How To Make Better Decisions About Your Business

By David Bullock

Let’s face it…the decisions you make for your business will make or break it.

• What is the next project?
• Where do I spend?
• Where do I cut back?
• Where to advertise and promote?
• Who to hire?
• When to start, wait, stop?
• Who to talk to next?
• Should I expand the product line?

Basic questions like these don’t require creative thinking but they do require critical thinking; you know, that “logic and systematic thinking” that we learned about many years ago but didn’t pay attention to because it was so boring.

As a business owner, this “boring stuff” may be your best bet in regards to making good decisions about the next steps for your business…

Logic definition: the study of the rules of correct thinking.

There is much emphasis on the use of tools that help us create new ideas and keep us organized.

But what do you do after the ideation process after you have all the new ideas in the world and all your ideas and tasks are organized?

The question then becomes which of these wonderful new organized ideas are worthy to be acted upon and which ones to discard.

Deciding on critical path is now the issue.

This is the “forgotten” part of ideation process: Evaluation.

Evaluation is simply asking the questions:

• What should I do next?
• Why is this important?
• What is the outcome that I expect?
• What is the quickest way to get closer to my goal?
• What supports this course of action?

I ran across some interesting decision-making software to help with the evaluation process.

This is a class of software that visually handles argument mapping. You can see what logic you are using to come to the decisions that you are coming to.

The company Austhink.com states it this way…

At Austhink, we are leaders in decision mapping and argument mapping: visual techniques for organizing thinking and handling complex argumentation. (from Austhink Web site)

The company has a piece of software called BCisive that I have been using for the last several months to let me “see” my decision-making process.  Seeing your thinking (beyond just a listing of new ideas) leads to smoother sailing.

The BCisive tool is a cross between mind mapping, concept mapping and a trial lawyer that is cross-examining you on why you think what you think.

It is truly a step beyond mind mapping.

Seeing your thinking is one thing. Creating new ideas is another.

Knowing what to do next and why you should do it seems to be something completely different.

What tools, thinking or resources do you use to help you make decisions about your business?