 HOME Solve It! © 2006 David M. Weeks.
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We learn how to be selective
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You are back at school. It's a science lesson and you're doing a multiple choice test, A, B or C. It's your turn to pick the right answer. In fact you don't recognise any of them. This is going to be tricky. Inside your head you are weighing up each answer and say C. The teacher smiles, you got it right, you can relax. Remember
those situations? It's all about calculating risk. Get the wrong answer and it's very embarrassing, something you don't want. Evaluating is about picking something that has the least chance of causing you a future kick in the butt.
By now you should have generated lots of ideas. Possibly hundreds. You need to put your Evaluation hat on and keep it on. Don't be tempted to start generating again beause Imagination and Evaluation don't mix. This section of the notebook will
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Rational or Emotive?
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You need a new car. There are four possibilities - a Peugeot, a Ford, an Audi or a VW. "OK, let's do this by the book " you say to your wife. "First let's make a list of criteria, and put them into a nice table with the criteria down the left edge and the cars across the top." You complete the scoring with your wife's help and she adds up each column. "It's the Ford" she says. "It can't be" you reply, "It's suppose to be the Audi. Let me see that." So, you rejig the table, adding and deleting a few criteria.
"Let's do it again" you say.
Judgement is the cognitive processes we use to
evaluate numerous alternatives so we may select the best option. But it is
not a rational! Emotions rule OK!
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Going with the crowd
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Imagine you are in a decision making workshop with 6 others. Everyone have to select an option from three possibilities.The facilitator starts furthest away from you with the CEO. "I think we should go with option 3" she says and explains her rationale. "I'll go with that one", says the Finance Director. You start to feel a bit under mental pressure because your choice was option 1. It moves onto the HR director and she also plums for option 3, offering a logical and precise justification. As the baton passes metaphorically around the room you realise that everyone is going for option 3. It's your turn as the Operations director now - what do you do?
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Sticky Dots, Wild Ideas, Put
Asides, Criteria scoring
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Jane's team have just generated over 100 ideas
with the Mexican BrainWave. "That was fun" says David, "but, now we're in
trouble" |
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4 questions
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Coming to a decision can be a battle
between logic and intuition or left and right brain thinking. You may
have made a decision logically, but there may be a doubt lingering at the
back of your mind. Try this exercise which uses four questions
to stretch your logic until finally your intuition takes over.
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Compare each idea against all the other ideas
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Sometimes you need to compare one idea against
another. This is most easily done in a grid but it gets quite unwieldy if
there are too many options.
Start by comparing A with B. You prefer A so put A down. You think A is much more important so make it A-3. This allows you to add weight to the difference. Continue like this until you have done all the comparisons. Then look for everywhere you score A and add up the numbers. In this example you get 7. Complete for each option letter. Finally you can convert to a percentage A= 7/34=20% |
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Friend or Foe
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A member of your team wants a word with you. "Jane, I've got this great idea..." and he goes on to outline it.
Your mind scans the detail and judges immediately that the idea is poor.
You have been here before, you know that you are too critical but you have come across a useful technique that stops you killing ideas automatically.
It's called being "friendly" toward ideas. You ask David to write his idea at the top of a sheet of paper, and then together, you list at least four benefits of doing it. Then you look for the concept behind the idea that is useful and ask how else could we get this? This way you don't demotivate David because you find that there is something that is useful if not his original idea.
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how judgement relies on rules of thumb
Imagine you have 7 ideas
that you want to compare against each other. Put them down the side and
across the top of the grid - here they are labelled A to G. Ignore the
diagonal row because you don't need to compare ideas with themselves.