Evaluating Options: Criteria for Effective Decision-Making

Evaluate the Options

Once you have worked out some potential solutions in detail, each suggests a course of action that might work. You now need to evaluate the options and pick the one most likely to make the future easier. There are two components here: (1) your criteria for evaluating the options and (2) how you apply them.

Each problem has its own specific criteria. Some of the more common ones include opportunity cost, return on investment (ROI), and likelihood of the desired outcome, but there are many others. When you understand the problem, the criteria should be apparent. Recently I undertook a renovation. Some of my criteria included experience of the crew, availability, demonstrated pace on past projects, and quality of craftsmanship.

If you struggle to determine specific criteria, clarify what the decision is supposed to achieve. The following features can help:

Clarity: The criteria should be simple, clear, and free of any jargon. Ideally, you should be able to explain them to a twelve-year-old.

Goal promotion: The criteria must favor only those options that achieve the desired goal.

Decisiveness: The criteria must favor exactly one option; they can’t result in a tie among several.

In practice, useful criteria can leave a tie; a tie-breaking rule or additional information can then guide the choice. Criteria that fail to distinguish options or serve the goal can lead to decision-making errors. When criteria are too complicated, people have trouble knowing how to apply them. When they are ambiguous, people have a green light to interpret them in whichever way suits them. As a result, people end up applying criteria in different ways based on what they want or how they feel at the moment. Their decision-making process becomes a playground for the emotion default.

When deciding at work, criteria that are ambiguous or jargon-laden lend themselves to endless debates as to their meaning. We assume that everyone has a shared understanding of what these words and phrases mean. They don’t. We assume that our own definitions won’t change. They might. What a word like “strategic” means to one person is often different from what it means to another. As a result, ambiguous criteria rob decision-makers of their ability to distinguish who’s right from who’s wrong, and force debates about semantics instead of which potential solution is the best.

Other times the criteria don’t promote the goal. This is often the social default’s doing. One common example is when leaders make decisions about hiring or promotion based not on someone’s qualifications but on their likeable personality. Being nice is not the same as being good at your job. Using niceness as a criterion in personnel decisions frequently doesn’t promote the goals of the organization.

Sometimes criteria can promote the wrong goal—steering a team toward what it can do soonest, perhaps, instead of what’s best for the company in the long run. A tragic example happened in January 1986.

The space shuttle Challenger was scheduled to take off in just a few short weeks. NASA had been trying to establish the space shuttle as a reliable way of conducting commercial and scientific missions in space, and adopted an incredibly ambitious launch schedule. Parrish links the pressure to launch to the planned State of the Union address and the publicity surrounding the mission. The key decision problem was whether the proposed launch conditions were safe.

But days before the launch, during a preflight meeting, engineers from Morton Thiokol, a contractor on the Challenger project, were shouting and in tears. They knew that the temperatures predicted for the date of the launch were likely too cold for the shuttle’s O-rings to function successfully. If the O-rings failed, the result would be catastrophic. They wanted time to fix the problem or wait for warmer launch temperatures, and begged NASA to delay the launch. Their pleas were rejected. “I am appalled by your recommendation,” one NASA official said. “When do you want me to launch? Next April?” said another. Most of us who lived through the ’80s remember what happened next; the Challenger exploded seventy-three seconds after taking off. The criteria for the launch date decision should obviously have been focused on promoting the goal of safety, not speed.

The inertia default can also inspire us to adopt criteria that aren’t goal promoting. For example, upper management might fail to see that market conditions have changed. Rather than taking the time to understand the new conditions and adjust their criteria accordingly, they continue using the criteria they’ve used in the past even though those criteria aren’t goal promoting in the present.

Criteria can also fail to be decisive. If they don’t help you narrow the options, they’re not useful. When the criteria leave several options, ask whether an important difference is missing or whether the remaining choices are genuinely close.

Think of choosing a restaurant for dinner with a group of friends. Someone will make an initial suggestion—like eating Mexican—and inevitably someone else will say, “I just had Mexican last night.” Then you’ll hear, “What about salads?” and someone will say, “I’m too hungry for salad.” On and on ad nauseam: people say what they don’t want until the group is so hungry they pick whatever is most convenient. I’ve seen this situation play out the same way so often it’s comical. (Pay attention the next time it’s happening to you!)

The problem here is that in many cases, purely negative criteria aren’t decisive: they don’t narrow the field of options down to one. As a result, people end up leaving the ultimate choice up to chance or circumstance. As the old saying goes, “If you don’t know where you want to go, any road will take you there.”

Suppose, by contrast, that when you and your friends were deciding where to eat, each of you stated not what you didn’t want but rather what you did:

• “I want somewhere that serves salads within ten minutes’ walking distance.”
• “I want somewhere that serves burgers.”
• “I really don’t care; I just want to eat soon.”

Making the decision would be much faster, and it would be more likely to get more people what they wanted.