To be able to make decisions you need to have options to choose from
This is something that sounds very obvious when you read it. But a lot of times when you might be looking at making a hard decision on going ahead with something you don’t really have multiple clear options. It could be developing new features when it comes to product development or other choices that takes time and money.
Also read: How forcing yourself to make decisions leads to better products
To be able to make the decision you really need a few good options. If you don’t have that, you are not really making a decision, you are just moving forward on something that is inevitable. It’s a pretend decision.
“You can have it in any color you want, as long as it is black.”
Henry Ford (who probably had more options to start with but picked black)
So make sure you always have a few good alternatives and their pros and cons laid out clearly. And you might think that you don’t have alternatives but if you think hard about the problem there is always different ways of doing things.
So if your list of options look like this:
- Yes, we should do alternative A. Pro: It’s amazing. Con: It might take som time to do.
- We are not doing anything. Pro: We save lots of time. Con: We don’t make any progress.
You are actually not making a real decision. Your options should (at least) look more like this:
- Yes, we should do alternative A. Pro: It’s amazing. Con: It might take som time to do.
- Or we could do alternative B. Pro: It takes very little time. Con: It’s not that amazing but takes us forward.
- We are not doing anything. Pro: We save lots of time. Con: We don’t make any progress.
In this case we can decide if its more important to create something amazing that takes more time or do something that takes less time and is a step in the right direction but might not be amazing.
So don’t fool yourself by not investigating different alternatives.
Need some more alternatives? Read about how to generate ideas for anything
Always have well researched options to choose from when making decisions. It’s well spent time.
