Decision Making决策制定
Leslie is a technical manager at an industrial-quality tool manufacturing company. The products that she and her engineers develop are manufactured internally. Leslie knows the manufacturing department is overburdened and frequently delivers its products late, resulting in delayed shipments to customers. She's noticed that her competition is developing products faster by outsourcing the manufacturing process. In light of this, she's afraid that her company will lose new business. Leslie's boss has asked her to investigate
outsourcing options and decide how they should proceed. She thinks the answer is clear— manufacturing the products externally would significantly save time and money. Leslie senses that her boss is in favor of this option as well. She is inclined to personally gather the information that supports outsourcing and submit a proposal to her boss immediately.
What would you do?你会怎么做？
What may seem like a clear answer to Leslie may not be the best approach to arriving at the best business decision. In order for Leslie to make the best decision, she needs to assemble a group that will first concentrate on understanding why their current process is costly and inefficient and then will explore possible alternatives for improving the process.
The group should consist of engineers as well as people outside her department; for example, someone from manufacturing and possibly sales. Including people with diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise will help her make a more informed decision. Once the team identifies the underlying reasons for the issue they are facing, they should then generate and evaluate a number of alternatives for resolving the issue. Although Leslie's inclination is to solve the problem a certain way, she should look for information and evaluate options that support alternative solutions. By involving others and evaluating a
wide range of options, Leslie will increase her chances of making a successful decision.
In this topic, you'll learn how to manage the decision-making process to improve your ability to make effective business decisions.
Sometimes the obvious solution is not the best one for the organization. How can you be sure that your business decision is the right one?
Topic Objectives主题目标
This topic helps you to:
• Create a context for making successful and ethical business decisions
• Identify common obstacles that stand in the way of effective decision making
• Assess the underlying issues related to the decision
• Generate and evaluate multiple alternatives
• Make a final decision
• Communicate and implement the decision
What is decision making?什么是决策？
As a manager, you are faced with decisions every day. Some decisions are straightforward, such as deciding which team member to assign to a specific project. Others are more complex, such as selecting a new vendor or deciding to discontinue a product due to weak sales.
Many managers tend to view decision making as an event—a choice to be made at a single point in time, usually by an individual or a small group. In reality, however, significant decisions are seldom made in the moment by one manager or in one meeting. Important decisions, such as changing the strategic direction of a group or hiring a new manager, typically require time and input from many individuals and sources of information throughout an organization. 
Hence, decision making can more accurately be viewed as a process.
Managers who recognize decision making as a process increase their likelihood of making more effective decisions. Why? Because by taking time they are able to identify and assess the issues associated with making the decision. By involving others, they weigh different perspectives and deepen the discussion. Perhaps most important, taking a process-driven approach is more likely
to lead to broader acceptance of the decision—and to more effective implementation.
Leadership Insight: Intuition领导洞察力：直觉
In the late 1940s, a number of smokejumpers died in a forest fire in Mann Gulch, Montana.
It's a story, a tragedy, that teaches us a lot about the power of intuition and also some of the dangers when we use intuition to make decisions.
Wag Dodge was the foreman of that crew. They jumped from an airplane to fight a forest fire in Mann Gulch back in the late 1940s, and they thought it was a routine fire at first.
Within an hour, however, Dodge realized, as the most experienced member of the crew, that they were facing what's called a "blow-up," that this fire would chase them at a rapid speed, and they needed to try to escape. And so they all began running for the ridge at his direction.
Soon he realized that they couldn't make it to the ridge, or at least many of them wouldn't be able to outrun the fire. Not knowing what to do, he quickly came up with, invented a strategy on the spot, something never done before in the history of fighting forest fires. He lit a match and he threw it into some grass in an area that wasn't wooded at all and that grass area burned very quickly and he ended up with a burned out area of dirt — and he lay in it. And he called all his team members to lay in the dirt as well. They all looked at him
like he was a madman, with the fire chasing them. They said, "How could you stop and do that?" And they ran for the ridge and all but two of them died being chased down by this blaze.
Wag Dodge got up after the fire had just gone right over him and dusted himself off and he was perfectly healthy. He had deprived the blaze of any fuel by burning out that area of grass, and thus he'd survived. He'd used intuition, his gut instinct.
What is intuition?什么是直觉？ It's the ability to recognize patterns based on past experience. To see a situation, and then be able to relate it to other things you've done in the past. And then either be able to come up with the right strategy or pluck a strategy from something that's worked in the past in your own experience.
That's what he did: He related this to a variety of conditions and experiences that he had been through. And he invented something on the spot. And that's the power of intuition, our ability to do that. But there is a danger here as well. Wag Dodge didn't know his crew very well. He hadn't built a lot of trust with them. And he didn't have a lot of time to communicate the rationale behind his decision.
And that's one of the risks when we make intuitive decisions, people don't understand our thought process. It's not like when we go through a big formal analysis where they can follow the steps. With intuition, it's this lightning bolt. They don't understand: How did you come to that conclusion? And therefore they don't buy into it and they don't follow our leadership. And therefore even though it was a brilliant strategy, a brilliant choice, no one else took it, and many of them died.
We think of them as “lightning bolts,” but most intuitive decisions really come from deep experience.
Key Idea: Decision making as a group process
关键理念：作为一个集体过程的决策
Managers who recognize decision making as a group process that unfolds over time increase their likelihood of making more effective decisions. Why? Because by devoting time to the process, they are able to identify and assess the issues associated with making the decision.
By involving others, they weigh different perspectives and deepen the discussion.
Perhaps most important, taking a process-driven approach is more likely to lead to broader acceptance of the decision—and to more effective implementation.
The decision-making process can be broken into three distinct phases:
决策过程可分为三个不同的阶段：
 Phase 1: Establishing 建立a context for success is the point at which you set the parameters for the decision making process. You'll decide who should be involved and how you'll operate as a group.
• Phase 2:Assessing评估 the situation and choosing a course of action is when you determine the root cause of the issue you are trying to resolve and discuss possible solutions.By the end of this phase, your group should reach a decision.
• Phase 3: Communicating and implementing 沟通与实施the decision is the final stage, during which you notify stakeholders of your group's decision and take steps to put it into action.
Keep in mind that this topic addresses business decisions that are important and farreaching.
It assumes that such decisions cannot be made effectively by one individual
operating in a vacuum. However, many of the general principles conveyed in this topic can be applied to smaller decisions that, for whatever reasons, need to be made without group input.
Taking a process-driven approach to decision-making has advantages. Understanding that decision making is a process that unfolds over time can lead to broader acceptance of the decision—and to more effective implementation.
Phase 1: Establish a context for success
阶段1：建立成功的环境
In this phase, you create the framework for making an effective decision. This phase includes:
• Setting the stage搭建舞台: First, you select participants and decide where to hold your meetings. Next, you determine the approach you will take to reach a decision—will you aim for consensus or vote by majority? During the meetings, especially the earliest ones, you set the tone for the group by encouraging open dialogue and promoting healthy debate.
• Recognizing obstacles认识障碍: Certain individual biases and group dynamics can be obstacles in the decision-making process. By predicting and recognizing these tendencies, you can take steps to avoid them.
Phase 2: Assess the situation and choose a course of action
阶段2：评估情况并选择行动方案
Once you have established a context for your meetings, you are ready to manage the decisionmaking process. This phase includes:
• Framing the issue提出问题: A successful decision depends on a clear understanding of the issue at hand and its root cause(s).
• Generating alternatives生成备选方案: After you've clarified the issue, you brainstorm and generate creative conflict to develop alternative courses of action and ways of proceeding.
• Evaluating alternatives评估备选方案: Next, you assess the feasibility, risk, and ethical implications of each possible choice.
• Making a decision做决定: Finally, you choose an alternative.
Phase 3: Communicate and implement the decision
第3阶段：沟通和执行决策
Effective executives know that decision making has its own systemic process
and its own clearly defined elements.
–Peter Drucker
After you and your team make a decision, the challenge is to put it into action. This phase includes:
• Communicating the decision传达决策: You decide who should be notified of your decision and communicate it effectively.
• Implementing the decision执行决策: You determine what tasks will be required to put the decision into action, assign resources, and establish deadlines.
The right context正确的背景
Creating the right context for the decision-making process is critical to making successful choices.
This consists of:
• Selecting the right people to participate in the process
• Identifying a setting, or physical location, that will encourage creative thinking
• Choosing an approach for making the actual decision
• Creating a climate that promotes healthy debate and allows for diverse viewpoints 
Participants参与者
A group of people with diverse perspectives is more likely to generate a variety of thoughtful ideas than a group of individuals with the same background. When you choose people for your group, look for individuals who are likely to express differing points of view and who represent different interests. Your group should include:
• Key stakeholders主要利益相关者: These are the people most directly affected by the decision or who have a stake in the decision. You need their buy-in to put the decision into effect. Since they are more likely to support a decision they helped make, include them early in the process to ensure an efficient implementation.
• Experts专家: Experts can educate the group and provide information about the feasibility of various options. Keep in mind that you may need more than one area of expertise represented in your group.
• Opponents反对者: If you are aware of individuals who may oppose the decision and block its implementation, invite them to one or more of your meetings. Involving potential opponents early on can eliminate obstacles down the road.
Ideally, your group should be small in size, preferably between five and seven members.
Depending on the complexity of the decision at hand, you may want to involve as many as ten or as few as two people in the decision-making process.
Leadership Insight: Don't go it alone I'd like to talk to you today about decision making, and how the process of decision making can really help you get to a great conclusion and engage the team that is going to be impacted.
There are many times in my career that I have needed to address tough challenges. One of the challenges I had as a newly appointed leader of an organization was to cut a significant amount of expense in the organization without impacting our customers — our most important asset.
I looked at the challenge knowing that it was one that I could not solve myself, and I involved my team. I brought my team leaders in and asked them who on their teams knew the business the best and really could provide input on changes without putting themselves in the situation of how they would be impacted.
So as we looked at the challenge, we identified different alternatives. What are the things that we could do to meet the goal in different examples? We took that goal and came up with three major alternatives.
With those alternatives, it was important to identify what the risk was and what the reward was, and then we had to look at each plan and determine how to mitigate those risks and still meet our goal.
The most important part of this process was to communicate not only to the team on the task force, but to the people who would be impacted: "How can we solve this problem and involve our customers and our employees?"
So we phased the project in three major phases and communicated how we were going to roll out the solution in those phases. At each phase gate, we communicated how successful we were and what changes we needed to make to the plan in order for it to be most successful.
The key to success in this project was that our team was engaged throughout the process, whether they were on the taskforce or whether they were impacted, because we were communicating. The bottom line is we measure success by our customer satisfaction and we absolutely hit the ball out of the park on that.
You get buy-in and better decisions when you involve your team and your customers in solving challenges.
Setting设置
To help your group generate creative solutions to problems and evaluate them critically, choose diverse settings for your meetings. Such settings might include conference rooms that you don't typically work in, off-site locations, or a familiar location with the furniture rearranged to facilitate face-to-face discussion. When people are removed from traditional settings, such as a boardroom or a supervisor's office, they tend to speak more freely because they feel less constrained by office hierarchies.
Key Idea: Approach关键理念：方法
Once you've selected the participants and chosen a setting for your meetings, the next step is to determine what decision-making approach you will take. The group you assemble needs to understand up front the process it will follow and how the final decision will be made. The spectrum of group decision-making approaches includes four general types:
• Consensus is a type of approach共识是一种方法 in which all team members meet together to discuss the proposal openly and strive to reach agreement, with everyone accepting the final decision.
• Majority is a type of approach多数是一种方法 in which the group votes and the majority rules. The team leader may elect to break a tie, if necessary.
• Qualified consensus is an approach有条件的共识是一种方法by which the team tries to reach a collective agreement, but if it is unable to do so, the team agrees that the team leader makes the decision.
• Directive leadership is an approach指导性领导是一种方法 often best-suited to particular situations. Because of the nature of the decision or its time frame, in a directed leadershipapproach, the leader makes the decision and then informs the group of the decision that was made. A crisis or sudden unexpected emergency is a classic example of when this approach might be necessary.
These approaches, with the exception of directive leadership, vary in the extent that they empower the participants and create a sense of responsibility within the group. Be aware, however, that regardless of approach, when a group is trying to find areas of agreement, it may avoid exploring minority viewpoints. Your job is to encourage exploration of all ideas, regardless of the approach you will take to make the decision.
Team empowerment varies according to the decision-making approach your team adopts. Learn the four main approaches and how to facilitate them.
Climate While the participants, setting, and approach change depending on the decision at hand, you need to create a consistent climate, or tone, for all your meetings. The climate you establish strongly influences how members of your team interact with one another.
Consider the following scenario:考虑以下场景：
A manager at a software development company has been charged with assigning limited resources to the firm's current projects. The manager calls a meeting with all of her project leaders to discuss how the resources will be allocated. The discussion quickly turns into an argument. Each project leader advocates for his or her project. The debate gets heated as the conversation goes around in circles, and each project leader disparages the others' efforts. Ultimately, the manager decides to assign the limited resources to three projects.
The project leaders leave the meeting exhausted and frustrated.
项目负责人让会议变得筋疲力尽和沮丧。
What went wrong in this example? The manager did not manage the decision-making process effectively and the meeting deteriorated into an advocacy mode. The project leaders viewed the meeting as a competition. They advocated for their positions without considering the needs of other departments or the company as a whole. In advocacy situations, people tend to offer only the information that supports their case and omit details that might weaken it. As a result, the discussion can quickly deteriorate into personal attacks, giving rise to negative emotions.
In a perfect world, decisions would be made using an inquiry approach—an open process in which individuals ask probing questions, explore different points of view, and identify a wide range of options with the goal of reaching a decision that the group creates and owns collectively. In an inquiry mode, individuals set aside their personal opinions or preferences in order to arrive at a decision that is best for the group or organization.
Individual biases个人偏见
Decision making is made difficult by common, often unconscious, obstacles that frequently inhibit a decision maker's ability to determine the optimal choice. Such obstacles include individual biases and unproductive group dynamics. While it is almost impossible to eliminate these obstacles, recognizing them in yourself and in the members of your group will help you make more objective decisions.
Here are some common examples of biases—distortions or preconceived notions—that people encounter when making decisions.
• Bias toward the familiar and toward past successes倾向于熟悉的和过去的成功。. We tend to base our decisions on events and information that are familiar to us. For example, a manager remembers her launch of a new product in Spain three years ago; it was her first big marketing success. She also vaguely remembers that a similar launch strategy was unsuccessful in a number of other countries. Because her memories of the successful Spanish launch are so vivid, she emphasizes this experience and discounts the evidence of unsuccessful launches elsewhere. When she tries to extend a new brand into Portugal, her efforts fail. While the strategy used for the Spanish launch may have been a good starting point, her reliance on a prior success led to incorrect assumptions about the Portuguese market.
• Bias toward accepting assumptions at face value倾向于接受表面价值的假设。. We are generally overconfident in our assumptions and therefore generate too few alternatives. For example, a manager purchases a software package offered by the largest vendor without collecting competitive bids. He assumes that because the package works for other users in the same industry, it will work for him. He fails to investigate other software packages that might better meet his needs.
• Bias toward the status quo对现状的偏见. We have a tendency to resist major deviations from the status quo.For example, people at a company may be familiar with how to use a particular computer program and resist using an alternative, even though their program is outdated. Their resistance may be driven more by their reluctance to learn something new than by the quality of the system itself.
• Bias toward confirming our opinion倾向于证实我们的观点. Once we form an opinion, we typically seek out information that supports our viewpoint and ignore facts that may challenge it. For example, a manager searches the Internet to find data supporting her preference for focus groups in market research, but does not stop to read information that supports other approaches. 
The most proactive way of preventing these biases from adversely impacting your decisionmaking ability is to recognize them.
Group dynamics群体动力学
We tend to subconsciously decide what to do before figuring out why we want
to do it.
–John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa
One of the advantages to treating decision making as a group process is that individual biases can be counteracted by the presence of multiple voices and perspectives.
But while groups offer different viewpoints, they need guidance to be productive. Your challenge is to manage the group decision-making process. Otherwise, you may find yourself confronted with one of the following extremes.
• Excessive group harmony过度群体和谐: Excessive group harmony occurs when individuals want to be accepted in a group or they lack interest in the process.
◦ "Groupthink."集体思考。This results when participants' desire for agreement overrides their motivation to evaluate alternative options. In this situation, people tend to withhold their opinions, especially if their views differ from those of the group leader. They make little effort to obtain new information from experts, and they selectively filter information to support their initial preferences. They may spend a lot of time inquiring about what others in the group want so that the solution they reach will make everyone happy.
◦ Lack of interest. 缺乏兴趣。Similar results can occur when participants lack interest in the process or do not feel empowered. If the group feels that the leader has already made the decision, they may go along with it, refuse to participate entirely, or accept the first reasonable alternative that is proposed in an effort to end the process.
• Excessive individualism:过度个人主义 Excessive individualism is at the opposite end of the spectrum from excessive group harmony. In this situation, individuals engage in aggressive advocacy, placing stakes in the ground, relentlessly arguing their positions. They disregard the opinions of other group members and fail to consider the common good.
Extreme behaviors can lengthen the decision-making process and interfere with making good decisions. Your job as a manager is to keep your decision-making group on track so they do not head toward either of these extremes.
Symptoms and root causes症状和根源
Once you've created the proper context and recognized common obstacles that can stand in the way of decision making, you're ready to frame the issue for your decision-making team. This is the point where many managers make the mistake of seeking out solutions before they understand
the nature of the problem.
Consider the following example:请考虑以下示例
New Age Electronics, a toy manufacturer, has a customer support phone line to answer customer questions about assembling its products. The volume of phone calls has increased so much that the phone support associates cannot keep up with the demand.
Customers have complained of waiting half an hour to get help. The manager responsible for the support line puts together a team to help him decide how to address the issue. He begins the first meeting by saying: "We have a serious problem with our customer support line. Customers are waiting too long for service. We need to fix it."
By framing the issue as a problem with the phone line response time, the team will most likely focus on ways to reduce the response time—for example, adding more phone lines, adding more phone representatives, or increasing the hours of service. These solutions will address the symptoms of the problem—overloaded phone lines—but may not address the root of the problem.
To get to the root of the problem, the team should be thinking about why customer calls have increased dramatically. Is one product in particular responsible for an inordinate number of calls? Is there a flaw in the design of a product, or in the assembly instructions?
Are the phone support associates poorly trained? Suppose the manager had framed the issue by saying: "We have a serious problem with our customer support line. The volume of calls has increased, customers are waiting too long for service, and we need to find out why. Then we need to decide what to do about it." The focus of the team would be quite different.
Perform root cause analysis 表现根本原因分析
To ensure that you get to the core of a problem, perform a root cause analysis. This is a process in which you repeatedly make a statement of fact and ask the question: "Why?"
For example, the general manager of a pizza parlor noticed that he was losing sales because his home deliveries were slower than his competitor's. His friend suggests that they invest in a fleet of delivery vehicles to solve this problem. Instead of jumping to this conclusion, the manager asks: "Our pizza deliveries are slow. Why? Our delivery associates drive old cars that are in poor condition. Why? They can't afford repairs or newer cars. Why? They don't have the money. Why? Their pay is too low." Through this process, he realizes that the older, poorly maintained vehicles were a symptom of lower wages than those competitors paid.
Root-cause analysis can work well for an individual, a small group, or in brainstorming sessions.
A tool that can help you perform such an analysis is called a fishbone diagram. As the following illustration demonstrates, every fishbone diagram will look a little different depending on the particular problem being solved.
When confronted with a problem, think about how to frame the issue for your team. Be careful not to assume from the outset that you know what the problem is. Challenge yourself and your team to get at the core of the issue by framing the problem in a variety of different ways and assessing whether the available information supports your theories. Throughout the entire process, ask "why?" and other open-ended questions that encourage exploration rather than closed questions based on predefined assumptions about the problem.
Identify your decision-making objectives确定你的决策目标
If you have a 'yes man' working for you, one of you is redundant.
–Barry Rand
Once you have successfully framed the issue, the next step is to identify your objectives in determining a course of action. Ask your team questions like "What do you want the decision we make to accomplish?" and "What would you like to see happen as a result of the decision we reach?" Invite your group to describe their vision of the outcome of the decision as vividly and specifically as possible.
For example, if you were the manager at New Age Electronics, you and your team might come up with the following objectives:
• Reduce the average waiting time per customer to two minutes
将每位客户的平均等待时间减少到两分钟
• Reduce call volume by 40%
通话量减少40%
• Reduce average call duration to three minutes
将平均通话时间缩短到3分钟
During the objective-setting process, you may encounter significant differences in opinion from one person to another. This is a healthy part of the dialogue and should be encouraged. However, if you find your list of objectives spiraling out of control, you may want to revisit your issue. You may find that you have more than one issue to resolve.
Once you have created a list of objectives, it's time to think about the strategy you are going to use to achieve them.
Create new ideas创造新思想
In order to make an informed decision, you need choices. Generating alternatives creates those choices. After weighing the merits of a variety of options, you are in a better position to make the best decision for the situation.
Consider the following scenario:
A marketing manager at a consumer products company calls a meeting with his team to discuss how to increase laundry detergent sales in Latin America. The meeting begins with silence as everyone waits for someone else to speak. The marketing manager breaks the silence by suggesting they consider changing the current packaging. Following this cue, someone chimes in with supporting statistics about packaging and consumer trends.
Another person then describes the packaging of a product that has done well in Latin America. The meeting concludes with the assignment of a task force to research new packaging options.
This meeting seemed to proceed smoothly. What then went wrong? In this scenario, the manager did not successfully engage the team in generating alternatives. He didn't promote healthy debate and constructive conflict. Instead, excessive group harmony resulted in an action step based on the first idea that emerged—to investigate packaging options. There was little creativity or innovative thinking. As a result, no new ideas surfaced and the group settled on the first alternative suggested, which had been the manager's idea!
Brainstorming头脑风暴
Brainstorming is an effective way to generate different ideas and courses of action.
How do you brainstorm? Start with a blank flipchart page. At the start of the meeting ask your team members to suggest any ideas that come into their heads, or ask individuals to take a few minutes to develop their own lists of ideas to share publicly. Either way, record the ideas but don't discuss their merits at this point. Be especially careful not to allow criticism in the early stages.
Instead, focus on identifying as many alternatives as possible. You can evaluate the ideas after you have a list of possibilities.
Key Idea: Encourage productive dialogue
关键理念：鼓励富有成效的对话
Energize your team so that they will work hard to identify creative solutions. Creative conflict is essential to the generation of alternatives, but it should never be personal or divisive. Promote team participation during your brainstorming sessions by employing the four following tactics:
• Encourage open, candid dialogue鼓励公开、坦诚的对话 by making it clear at the outset that the final outcome is not predetermined and everyone's input will be valued.
• Suggest that people try to think outside of their individual or departmental roles. 建议人们尝试在个人或部门角色之外思考。They should focus on what is best for the group using all of the available information.
• Provide closure at the end of every meeting每次会议结束时做总结 by assigning tasks and deadlines so people are accountable for moving the process forward.
• Recognize and thank people who share their ideas and viewpointsin a positive manner承认并感谢以积极的方式分享自己观点和观点的人—especially those who are willing to take the risk to challenge you.
Creative collaboration will fail if team members don't offer their ideas freely. How can you motivate your team to generate a number of creative solutions?
Promote fair process Throughout the decision-making process, it is essential that your participants feel the process is fair. Specifically, they must believe that their ideas were acknowledged and considered, even if their suggestions were not ultimately adopted. This sense of fairness is critical for ensuring
cooperationand buy-in when it comes time to implement the decision.
Alternatives provide the choices you will need to make an informed decision. When you encourage team participation, facilitate creative conflict, and listen to ideas, you are likely to generate a full slate of options that will serve you well as you enter the next stage: evaluating alternatives.
Variables to consider考虑变量
Once you have identified the alternatives you'll consider, the next step is to evaluate those alternatives and make a final decision.
You assess the alternatives by seeing how well each one meets the objectives you established at the outset of the process. Here are some variables managers weigh when evaluating an alternative:
• Costs:成本How much will the alternative cost? Will it result in a cost savings now or over the long-term? Are there any hidden costs? Are there likely to be additional costs down the road? Does this alternative meet budget constraints?
• Benefits效益: What kind of profits will we realize if we implement this alternative? Will it increase the quality of our product? Will customer satisfaction increase?
• Intangibles无形资产: Will our reputation improve if we implement this alternative? Will our customers and/or our employees be more loyal?
• Time时间: How long will it take to implement this alternative? Could there be delays? If so, what impact will this have on any schedules?
• Feasibility可行性: Can this alternative be implemented realistically? Are there any obstacles that must be overcome? If this alternative is implemented, what resistance might be encountered inside or outside the organization?
• Resources资源: How many people are needed to implement this alternative? Are they available? What other projects will suffer if individuals focus on this option?
• Risks风险: What are the risks associated with this alternative? Could this option result in loss of profits or competitive advantage? Will competitors respond? If so, how?
• Ethics伦理: Is this alternative legal? Is it in the best interests of the customers, the employees, and the community where we operate? Would I feel comfortable if other people knew about this alternative?
Key Idea: Evaluation techniques关键理念：评估技术
As you and your team assess each alternative, a clear choice may emerge. If further evaluation is necessary, consider using one or more of the following analytical techniques to help you reach a decision:
• A prioritization matrix provides a way for you to compare how well each alternative achieves your objectives.优先级矩阵为您提供了一种方法来比较每个备选方案在多大程度上实现了您的目标 It uses weighted scores to rank each alternative; the alternative with the highest score is most likely your best choice.
• A trade-off method enables you to identify the degree of variation between alternatives. With this approach, you identify all of the attributes of each alternative and compare them to each other in a table. To use this technique effectively, you would need to have specific data for each alternative.
• Decision trees provide a visual representation of the alternatives and their strengths and weaknesses.权衡方法使您能够确定备选方案之间的差异程度。They work particularly well for investment decisions such as whether or not to increase manufacturing capacity.
The task of evaluating alternatives is easier when you use a systematic approach. Adapt the guidelines and techniques described above to your situation, always keeping in mind the original objectives you have set out to achieve.
Once your team has generated alternatives, you'll have decide how to choose the solution. Which would be the best systematic approach to help you reach your decision—the prioritization matrix, the trade-off technique, or the decision tree?
Prioritization matrix优先级矩阵
To create a prioritization matrix, start by listing your objectives in making the decision and assigning them a value (highest = best). Then, make each of these objectives, along with its corresponding value, a column header for your matrix. 
Make each of your alternatives a row. Next, for each alternative, rate the objectives on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 = best); then, multiply your ratings by the priority values. Add all the scores for each alternative to determine which has the higher number. This is your best decision, based on your priorities.
Trade-offs权衡
Once you lay out the alternatives with their associated information, consider how important these factors are to your group and/or the company, and identify the compromises that you are willing to make.
For example, would a $90,000 increase in profits be worth the time of five extra people? Be sure to think about the trade-offs in light of the priority you assign to each objective.
Decision trees决策树
When you come to a fork in the road,
take it.
–Yogi Berra
Consider a situation in which you project an increased demand for your product. You and your team need to decide whether to continue manufacturing a component internally or whether to outsource the work. An oversimplified decision tree might present your alternatives as follows:
Based on this simplified decision tree, the best course of action would be to pursue Alternative B (of the two options, Alternative B offers the highest risk-adjusted net present value).
Decision trees are typically much more robust than the above illustration in that they evaluate more options and include multiple decision points. In general, the more alternatives you consider, and the more detailed tree you can create, the more likely you are to discover a solution that meets your needs. A decision tree, however, will not automatically indicate the best course of action—you will still need to assess the information in the decision tree to make your choice.
Leadership Insight: Faulty analogies领导力洞察力：错误的类比

All of us reason by analogy when we make decisions. Unfortunately, when we reason by analogy, we often make mistakes as well. There is certain faulty logic that takes place when we reason by analogy in making choices.
And the story of Enron and its demise actually helps us understand how reasoning by analogy can go off the rails. During 2001 I spent a great deal of time actually researching Enron, interviewing many of its people and, thankfully, never publishing the case about Enron — which many people did, of course, thinking that they were a great success at the time. And of course they failed later that year.
The story at Enron is that Jeff Skilling invented the idea of a gas bank — the idea of creating markets where gas contracts could be traded, bought, and sold. In an environment where previously it was totally regulated, no such contracts in markets existed. It was actually a very brilliant idea that created both shareholder and social value.
And then what happened is, Enron decided, "Can we find other markets that look like natural gas where we can apply this same business model?" And they began to identify what are the characteristics of natural gas that made it amenable to this revolutionary market-based model of trading.
And ultimately they began to call this "the template," this list of characteristics of natural gas, and they would look for other industries where they could apply the template. So, they were reasoning by analogy: What is analogous to natural gas?
Well, early on they went from gas to electric power. They are pretty closely related, although there are some differences. And then they went to coal and pulp and paper.
Eventually they got to broadband and weather derivatives, things that were very different than natural gas.
And of course ultimately they actually wrote that template down on piece of paper: These are the characteristics we are looking for in other businesses. And they unleashed all these talented people to go look for industries that had these characteristics. So they were looking for analogies.
The problem, though, as scholars Richard Neustadt and Ernest May have said, is that when we reason by analogy, we focus on all the similarities, and we often ignore the differences between related situations. So they were looking for things that looked like natural gas, but they often weren't discussing, "How is broadband different than natural gas?"
And the differences often is where the problems are, where the challenges are. And in fact Enron got themselves into a lot of hot water because they began to stray into businesses they didn't know as well. And I think to some extent, then, their sort of unethical or illegal behavior became a result of the fact that they gotten into trouble in businesses and didn't want to disclose the fact that they were struggling.
So, reasoning by analogy is very natural. It's how we make decisions every day, but we have to be aware that we don't only focus on the similarities between two seemingly analogous situations. We need to make sure we pay attention to the differences as well.
Previous experience will only take you so far in your next decision. Pay attention to what's different.
Qualitative considerations定性考虑
In a perfect world, you would have all of the information you need and an unlimited amount of time to make a decision. Your choices would be clear and company politics would not influence your decision. Often, however, you need to make complex decisions quickly, with only partial information. The techniques for evaluating the alternatives outlined in the previous section should help you compare the pros and cons of each choice—but they don't eliminate subjective, qualitative considerations.
Move toward closure走向封闭
If your group is having difficulty reaching a final decision, consider using the following methods to help your team move toward resolution:
• Point-counterpoint: 点-对位Divide your team into two groups of equal size—Group A and Group B. Wherever possible, spread supporters of opposing ideas between the groups. Ask Group A to develop a proposal for a solution that includes their recommendations and key assumptions, and then present their proposal to Group B. Then ask Group B to identify one or more alternative plans of action, and then present those alternative plans of action to Group A. Have both groups debate the different proposals until they all agree on a set of recommendations. For example, a finance department has been engaged in a heated debate over which accounting firm to use to audit the books this year. One group favors a big name brand, while the other favors a smaller, yet well-respected firm. Using the point-counterpoint technique, the decision-making team considers each firm and reaches a conclusion.
• Intellectual watchdog:智力观察Similar to the point-counterpoint technique, the intellectual watchdog technique begins by dividing the team into two groups of equal size. Group A develops a proposal for a solution that includes their recommendations and key assumptions, and presents their proposal to Group B. Instead of having Group B generate an alternative plan of action, ask Group B to critique the proposal and present its analysis to Group A. Ask Group A to revise the proposal based on Group B's feedback and present it again. The two groups continue to critique and revise the proposal until they agree on a set
of recommendations. For example, a manufacturer of office furniture needs to improve the quality of its products. The first group assumes that the problem with quality is due to outdated manufacturing equipment, and recommends investment in better equipment. The second group questions this assumption, critiques the proposal, and presents its analysis to the first group. The first group revises its proposal, and the two groups work together in the revision-critique-revision cycle until they arrive at a solution that both groups feel will improve their products' quality. 
Other ways to resolve disagreements and move toward closure include:
解决分歧和走向终结的其他方法包括
• Revisiting and retesting assumptions
• Going back to the original decision-making objectives and ensuring that they remain appropriate
• Setting a deadline in advance For example, "By next Tuesday we will make our decision, no matter how much uncertainty remains."
• Agreeing up front that if disagreements are unresolved, the choice will be made by qualified consensus
Key Idea: End deliberations关键思想：结束审议
Knowing when to end deliberations is difficult. If you make a decision too early, you might not explore enough possibilities. If you sense that your group is rushing to make a decision, consider adjourning a meeting before making a final choice and reconvening at a later time.
Ask each participant to try to find a flaw with the decision to present at the next meeting.
The flip side of deciding too early is deciding too late, which is equally problematic. If you make a decision too late, you may waste valuable time and possibly even miss the opportunity to solve the problem. If your team insists on hearing every viewpoint and resolving every question before reaching a conclusion, the result is the same: your discussions will become a tiring, endless loop. If you find your group is stuck going around in circles, it is your job as a manager to bring the discussion to closure. You may need to simply "force the issue" by establishing a deadline for a decision, using the best information
available at that time.
There is danger in making a decision too early or too late. How can you avoid making this error?
How to communicate如何沟通
Many managers overlook one of the most important aspects of the decision-making process: communicating the decision to everyone involved in and affected by it.
Once a final choice has been made, some group members will have to give up their preferred solution. The fairness of the decision-making process as perceived by the participants and others will determine their willingness to support the final outcome. In communicating the decision and getting buy-in, keep in mind the following principles:
• Consideration and voice:体贴和声音 Participants who are encouraged to question and debate each other's ideas are more likely to believe that the leader listened to their viewpoints and gave them serious consideration, especially if the leader demonstrated attentiveness through his or her actions—for example, by taking notes and paraphrasing what was said to show he or she was actively listening. Even if the participants' viewpoints did not prevail, knowing that they were taken seriously will lend credibility to the process and acceptance of the final
decision.
• Explanation解释: The leader needs to explain the thinking behind the final decision. It's important to be clear about why you and your group made this choice, as opposed to a different one. Explaining the reasons for the decision builds trust in the leader's intentions and confidence that it was made for the benefit of the company as a whole.
• Expectation期望值: Once the decision has been made, everyone affected by the decision needs to understand the new rules of the game. New responsibilities need to be spelled out, as do performance measures and penalties for failure. When people clearly understand expectations, they can focus on what needs to be done.
The people you notify will include everyone who is responsible for implementing the decision as well as anyone who is affected by it. Your list might also include other key stakeholders: members of your unit who were not part of the decision-making group, senior management, department
supervisors, external constituents, and even customers if they will see a change in the way you do business with them.
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