Decision Making Tips

You have a budget of $5,000. Your family consists of you, your spouse, and your two children, ages 14 and 16. You will have two full weeks available to go. The only restriction is that two of your family members do not like to fly.

If we apply the autocratic method of decision making it makes it easier, but the chances of making everyone happy are greatly reduced.

If you apply the consultation method, assuming you and your spouse make the decision together, at least two of your family members will be happy.

If you apply the group method it increases the chances of making the majority happy, or hopefully everyone.

So what method would you use? Does this require an additional decision to decide what decision making method to use? Ha! Ha!

Depending on how mature your children are I would try to include them in the decision. This may require limiting the amount of choices.

So my suggestion would be to apply two methods.

First I would get with my spouse and we would decide on some different

options. No more than three or four that would meet all of your requirements of money, time and type of travel.

Once that has been decided you would then include your two children in the decision making process.

You would introduce the choices and then begin the discussion of who wants to go where and why.

Everyone would have a chance to give their input. During this process your hope is that at least one or two of the choices are removed. As the facilitator's you and your spouse should guide the discussion down a path of doing just that.

One way would be to highlight the negatives and/or the positives of the different locations. As an example you may say something like, "If we go to this place we will only be able to do this. However, if we go to the other location we can do this and that!"

Or prior to beginning the discussion you could set the ground rules to say that the location with the most positives will be the location we all will agree to go. Then someone keep track of the positives of each location. One or two will rise to the top and the others will fall off.

If your family does not get along well this has some risk involved, and you may want to go to the old fashion autocratic method of I decide, and that's that!

Again, the tip is that you may have to adjust some of the normal rules of decision making to accomplish the best outcome.

In the above case it is applying two methods.

This can be applied to a business setting also where management limits the choices for something and then applies the group method to pick the best of those choices. This will always help in the decision making process.

One thing I have learned over the years is that you may think you know what the outcome will be but after you analyze the facts you see it entirely differently. Point is, go through the process.

Good Luck and May God Bless You!

Thank you for reviewing this article on Decision Making Tips - Return