Decision-making is all around us, almost every day. Being able to make better decisions, in almost any circumstances, is a real career-booster. The key to better decision-making is to understand the basics of how you can evaluate a situation, and how decisions themselves are made—particularly in business settings. Another key point of this chapter is that it’s crucial to get all the different bits of context if you hope to comprehend the decisions that your company makes.
The worst kinds of companies are the ones where a small number of leaders, each with a strong personality, make seemingly arbitrary decisions and then inflict those on the rest of the business. Employees don’t understand the thinking behind the decisions, have no input into the decisions, and often feel like they’re just cogs in a machine. It’s not a very rewarding feeling.
The other worst kinds of organizations are the ones who invite everyone to be a part of the decision-making process, but don’t provide any means of resolving conflicting input, conflicting priorities, or any other conflicts. Those companies often get stuck in analysis paralysis, going round and round with what they could do, discussing the pros and cons of every possible choice, and in the end making no choice whatsoever. The best organizations have a decision-making framework in place, so they have guidelines for how they want to make decisions.