Option Identification in Decision Making

John J. Schaub 

Feb 13 , 2023 

In March I will be giving a talk on Decision Making in Product Management at ProductCamp Vancouver. As part of preparing for the talk I will be writing a few posts on some of the lesser understood aspects of decision making. In this post I'll cover the foundational skill of option identification which like a lot of things seems simple but gets more complex once you start diving in. I'll provide a list of basic tips and tricks to improve your decision making by giving you a formal process of option identification to follow.

Is doing nothing an option: Do not fall into the trap that just because you are faced with a decision you must make one.  Doing nothing aka the NULL option is almost always possible. It is often a very poor choice and can be quickly discarded if so but it should always be given formal consideration. One important note when proposing options lists to senior executives they will always expect that the NULL option is formally listed and the reasons for its rejection stated explicitly. This requirement is a result of the next consideration.

Consider the lowest impact change you could make: Because complex decision making almost always happens in an environment full of unknowns, experienced decision makers will develop a habit of avoiding large changes for fear they do not understand some wider knock on impact that could happen with a larger change. Instead they will follow a practise of making changes at the lowest level of impact that would solve the problem in front of them. This approach has merit so you absolutely must consider these sorts of options but do so with the understanding that granular decision making has consequences and when followed consistently over time it often leads to vastly suboptimal outcomes and incoherent and unmanagable systems. Simply put sometimes you need to solve the problem at the root and deal with the consequences.

Suggest the worst possible choice you could make: I am not suggesting that you actually consider the worst possible choice but the exercise is important because it removes blinders and in a group decision making process allows people to suggest the truly off the wall stuff that they would be hesitant to propose even in a free form brainstorming session. More than once I have seen this technique lead to a train of thought that opened up previously unconsidered options that ended up being chosen. 

Remove constraints: There is a fundamental human trait of applying a reasonableness filter to options under consideration and discarding without consideration those that are plainly impractical. This default approach exists for good reason in that it speeds up decision making but when faced with a large decision ask yourself a few leading questions to potentially suggest options that you had not considered. Questions like what would I be considering if I had 10x as much money to spend as I do? What would I be considering if I had 10x as much time as I do? If you have some clear constraints ask yourself what you would do if that constraint did not exist. If you identify a single driving constraint where if that constraint did not exist you would have a clearly preferable path forward it is worth the time to stop and think if you can remove that constraint.  

Apply Constraints: When you’ve identified the unconstrained options run the process in reverse and ask what you’d consider if you had 1/10th as much money or 1/10 as much time. As in the consider the worst idea you can come up with process this process exists to help remove those automatic mental blinders we all apply and while it likely won’t directly provide realistic options it will help to suggest other options for consideration. There are however times when this thought experiment will generate new avenues of investigation. When for example you ask the question what would we do if we had 1/10 as much money and the options you arrive at are identical that is giving you some important insight into where you stand.

Go for a walk take a nap ect: There is a very good reason that experienced people take their time with big decisions. Your subconscious will do the outside the box thinking for you while you are focused on other things.  If the decision doesn't need to be made immediately give it some time and mull it over to see if anything pops up. 

By applying these tools you should be able to generate at least a half dozen options that are worthy of consideration. In the next post we will look at how you can filter these down.