Brown - Its Your Move

• This publication includes material (C) 1983-2002 by Kenneth R. Oppenheimer.
• Thanks to Wendy Brown Davis, who generously donated the beautiful photograph of the gray squirrel for the cover. peek a boo, oh yeah I see you (C) Wendy Brown Davis ~Canon 5D Mark III & EF 70-200 mm/ f2.8 L IS II USM~

A few years ago, a friend of mine asked me to help him think through how to grow his business. He had successfully operated a small boutique professional services firm for several years up that point. Now he was concerned about the demands on his personal time, his ability to save for retirement and his childrens education, and a nagging sense that things were getting a little stale. Maybe he needed a new strategy, he thought. As we discussed his current situation, he expressed the following concerns:

• Its difficult to scale my companys growth.
• Its hard to find and keep the right people.
• My personal interest in creating a business are not yet realized.
• How can my company establish a means to generate ongoing revenue and equity value?
• How can my company make a much bigger and positive lasting effect on clients?

Once we clarified those concerns, we restated them as a strategic question.

How can we facilitate our clients business development activity for maximum profit in such a way that our clients enjoy the way they create business, we track our clients evolution of needs, and our services become a must-have habit in order for my company to grow a profitable, sustainable, and scalable business that I enjoy?

But how do I get there, Rob? What should I do? There are still so many decision to make. I keep thinking about the risks and benefits of each, but I dont quite know how to handle the complexity of all their possible interactions.

Usually, my clients initially face the very important issue of not really knowing what they want to achieve by making decisions, but in this case my friend knew his objectives fairly well. Where he was getting mired down was in conceiving effective ways to coordinate multiple decisions to achieve those objectives. Overwhelmed by option complexity, my friend didnt know what to do. Maybe you have found yourself in a similar position.

When we make decisions, we usually speak of choosing among a known set of options, a choice between a This or a That. We may think about choosing between

• Vanilla ice cream or chocolate or the new wasabi cream flavor
• Pirelli tires or Michelin or Goodyear
• A vacation in the Bahamas or one in Las Vegas

If the options are not mutually exclusive, we may even talk about choosing between some of This and some of That. These are the simpler decisions in life. Even if they are not routine, their consequences are usually limited in scope and magnitude. We usually address these decisions by weighing in our mind the net effect of the relative pros and cons of each choice without generally worrying that the consequences will be beyond our ability to handle them should they turn out contrary to our preferences, even significantly so. If you do choose the wasabi cream flavored ice cream and its just awful (as I can assure you that it actually was), its not an outcome you will regret the rest of your life. Youll gag a little and be a few dollars poorerno big deal.

However, when we find ourselves facing complex personal or business situations, we very rarely find ourselves limited to the choices within the scope of a single decision category. Instead, we usually find ourselves thinking about the consequences of choosing among multiple coordinated options across multiple decision categories. The number of potential decision options we can choose from can lead to an overwhelming, swarming beehive of what-ifs in our minds.

For example, consider that you are a key decision maker within a company that develops biomedical devices. Choosing whether or not to launch a new product does not usually have a simple Go or No Go set of options. For a new product launch, you might have to think through the combined effects of choices about a new products geographic distribution, pricing level, product configuration, packaging, staging, specific disease application, etc. Each choice within a decision set leads to a set of implied potential consequences that, as a responsible decision maker, you ought to consider to the satisfaction of your fiduciary responsibilities. While the associated economic analysis will represent enough complexity of its own, more immediately you might face some degree of confusion about which decision scenarios you should even consider. You will probably not have time to consider them all.

Just among the decision categories listed in the biomedical device situation above, there exist hundreds, if not thousands, of possible decision scenarios worth considering. What if each of the six categories contained three options? The decision makers would face 36 combinations (3x3x3x3x3x3) or 729 scenarios in their analysis. What decision makers face is choice complexity, which is a significant contributor to two common decision failures: analysis paralysis and shooting from the hip.

Some decision-makers forge ahead believing they ought to and can conquer the complexity by testing every possible scenario. However, as both the number of decision sets increase or the number of options increase, the number of testable scenarios can approach the number of atoms in the universe! Clearly, no one will ever commit to a decision while there is always one more scenario to test in this case. (Im convinced that many people actually use analysis paralysis to avoid making decisions as a CYA approach to managing their own career risk.) In the end, if anything ever gets done, its usually too late to take advantage of the best part of the available value the opportunity provides.

Unfortunately, other decision makers opt to shoot from the hip as they assume that their gut is a better guide than the looming detailed analysis. Selective hindsight bias convinces them that their intuition is usually right (Isnt that what everyone thinks Malcolm Gladwells book, Blink!, taught us?). Or they reason that committing now and fixing things later (regardless of what the unforeseen costs might be) is at least movement, and movement is valuable for its own sake until the bill for the unforeseen costs or unintended consequences comes due.

Is there a reasonable way to tame the choice complexity that you face as a decision maker in your real world, complex decision situations? There is by using three simple integrated thinking tools called a