Decision Defined

If you haven't already done so, read my March 18 post entitled "Decision Awareness" and complete the corresponding assignment. The purpose of that assignment is to raise your level of awareness of decisions. Having observed and listed decisions you and others face, you may be surprised at just how prevalent decisions are in your life, and how you make many decisions without much conscious thought ("on autopilot" so-to-speak).

One of the primary purposes of this blog is to explore how to make better decisions. Before taking up that objective, let us ask and answer a basic question and that is, "what is a decision?" For our purposes, a decision is a choice among two or more alternative courses of action that can be taken. This definition encompasses two important ideas. First, decisions involve choice; no choice means no decision. Second, decisions lead to actions.

Perhaps the most common type of decision involves exactly two alternatives. These alternatives might be labeled "yes or no," "go or no go," "stay or go," or "to be or not to be." On the other end of the spectrum are decisions involving a very large number of alternatives. Consider the problem of deciding how to assign 10 workers to 10 tasks. One can assign the first worker to any of the 10 tasks, the second worker to any of the remaining 9 tasks, the third worker to the any of the remaining 8 tasks, etc. The total number of possible ways to decide is 10 x 9 x 8 x ... x 1 = 3,628,800.

Your assignment for this week is to answer the following two questions for each decision you listed in your previous assignment.
1. How many alternatives are possible for this decision?
2. What actions would you take to implement each decision alternative?
I encourage you to write down your responses, but whether or not you choose to do so is your decision.