How to overcome decision dilemmas?

 In a professional environment, except for routine decisions, many of us get into the decision dilemma. The dilemma is whether we can decide in a given situation, despite sufficient data points and assumptions available. Internally fear of making wrong decisions puts us in a dilemma.

In this process, neither we make decisions nor be peaceful as non-decisiveness puts us in a disturbed state. How do we get the clarity or courage to overcome the dilemma?

For example, consider this situation.

You are head of manufacturing and received a message from your customer that they rejected the recent consignments and would impose the penalty if not replaced quickly. As this situation may typically happen, you can manage on your own. However, you have a dilemma whether you need to inform your boss or not.

Even though the problem is manageable, you have a typical decision dilemma. If you inform your boss, he may get angry with you. If you do not notify your boss, you can avoid the immediate pain of emotional drama. In case if your boss comes to know the issue at a  later stage, he would perceive it as an integrity issue, which may be much painful for you. That is a decision dilemma.

Similarly, as a manager or leader, you may have decision dilemmas in many instances like whether to recruit a person for a key role or not, whether to give feedback to a non-performer or not, whether to accept a new assignment or not. You might have come across many situations wherein you stuck to making decisions.
 
Here, we need to get clarity of our decision vs. consequence by weighing many outcomes.

The simple tool of decision vs. consequence will be helpful to overcome the dilemmas.

 

 As in the above example, if you decide to inform your boss about quality issues, you can list down all the positive and negative consequences. Also, when you decide not to inform your boss, you can list down all the positive and negative consequences. When you list down all the probable positive and negative consequences of "informing" and "not informing," you may get clarity on which path to take.

This simple tool will help to think clearly to overcome the decision dilemma.

We have a mix of emotions that puts us in a dilemma that we can overcome with rational evaluation by correlating decision vs. consequence.

You may try next time when you have a decision dilemma!
 
Have a great week ahead!