Decision Making & Problem Solving

 The business environment comes with a particular set of troubling issues that needs to be resolved and this happens on a daily basis. The ability to make the right decisions and find solutions for occurring problems are two particular skills which are always prized in such an environment. A company which lacks personnel with the two mentioned capabilities will eventually face money loss, contraction, and even exit from the market.

We live in a world where choices are multiplying every second passing. From the goods you are invited to buy in shops, up towards more crucial decisions you make in life, you simply can’t escape having to choose one element and reject many others. The equation which renders the right results is not always obvious, and you will often need to rely on intuition, common practice, and even your best guess, in order to keep things moving.

The same applies to the business environment, but this time multiplied and distorted by the many lenses which lie between the decisions you need to take and possible future outcomes. This is because, unlike small scale and mundane decisions, big decisions come packed with big responsibilities for those who make them. Complex hierarchies of subordination will always render someone responsible for a step taken in a certain direction.

Decision can be made easy if there is something called precedence. If something similar was deled with in a certain manner and everything turned out well, the tradition should continue unless a real flaw is found. Going even further, if making such decisions is a constant requirement, guidelines should be developed in order to convince those committing to the decisions that they are not following just a perpetuating luck. The need to streamline the process of making decisions and eliminate useless frictions and doubts should be looked upon with real concern by the management department.

All human activities, either simple or complex, will eventually encounter some sort of problems. Of course, the more elaborate the procedure is and the more cutting-edge its results need to be, the bigger the problems. There is need to work on the question of why they appear, but more on how to solve them and keep things going forward. Once a problem is solved, it is of course very useful to try and dig for its roots. Finding the cause of the problem can lead to the conclusion that some things or some people need to change.

It’s very useful to understand that a problem can be stripped down to its real structure if looked upon from different points. In this new light, every problem is developing itself on multiple level, layers, and directions. Without being frightened by the fact that a problem is multi-faced and it reaches far in every direction, the reveal structure serves as remainder that being superficial can lead to misinterpretation and can hijack the decision making process horribly off track. Analyzing the new revealed structure is mandatory before rushing in to find an answer and can lead to shortcuts or adopting known approaches.

Of course, it is equally important to try and leave aside the traditional vertical thinking approach for finding an answer. Going sideways, driving the thinking process on a secondary lead, and even jumping some steps can sometimes produce an unexpected breakthrough at a speed no traditional, step-by-step method is capable of. There is no such thing as only one method for finding the solution to a problem.

Decision making and problem solving usually go hand in hand, as finding answers is sometimes conditioned by committing to a certain methodology and choosing certain parameters as unchangeable. But separating the two concepts and most important, the employees dealing with them, can have positive outcomes in terms of the time spent to go around the bottleneck. It is important to note that the actions triggered by decision making and problem solving will put everything in a less comfortable position, as they usually require a lot of work and also a transition towards a new state.