Strategic Decision Making

Just attended a workshop on Decision Making and found it very interesting. So wanted to write about it.
Key Points :

• Lower level employees work with certainty whereas higher level employees work under ambiguity. Like in a software company a coder will be given a design, explained what to do - now all he has to do is to write the code and test it out - which is pretty certain. A higher level manager will get a job like "bring more projects".

There are three types of decisions:

• Strategic - Have Long Term Impact, are Less Frequently made, and have a High Cost of Change.
• Tactical - Something that can change based on time and situation.
• Operational - Opposite to Strategic i.e. have Short term impact, are made on regular intervals, and can be changed easily.
• Decisions which are strategic for low level folks can be operational for higher level ones and vice-versa.

Strategic Decision Framework:

• Information - Fact or Assumption
• Challenges (Internal or External) - Fixed or Changeable
• Specialized Knowledge - Accessible or Inaccessible (now made more accessible due to Internet)

Finally, build a Story to support your decision - very important for a manager to become a leader to convince all those impacted by the decision.

Finally :

• Define the objective - half the job is done.
• Apply the Framework (above)
• Look for Changeable Challenges
• Build Specialized Knowledge
• Develop articulation skills (for convincing)
• Review the decision as its strategic
• Document it
• Finally detach yourself and don't make the failure of the decision impact your ego