Over the years there have been several ‘decision making frameworks’ that have appeared in leadership training, however, regardless of your preferred decision model there are four things that are essential to know before making important decisions:

1.       Yourself

2.       Your Biases

3.       Your Gut

4.       Your Numbers

Know Yourself

Knowing yourself is about understanding where your beliefs come from and what is the foundation for your values. For most of us, this is a combination of parental influence, education and societal or cultural expectation. However, in many instances you have your own ideals that are suppressed in normal conditions but subconsciously drive your judgement, your expectations of yourself and others, and your biases.

Know Your Biases

Sometimes we are aware of our biases – those attributes we label as ‘preferences’. However, there are also biases that we are not aware of, that subconsciously impact our judgement, our decisions, and our behaviour. Sometimes we can rationalise these biases, but other times they are just what they are – unconscious biases. Only by really getting to know the ‘real you’ can you start to unravel the source of many of the values and beliefs that drive your biases. Other times, we cannot rationalise a bias, but we feel it – mostly in our gut.

Know your Gut

We have all heard the phrase “listen to your gut instinct”. Our gut typically tells us when something doesn’t quite sit well with us cognitively. We cannot pinpoint why, but we ‘sense’ it through emotions that have a physical manifestation in the body. It is not always the gut, you may feel a sensation in other places – it may be a tightness in the jaw, and stiffness in the shoulders, or some others sensation and location. Getting to know what you feel, and why gets you in touch with your emotional signalling system. Your emotions hit your brain and impact your decision making before you feel them in the body, so learning to maintain a body scan and using this to direct a moment of analytical thought will pay dividends in guiding you through a better decision making process.

Know you Numbers

The first three attributes are all personal insight guidance systems. The last one is a technical, business insight system. Having access to data, presented through a well-designed dashboard is critical to guiding and ratifying decisions. Now I stress ‘well designed’ dashboard because 80-90% of corporate dashboards I see are not well designed. They are no more than very pleasant looking portraits of old-style reporting. A well designed dashboard drives the right conversations around every key question that should be asked in your business on a regular basis. They are constantly being updated as strategy changes, and provide highly relevant, and time appropriate support to key decision makers.

Author: Gail La Grouw. Insight Mastery Program Director, and Strategic Performance Consultant for Coded Vision Ltd.