If you want to improve your skill at making higher-quality decisions, your best bet is to focus on generating more options. Research for over three decades confirms that generating more viable options when making a decision substantially increases the likelihood of finding a great one.
The best decision-makers don’t settle for a small set or slate of solutions, approaches, or strategies. They work hard to expand that list to give them the best chance of landing on a great choice.
Limiting the selection of decision options is akin to buying clothes only from one rack. Until we take the opportunity to learn about what else is out there, we make selections that are more average than they should be.
There are a host of ways of finding more alternatives to the issues requiring a great decision. In addition to exploring the possible options with the team, leaders can also look to other institutions and learn what choices they have made to address a problem or opportunity. Add these to the list.
Subject-matter experts are another source of options, as consultants and in-house experts know how others have approached the issue and what else might work to address the problem. Asking experts to engage in out-of-the-box thinking with the primary goal of identifying plausible alternatives will often produce a breakthrough and put several new options on the table.
The idea is to get as many viable options to consider as possible before evaluating each on its merits and narrowing the choice. Once a full range of possibilities exists, decision-makers can systematically evaluate them for probable outcomes, risks, and benefits.
By having more choices to consider, decision-makers often find a great option among them and can quickly build the conviction needed to decide. While option expansion alone won’t make a leader a great decision-maker, it will increase decision quality in a way no other application can replicate. More choices give decision-makers stronger voices.
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