Making Better Decisions

by Don Campbell, January 2012

This is an excerpt from the free e-book Lifetime of Learning. 

We all know that the basis of Holistic Management is to make better decisions however, knowing this & doing it can be two different things. The start of a New Year filled with opportunity & challenge might be an ideal time to refine & improve our decision making. We can be confident that the better our decision making the better our year will be. It’s up to us.

The testing questions are designed to break our decision making down into small easy to take steps. By the end of the process, we should be confident that we have covered all the bases & that our decision will be a good one. In fact, it will be the best one for that moment in time given the current situation & our knowledge & skills. When you follow this up with monitoring, we can have extreme confidence in our decision making.

If you are having trouble using the testing questions or if you are not using them at all it may be that you are not clear on what you are actually trying to test. When the question is clear the testing tends to go quite smoothly.

Making decisions becomes easier if you focus on one decision at a time. So often we are trying to make a decision & we let secondary points cloud & confuse the process.

Let me give you a personal example. Just recently we were deciding where & how to winter our bulls. The primary decision was, should we bale graze the bulls or feed them every 3 or 4 days. The decision was going nowhere. The discussion soon involved water concerns, bedding, time, excess residual & location. We were confused & making no progress. One of our team members suggested “let’s make one decision at a time.” We tried this & it became amazing easy & simple.

Bale grazing was the most economical way to winter the bulls. We had unanimous agreement.

As we tested the other issues water, bedding, time, excess residual & location we were able to come up with a good decision for each concern, one at a time.

Most folks I have talked with agree that it would be wise to be focused in our decision making. However, most of them also say it is very easy to get off track. The most common question is how do I stay focused?

Suggestions for Staying Focused

1. Think & talk about your decision making when you aren’t actually faced with a decision. If you think being focused would help agree on this.
2. Give each person on the team the authority to keep the process on track.
3. Define as clearly as possible the decision you are making. If you are having difficulty, you might write the question down. Stay with this step until everyone agrees on what you are actually testing.
4. Make one small decision at a time. Then make the next decision. Keep going until you have covered all the areas of concern.
5. Following a process like this will lead to good decisions. You will also have confidence in your decision making.
6. Good decisions will lead to a better future.