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What Is a Decision?

Yes, this sounds like a stupid question. But wait—it isn’t, really. We often think we are making decisions when what we are really doing is simply making choices. Decision making is a management tool designed to be much more than just selecting from some choices.

While there are often choices in decision making—at least one hopes there are—those choices must be analyzed in terms of outcomes and consequences. That is what makes decision making a management process in any organization. It is the focus on achieving desired outcomes that is important.

Thus, decision making is a process of analyzing alternatives to reduce uncertainty about achieving a desired outcome. Of course, along the way, we must always be concerned with unintended consequences, but more about those later.

So, decision making for managers is the identification of alternative solutions to problems, challenges, and opportunities; the analysis of those alternatives; and the selection of the alternative most likely to achieve the desired outcome with the best affect on the organization. There! How’s that for a definition? Pretty simple, right? Well, maybe not. We are going to spend another 92 ideas on this process called decision making. It’s not simple, if you want to get it right, that is.