Blog - Operational Problem Solving

Decisions fail everyday in most organizations, and the reason for this does not seem to get through to decision makers. If you do a study to get to the bottom of why decisions fail you would uncover two factors as being the main culprits for this failure. That is “Lack of Stakeholder inputs” and “Lack of using a proper decision making process”.

Today, let’s talk about the first and most important one – stakeholder inputs. We could make a statement that the level of collaborative inputs equals the level of implementation commitment and we will not be far from the truth. In fact the following equation is most applicable in decision making:

Just imagine you are making a decision that is going to have an effect across certain silos and it is going to need the absolute commitment of your division’s implementation team and the implementation teams of the other divisions as well. If you make this decision without consulting any of them – what do you think your chances are for success?  We would suggest your chances are less than 50%. There is a way to avoid this kind of disaster by asking just a few questions to identify the appropriate stakeholders and asking them for input.

 

We suggest the following questions to be asked and answered:

Asking the questions that should be answered will make life as a manager much easier, because you would use the inputs from your stakeholders to gather information and ideas that would ultimately be very important for your decision. In any case, performing a complete stakeholder analysis gives you a double benefit: much more appropriate and better information for your decision and also their support and commitment just because you thought it was important to ask them.

 

Try this next time and you would be surprised how much goodwill you will earn by doing this. The downside of having to “speak” to others will far outweigh the benefits you will reap.