Choosing always involves taking on responsibility and the ability to face and manage the changes that an important decision inevitably entails. In addition, choosing in absolute autonomy allows us to experience, beyond the consequences of choosing (positive or negative), a feeling of freedom and not to experience any kind of regret.
Happiness, success, self-confidence, our mood in general, are the results, the product of our actions, which in turn start from our choices.
The only thing over which we have total control and total responsibility is our choices. Everyone must be educated, as soon as possible, to make their own choices, to take responsibility, and to learn from their mistakes. It’s so that one learns to grow and to manage uncertainty without being overwhelmed by insecurity. It’s so that one learns to improve continuously, without being demoralized before the first, inevitable, frustrations.
Managing companies involves making many choices and making a large number of decisions every day. Business success depends on the right decisions.
Effective decision-making is critical to leadership and the primary function of a good leader, and decision-making models enable leaders to respond to changing market conditions, challenges, and opportunities, to ensure a successful future for their organization. However, nowadays, the increasing speed with which new information circulates, changes in the world of work, and external events make the task of making effective decisions more complicated every day.
Leaders are busy people, with conflicting priorities, and often with a large number of business meetings to attend. This means that their strategic decision-making must be simple and efficient, to maximize their ability to make decisions. Fortunately, functional decision-making models, when paired with technology help leaders to make informed decisions quickly and effectively.
We need to think of corporate decision-making as a crossroads. The road corresponds to the strategy, and the business is the vehicle in which we travel. The opportunity to change our approach based on a specific issue is equivalent to an intersection, which allows us to change the direction of travel or to stay on the existing route.
A clear example is the recent development of the COVID-19 pandemic: an external event, of enormous magnitude, created a series of crossroads for leaders, who had to take urgent decisions and action. The end result of the decision-making process is to chart the correct direction for the future of the organization. At each intersection, you can decide to continue on the existing road, or choose to turn and proceed in a completely new direction.
This all sounds simple enough, but what we need to recognize is that for most businesses, there is often more than one crossroads to consider at one time, with numerous decisions to make. This problem is accentuated by the increasingly interconnected nature of the world of work, with faster information flows requiring more accurate decisions. Especially for those companies that operate globally.
When, then, generational changes intervene, new values are even called into question and new expectations are created. Leadership must adapt to remain effective. As the business world embraces new technologies and agile ways of working, leaders must be agile in order to be able to adapt.
Agile leadership involves openness, trust, and a horizontal organizational hierarchy, which allows industry experts to use their skills as effectively as possible.
As a result, the decision-making process has undergone significant changes: it now involves a much more democratic process, involving subject matter experts regardless of their status or title. Decision-making is no longer the sole responsibility of leaders but has become the responsibility of the entire workforce, especially with regards to consensual decision making, in which teams make decisions as a collective.
It is therefore of fundamental importance to organize any company in the most suitable way to make good decisions and make the right choices in an ever-changing and increasingly complex context. In fact, the uncertainty of the real world does not in itself affect the ability of companies to make good decisions. What matters to companies is having the right elements that influence decisions: people, processes, and systems.
There are some more relevant aspects to take into account in order to gear up and make good decisions.
The way in which decisions are made, for example, is a fundamental aspect. In this regard, from my point of view, it is interesting to analyze the men who are decisive in the decision-making process within the corporate world, with their thinking, values, prejudices, or with the stroke of genius of the best entrepreneurs.
