Decisive (How to Make Better Decisions)

Each of us makes multiple decisions every day.  Big decisions, small decisions, and sometimes we even make life-changing decisions.  But how often do we make the best decisions?

I recently read Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, and enjoyed the book so much that I had our Lead Team read it as part of our ongoing leadership development.  Everyone else valued the book as well.  🙂

Decisive is a highly engaging, well-researched, and practical guide that enables each of us to see our decision-making blind spots, and it provides some great “hands on” ideas to make better decisions.

For example, one tool that I have found quite valuable is the idea of Vanishing Options.  In essence, when you are facing a decision and you think you already know the direction to take, tell yourself that the direction you are thinking of is no longer an option.  What other options can you come up with?  What if they were taken off the list too?  What new, previously un-thought of options could you or your team come up with?

We did this the Vanishing Options test at Westwood Church last year, as we worked through how to best manage our growth.  Our first thought was to add a third service on Sunday morning, since that seemed like an obvious solution.  But was it the best solution?  To answer that question we took the third Sunday morning service off the table and asked the question, “How could we respond to our ongoing growth,  knowing that a third morning service was not an option?”  Initially, we came up blank, but within 20 minutes we had 12 possible solutions to our growth “problem”.  Some were simple, some were crazy, some were easy, some were hard, but each one was possible.  And all it took to uncover them was to utilize the Vanishing Options approach.

Take a minute now and look at your own life or organization.  What problem or opportunity do you see in front of you that could benefit from Vanishing Options?  Why not try it out and see what innovative ideas and solutions come to the surface?  You have nothing to lose, and much to gain!