Reviews ASTD Members Only

How to Make a Decision
By Tim Anderson

Leaders and managers need to make decisions at the pace of the environment in which they work. That means not just fast decisions but sound ones. The Harvard Business School online course Decision Making helps learners think through both the rational and psychological aspects of decision making.

The course explores these aspects primarily through a case study on customer service. It also includes a set of exercises to test and reinforce the concepts. Articles by experts deepen the user’s understanding, and a final quiz tests the user’s knowledge.

The course begins with the case study set in the deregulated telephone industry. Deregulation has sharpened competition, and advances in technology have led to an explosion of new products. The changes have resulted in higher call volumes, more work and stress, and a need for creative marketing approaches. As the head of the customer service department, the learner must make decisions to improve the performance of the department.

Substance and process

To support the user, the course touches on five of nine psychological traps that impede decisions:

• anchoring
• status quo
• sunk costs
• confirming evidence
• estimating and forecasting.

In addition, the course includes a framework for making tradeoffs between options by developing a set of criteria and making even swaps, and it demonstrates the importance of intuition in decisions.

Valuable articles are another source of learning in this course. They include "The Hidden Traps in Decision Making," "Even Swaps: A Rational Method for Making Tradeoffs," "When to Trust Your Gut," "Fast-Cycle Decision Making," and "Your Managerial Intuition: How Much Should You Trust It? Can You Improve It?" The articles not only inform a manager’s decision making but also explain how to empower others to make decisions.

As I moved through the course, I was reminded of many experiences in the Internet world during the bubble days. The business fundamentals seemed to shift from day to day. Some people were evangelizing for maximum market share, while others worried about the road to profitability. Confusion was rampant.

In one of the companies I worked for, a rumor reached us that a competitor was entering the wireless space. We "decided" to enter too. We had no idea how we were going to make a profitable business out of a wireless venture, but the change in direction also changed how we allocated resources. We had to shift resources that were needed elsewhere to wireless products, delay launches of other products, and alter marketing campaigns. Worse, few people completely bought into the decision, which led to conflict and, in turn, destructive organizational politics.

The decision led to a fiasco. We retrenched, but serious damage had been done. A better decision-making process might have helped us avoid a serious business mistake and company bloodletting.

Features and interface

The program’s homepage has links to the case, tools, resources, and a quiz. Users should peruse the overview page to familiarize themselves with the program pedagogy and learning objectives. The page also explains how to use the course interface, gives technical tips, and has a privacy statement. The course content listing includes circles next to each item indicating whether they’ve been visited or completed.

In the interactive case section, a summary sets up the situation. To proceed, learners can play video with an audio track or read the case. (I preferred to read the case because I have bandwidth problems downloading video and voice data.) Throughout the case, the program asks the user to make decisions. He is then faced with different scenarios depending on the choice he made.

The user can always return to the decision point, choose another option, and play out the next scenario. I often did this to learn from the consequences of different decisions. There are usually no right or wrong answers, just decisions with better and worse outcomes.

When the user completes the case, the program provides feedback, refers him or her to the leadership concepts of recognized experts, and reviews key points derived from the case. The articles mentioned earlier, as well as other print materials, are available as downloadable and printable PDF files.

The tools section includes an option to work with a mentor. A user must recruit the individual from his or her workplace. The course emphasizes the value to the user of working with someone that he or she trusts. The mentor can provide constructive feedback and help monitor how the learner transfers his or her learning into practice. I think the mentor suggestion is an excellent one. A mentor can provide additional motivation to keep the learner moving through a self-paced course. Many well-intentioned users of self-paced courses run out of gas and never complete them. A mentor also makes the learning collaborative and helps in the difficult work of transferring learning to the job.

Other tools include a series of skills assessments that provide preprogrammed feedback. The follow-up section offers the user a chance to make a priority listing of the changes he wants to make in the way he leads. The section is action-oriented: It asks what the user plans to change, how he plans to change it, and how he will know it has changed. The user can set up email reminders of his goals.

The end-of-course quiz assesses a user’s performance. The results are confidential; only the user has access to them. However, if the user is working with a mentor, he or she may find the results useful for helping the learner to improve.

Recommendation

I recommend this course to decision makers at all levels of a company or organization. It helps people avoid psychological traps that keep them from thinking clearly and furnishes a framework for making tough tradeoffs of potential options. In addition, it helps people understand the value of intuition in the decision-making process. Interactivity could be more varied and dynamic, and a stronger set of online collaborative tools would encourage more of the peer-to-peer learning for which the classroom-based case method is famous.