Smart Choices

Do you spend too much time on less important issues?

What have I learned?

What should I work on next?

Getting Started: Ten Diagnostic Questions

1. What’s my decision problem? What, broadly, do I have to decide? What specific decisions do I have to make as a part of the broad decision?

2. What are my fundamental objectives? Have I asked ‘‘Why’’ enough times to get to my bedrock wants and needs?

3. What are my alternatives? Can I think of more good ones?

4. What are the consequences of each alternative in terms of the achievement of each of my objectives? Can any alternatives be safely eliminated?

5. What are the tradeoffs among my more important objectives? Where do conflicting objectives concern me the most?

6. Do any uncertainties pose serious problems? If so, which ones? How do they impact consequences?

7. How much risk am I willing to take? How good and how bad are the various possible consequences? What are ways of reducing my risk?

8. Have I thought ahead, planning out into the future? Can I reduce my uncertainties by gathering information? What are the potential gains and the costs in time, money, and effort?

9. Is the decision obvious or pretty clear at this point? What reservations do I have about deciding now? In what ways could the decision be improved by a modest amount of added time and effort?

10. What should I be working on? If the decision isn’t obvious, what do the critical issues appear to be? What facts and opinions would make my job easier?

What can you do about it?

A young priest asked his bishop, ‘‘May I smoke while praying?’’ The answer was an emphatic ‘‘No!’’ Later, encountering an older priest puffing on a cigarette while praying, the younger priest scolded, ‘‘You shouldn’t be smoking while praying! I asked the bishop, and he said I couldn’t.’’

‘‘That’s strange,’’ the older priest replied. ‘‘I asked the bishop if I could pray while I’m smoking, and he told me that it was okay to pray at any time.’’

Identify ways to reduce critical uncertainties

• What are the key uncertainties?

• What are the possible outcomes of these uncertainties?

• What are the chances of occurrence of each possible outcome?

• What are the consequences of each outcome?

To make sense of uncertainty, you need to find a way to simplify it—to isolate its elements and evaluate them one by one

Uncertainty adds a new layer of complexity to decision making.