The keys to strong decision-making

Strong decision-making skills are essential for project managers. While long-term or significant decisions can be referred upwards to the Project Board, daily challenges and obstables to project success are the bread and butter of the project manager. Learning to plan and manage projects successfully forms part of any project management course. This article focuses on the skills of strong decision making.

There are three phases to making a strong decision:

• Research
• Identification of possible actions
• Selection of preferred action

Many decisions are undermined by failure to fully carry out one of these steps. Frequently this is caused by subconscious assumptions (or ‘cognitive biases’). Once you learn to recognise these assumptions, you will be able to make strong, clear and justified decisions with a far greater chance of success.

• Selective Research

Also known as ‘confirmation bias,’ selective research is usually a problem when you have already (perhaps subconsciously) come to a decision. In these cases, research is sometimes limited to evidence that will support the intended decision, or is terminated once information supportion the solution has been gathered. This results in an uninformed decision.

Research is an integral part of making a decision. Before entering into the second phase of decision-making (‘Identification of possible actions’) you need to have at your fingertips all the relevant information regarding:

• The decision situation
• Factors that impact your decision (like cost or resource considerations)
• Who or what your decision will impact
• Decisions that have been made in comparable situations, and their consequences

Make a research plan. List all the things you need to find out, and all the sources that you can approach. Keep a record of your research, including relevant notes and observations and where and when you found the information. This will enable you to follow up connections made at a later date.

• Preconceptions

By the time all of the evidence has been gathered you probably already have an idea of how you will interpret it. However, you must be rigorous in your analysis of the material, or else you risk missing important issues relating to your decision.

Preconceptions come in various guises:

• Choice-supportive bias: only the evidence that supports a particular interpretations is taken into account.


• Recency/Primacy effect: information gathered at either the end or the beginning of the period of research has a disproportionately strong influence on the decision.


• Unwillingness to change thought patterns: previous assumptions and decision models are allowed to influence analysis of the material. Lateral-thinking puzzles are a good way to learn flexible thinking.



• Subjective Decision-Making

Of course some of your decisions will be subjective. The colour of your new suit, which newspaper you buy, who you choose to eat lunch with – all of these decisions are justifiably subjective.

However, if you make a decision about a customer’s product based on your opinion of the colour scheme, the customer’s political views or the team’s majority vote then you risk making an unbalanced decision that could have a negative impace on your project and on your credibility as a project manager.

Three things that you must consider to ensure objective decision-making are:

• Role fulfilment: how much are your perceptions of your role influencing the decisions that you make? Are you less likely to accept a Request for Change because you see yourself as the one who must keep the project running strictly in accordance with the original plan? This could have a negative impact on the flexilibity of your decisions.


• Source credibility: how much do you trust your sources? How much should you trust your sources? Are you letting irrelevant or personal factors influence the degree to which you accept information or advice?


• Peer pressure: As project manager you must be immune to peer pressure. This does not mean that you refuse to consider the suggestions of others – to the contrary, an important part of decision-making is to actively seek others’ advice. What it does mean is that you should carefully consider the suggestions offered by each party, and then be willing to propose and support your own point-of-view.

Making strong decisions is not a mystical art. All it requires is that you research and take into consideration all of the relevant information, taking an objective stance in your consideration of your evidence, your sources and your solutions.