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How Developing New Solutions Can Improve Decision-making

When it comes to making significant decisions, we typically focus on the possibilities that are regarded or perceived to be the best answers. While it is vital to identify a few approaches that may work well in a certain circumstance, it is also detrimental to not look beyond the possibilities provided. This is due to the fact that even standard solutions may not be the greatest match for every tough situation. Since organizations have seen developments in practically every aspect; there is an imperative need to reconsider the manner in which decisions are made to improve decision-making, and one of the best ways to do this is to develop new solutions. Hence, in this podcast episode on the HBR IdeaCast channel, Wendy Smith, a management professor at the University of Delaware, and Marianne Lewis, dean of the University of Cincinnati Lindner College of Business, suggest ways to develop solutions that may be better than any option available when one is involved in decision-making.

Their first suggestion to develop solutions that may be superior to any option available urges individuals to feel the pressure of making the right decision in the first place during the decision-making process. Marianne believes that if you do not experience the discomfort or pressure of making the right decision, you have not gone far enough. The discomfort is what pushes leaders to create solutions that no one has ever seen before but are the right match for a certain scenario. Otherwise, the problem can be solved using one of the traditional methods. It is the discomfort that allows you to design and develop solutions that are not only effective but also introduce a concept that did not previously exist. Second, she argues that no matter how complicated a situation is, it is critical to identify the areas that require attention. Once those are recognized, we can better grasp the issue and thus work on creating fresh solutions. Wendy proposes altering our perspective on challenges and viewing them as situations that require us to make the initial step. One of the biggest ideas brought up in the podcast is that most of the time, we spend so much time intensifying and thinking about the problem that the phase where we consider developing new solutions never happens. Worse, there may be teams participating in decision-making that may be unable to work with each other’s respective statistics. They believe that communicating properly and gracefully is one of the finest remedies to such a circumstance. It is recommended that everybody who may be engaged in making a choice maintain effective communication, detect trends in their respective fields, and find a method to align them all so that they perform best for the firm.

To improve decision-making at organizations has always been a heavily focused issue. However, knowledge must be prioritized in order to develop solutions that do not correspond with any of the accessible possibilities but operate better than them, as highlighted in this audio episode on the HBR IdeaCast channel.

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