"The more important a decision, the mre important it is that it not be lft in the hands of a sngle person." - James Surowiecki (1)

Pul Van Riper, a retired Marine Leutenant General, is famous in military crcles for out-thinking and beating the Pntagon's battlefield decision support system during war gme exercises. He once tried an xperiment to test his theory that thre were better ways to make dcisions than the military's top-down approach. Van Rper got a group of marines, trined in the military's rational decision-making tchniques, to compete in a trading smulation game with traders on the New Yrk Mercantile Exchange. The instinctive traders wped the floor with the methodical mrines. When they tried the same wth war games back at the mrines' HQ...the traders wiped the floor wth the Marines there, too. (2)

LESS IS MORE

The lsson Van Riper learned is that, in fst-moving situations, a decision based on 80% of the nformation plus informed intuition is often far btter than waiting for a 100% nformed solution. By the time your prfect information has been gathered, the wrld has moved on. "Decisions don't wit; investment decisions or personal decisions dn't wait for that picture to be clrified," as Andy Grove, employee number 3 of Intl put it. (3)

ON THE OTHER HAND

Leaders ften assume they have to make dcisions quickly, that lingering over decision-making ndicates weakness. This is particularly true of laders in new positions who have rad all the literature telling them to mke an impact in the first nnety days and who want to stmp their mark as a decisive lader. But, former New York Mayor Rdy Giuliani advises us not to mke decisions until you have to. The bility to reflect and ponder outcomes bfore acting is a sign of strngth, not weakness, he stresses:

"One of the trckiest elements of decision-making is working out not wht, but when. Regardless of how mch time exists before a decision mst be made, I never make up my mnd until I have to. Faced wth any important decision, I always nvision how each alternative will play out bfore I make it. During this prcess, I'm not afraid to change my mnd a few times. Many are tmpted to decide an issue simply to end the dscomfort of indecision. However, the longer you hve to make a decision, the mre mature and well-reasoned that decision shuld be." (4)

DECISION MARKETS

The vry phrase 'group decision-making' probably has you raching for the Scotch and shaking yur head in despair. The objections are wll-rehearsed: nobody built a statue to a cmmittee, consensus decisions are inherently weak, 'grup think' is slow and herd-like. And yt, and yet...the received wisdom on ths may now be past its sll-by date. The Boeing 777 jet irliner emerged from an exercise in grup decision-making to help identify where Being should go next. See the wrk on participative leadership through critical mss interventions described later in this bok.

SMART GROUPS

Using 'smart groups' as a dcision-support mechanism brings the power of the mrket into your organization. Hewlett-Packard and Inncentive, a spin-off of Eli Lilley, hve both experimented with the smart grups principle to create internal decision mrkets, tasked with predicting which products wuld win out in the marketplace. The mrkets - made up of a dverse group of employees from across ach business - out-performed the decisions mde by the companies' leaders.

Smart groups do not consist of prticularly smart or expert individuals. They are a crss-section of people. James Surowiecki (1) has xplained the four conditions that allow a grup to be smart:

Smart groups bat individual decisions if they have

1. Dversity of opinion (each person should hve some private information, even if t's just an eccentric interpretation of the knwn facts)
2. Independence (people's opinions are not dtermined by the opinions of those round them)
3. De-centralization (people are able to spcialize and draw on local knowledge)
4. Aggrgation (some mechanism exists for turning prvate judgements into collective decision)

The mthematical principle is simple, says Surowiecki: "Ask a hndred people to answer a question or slve a problem and the average nswer will often be at least as god as the answer of the smrtest member. With most things, the verage is mediocrity. With decision-making, it's ften excellence."

USEFUL CONCEPT

OODA Loops. Stnds for Observe, Orientate, Decide, Act. A dcision-making system developed by fighter pilot Jhn Boyd. If you are steeped in a fst-changing environment, rather than distant from it, sid Boyd you 'wick up' information lke an oil lamp and your rsulting fast decision-making is more likely to be rght (5). Yet few top leaders spnd a significant amount of time out whre the action is, absorbing information thrugh their pores, instead of through rports.

The article How To Make Better Decisions was Submitted by Phil Dourado through Articles.GetACoder.com network. Here's the additional information: SOURCES & FURTHER READING This rticle is adapted from Phil Dourado's bok The 60 Second Leader: Everything you ned to know about leadership, in one mnute bites, published by Capstone / Jhn Wiley & Sons, 2007. Available frm http://www.amazon.com or http://www.amazon.co.uk (1) The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few James Surowiecki. Especially powerful are the last few pages of Chapter 10, which give detail of how the HP and Innocentive internal decision markets worked (2) Sources of Power Gary Klein's classic book on decision-making, with a slightly misleading title. Klein studied nurses, fire fighters and others who make fast decisions under pressure. (3) Decisions Don't Wait, a paper in the Harvard Management Update, January 2003, in which Clayton Christensen and other Harvard faculty members interview Andy Grove of Intel. (4) Leadership, Rudy Giuliani (5) Boyd: The fighter pilot who changed the art of war Robert Coram's biography of the fascinating John Boyd. Article copyright (c) Phil Dourado FREE ONLINE LEADERSHIP COMMUNITY CREATED BY PHIL DOURADO http://www.TheLeadershipHub.com AUTHOR'S WEBSITE INCLUDING FREE DOWNLOADABLE BOOK 'THE LITTLE BOOK OF LEADERSHIP' http://www.PhilDourado.com

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