How good are you at making decisions?

I don’t mean regular decisions like what you’re going to have for dinner, or even slightly larger decisions, such as where you’re going to go on holiday this year.

No, I mean the big decisions. Decisions like whether you should stay with your current company or move on; or, if you’re changing career what industry should you move into; or, maybe you’re buying a house, so which property out of the dozens you’ve seen should you put an offer on?

There’s a model I’ve picked up from an HR Director that can help.

There are several steps to this but the results can be quite revealing. In this example, I’m weighing up some house options.

Step 1: Develop a list of 8 to 9 criteria you think are key to your decision, these will be the equivalent of a traditional pros and cons list.

Step 2: Add a weighting of importance to your list. This’ll need to add up to 100% so choose carefully, if it turns out one element is more important to you than you realised, you’ll need to take it away from somewhere else to balance.

 

 

Step 3: Rate the criteria of each property/job/industry etc., that you view, out of 10. Same as a pros and cons list, if what you see ticks a box then score it highly, if it doesn’t score it low. Like this:

 

 

Step 4: Multiply your score by the importance weighting of each criterion and then total that column to give you a total percentage:

 

 

Step 5: See which option has the highest percentage. This’ll be your winner. But then sleep on it, print out the results and tuck them away for a day or two if you can. When you come back to your results first check that your criteria and importance weightings haven’t changed; if they have you should alter them and that’ll tweak your results.

Step 6: If your winner is still the winner that’s a huge vote of confidence. Of course, you’ll need to have the confidence to take that next step, but, seriously, after this, your mind should be at ease – it’s telling you what you already know, backed up by figures that are hard to argue with.