Be clear on what you're deciding about

This resource first appeared in issue #66 on 20 Mar 2021 and has tags Strategy: Making Decisions

Five Questions that Will Help You Strengthen as a Decision-Maker - Art Petty
Tweet: “Every time I make myself write out…” - Cindy Alvarez

As managers, making decisions is a pretty big part of the job - priorities for the team, criteria the next new hire, etc. It pays to spend a little time structuring our thoughts around decisions, whether they are decisions we’re making completely by ourselves, or decisions the team is making together.

Petty has five questions he suggests we use to guide ourselves or to guide discussions when a group is informing a decision:

What problem are we trying to solve?
Are we solving the right problem?
What do we need to know?
What are the assumptions we’re making about our preferred solution?
If our preferred solution isn’t an option, what will we do?

These are good questions - it also prompted me to dig up a reference I filed away a while ago and traced back to Alvarez’s linked tweet above, which takes a different tack but might be a little crisper, depending on the context:

We are doing …..
Because we see the problem of …..
We know it’s a problem because …..
If we don’t fix it, we’ll see …..
We’ll know we’ve fixed it when we get …..