strategy will shape a range of task, investment and people decisions, and making the wrong
call could waste vital resources. Using a structured approach helps minimise the risk of a
poor decision. We offer a four
stage process for decision making :
1) Carry out a thorough strategic analysis of the needs of the situation.
2) Understand what factors make a real difference, and which factors are "nice
to have".
3) Develop criteria to objectively judge the alternative options.
4) Evaluate each option, and ensure that objective analysis can be reconciled with
subjective assessment.
STAGE ONE : STRATEGIC ANALYSIS
Having a good understanding of the situation is a vital start point. a. From what
you already know, write down what you think are the key issues. b. Then develop a list of
hypotheses : things that you believe to be true about these issues. c. Now don your best
investigative detection skills and seek to gather the data that will either prove or
disprove these hypothesis.
STAGE TWO : IDENTIFYING KEY FACTORS
Having assembled a good list of issues, the key is now to try to single out the
four or five issues that are of most importance in shaping the success of a strategy. a.
First write down your strategic goal or vision. What do you need the strategy to
achieve….. precisely? b. Then you can write down the four or five issues that will
have the greatest impact on determining whether a strategy succeeds or fails. c. Now
consider whether you need to add one or two other factors that are important to your
organization, but will not make a material difference to the success of the strategy.
These are hoops that need to be jumped through. In an ideal world you will not need to add
any additional criteria.
STAGE THREE : ASSESSMENT CRITERIA
The third stage of the process
is to assemble quantitative criteria that can be used to rate alternative strategic
options. The challenge here is to come up with measures that accurately determine the
strategy's chance of success. Factors such as cost, time, resources required are
relatively easy to collate, but other factors are much harder. You will need to be
especially creative at this stage. If necessary, weight the criteria to reflect the
relative importance of the issue you are trying to measure.
STAGE FOUR : OBJECTIVE EVALUATION
Finally score each alternative
strategic option on each of the key criteria to come up with an overall assessment.
However, before automatically selecting this as the preferred route, there are two other
stages you will need to go through.
i. Firstly, how does this stack up with your judgment - is the quantitative
analysis in line with your emotional intelligence? If not, why is there a difference?
ii. Secondly, when praying through the direction you should take, does your prayer
confirm or conflict with the way that you are heading.
At the end of this phase, you will need to
take a decision. Making big decisions is never easy, but if your emotional intelligence
and your prayers are supporting what your analysis suggests is the best route forwards,
you can take some confidence that the decision has been carefully assessed.
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