Page 62 - The John Adair Handbook of Management and Leadership

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Decision-making and weighing up the options

It is invariably necessary to choose a particular course of action out
of a range of possible ‘options’.What is the best way of ensuring
that your own selection process is a sound one? The basic point here
is that you should never assume that there is only one option open
to you. Consider a number of options (or as many sensible and
pertinent ones as you can muster), many of which will be directly
dictated or affected by the facts that you can establish. Gathering
information also helps the collection of options, even considering
options that you might think are closed to you (eg increasing price,
scrapping low-profit items etc).

Selecting and working through a range of options means considering:
• Which are the possible ones?
• Which of those are feasible?

• How to reduce feasible options to two choices, the ‘either/or’?
• Which one to choose (or a mixture)?
• Whether any action is really necessary at all, now, later?

• Whether or not to keep options open, ie not to choose yet?
You should avoid any compulsion to take action through an option
where no action would be better and you should avoid assuming
that there are only two possibilities, until you have weighed up all
the feasible ones you can in a reasonable time-frame.

Whilst considering the options beware false assumptions: test all for
validity.

52 The John Adair Handbook of Management and Leadership