Following situation is the new normal now, however if it
would have been 3 months back, what would have been your response?
Imagine the situation where you come to know that your 25%
employees are infected with the virus. There is a panic situation outside the
organization because of increased pandemic. Employees & managers are
worried. Your management has to take the decision about the continuity of the
operations considering employee safety. Your plants need to run, otherwise it
will have a major impact on the business. On the other side, the government has
their own rules to handle such things. Media may be behind you hence your
reputation is at stake. You have to take care of employees; engage with union
and society; think about business and need to take few decisions as a leader or
you have to facilitate the decision-making process in the organization in such
crucial periods.
I think most of the leaders have gone through such
situations. During heightened VUCA (with high Volatile, Uncertain, Complex,
Ambitious) situations, normal decision-making process can break down. Some
people become paralysed and afraid to act however few others make quick
decisions based on emotions or bias rather than fact.
During such uncertain situations, our decisions may be
affected because of a lot of information, which is not authentic, contradictory
views of experts, (like virus spread through air also), bias information shared
by some people, media, politicians etc. During the decision-making process, we
may overreact on certain information or overestimate or underestimate based
from where it is coming. If there are infinite, clue less information, you may
not be able to think rationally.
So? During such situations, it is always good to focus on
the purpose and specific alternatives step by step. You may need to brainstorm
with the team of decision makers to get more information, knowledge, you need
to know before moving forward. Formulate the right question (for others and
yourself) that will help you to get the right answers.
Once you get all answers, classify the information in the following format.
Behaviour & Feeling: This is a human dimension where you will understand the feeling sideof the information and consequent behaviour. During covid19 situations people become worried (feeling) and hence they are demonstrating frustrations (behaviour) & then they share weird information is one of the examples of this. Sometimes this is just the reaction based on the nature of the person.
Opinion: People generate their opinions after the situation. The opinion may be biased again based on certain assumptions and nature of the person.
Knowledge: This part is easier to understand; however, you need to be aware about the situation fully. The covid19 infection in India is around 4.46 million but the recovery rate is around 75%. knowing this data and interpreting it, is the knowledge.
This practice will help you to bring the diverse
perspective and the variety in the decision-making process. This will also help
to address your immediate emotional response.
There are other tools which you can try in your team like Six Thinking Hats to generate more alternatives and Weighted Criteria Assessment for better decision making.
Sometimes some decisions need strong intuition and you can read more about here Intuitive Decision Making
Please read the print replica of my latest book written for leaders on amazon kindle; Vitality in Human Resource
3 comments:
Vinod’s articles are deep, thought provoking and easy to digest. I also look for our Indianised version of VUCA thru our old relics as we were the best educators, great philosophers and what not, is there any great book which one can refer for Indianised management rather then west - looking forward to deep dive on our past
Interesting read Vinod . I agree in any decision making situations “ purpose and context “ will be vital.
Thank You For Writing This Article gave a lots of information.
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