Smart Choices. Howard Raiffa
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suggestions might help them now?
• First, they should take more time to reflect on still other possible problem definitions. They might take into account how, for example, a move out to the suburbs would affect their quality of life. Or they might think about whether they’ll have a third child in the future or whether there might be an aging relative to house and care for.
• Second, they should identify and examine some of the assumed constraints surrounding their decision and ask themselves whether they might want to loosen, eliminate, or replace some of them. If they moved, for example, how much would it matter if they were farther away from Drew’s or Darlene’s family? Might they be able to find good jobs with different employers, widening the geographic area available to them?
Expansive thinking generates better problem definitions. And better definitions open up a broader range of creative solutions.
CHAPTER 3
Objectives
YOU’VE FORMULATED THE RIGHT DECISION PROBLEM. Now, before you rush into making the actual decision, pause and think hard about your objectives. What do you really want? What do you really need? What are your hopes? your goals? Answering these questions honestly, clearly, and fully puts you on track to making the smart choice.
Why are objectives so important? They form the basis for evaluating the alternatives open to you. They are, in other words, your decision criteria. By making sure you’ve identified all your objectives, you will avoid making an unbalanced decision—one that, for example, considers financial implications but ignores personal fulfillment. In addition, a full set of objectives can help you think of new and better alternatives, looking beyond the immediately apparent choices.
Objectives are very personal, but they need not be self-centered. Depending on the decision, the objectives you establish can reflect concerns for your family, your employer, your community and country, even the whole of society. Imagine that you’re a freelance writer and you’ve just completed a long assignment writing a computer training manual for a large company. Now you’re looking for your next job. Your immediate inclination is to solicit similar work from other big companies—that course would fulfill your objectives for maximizing your income and building your business portfolio. But then you begin to think of other objectives that are also important to you: supporting your community, helping the less fortunate, broadening your experience. You decide to take a lower-paying job writing a fundraising letter and brochure for a local hospice for AIDS patients. Even though you’ve forgone some income, you soon realize that, by looking beyond your own concerns, you’ve made a wise decision.
Let Your Objectives Be Your Guide
Sometimes, the process of thinking through and writing out your objectives can guide you straight to the smart choice—without your having to do a lot of additional analysis. Here’s an example. Imagine that your boss has just offered you a promotion. The new job, which requires you to move cross-country from San Diego to New York City, has a considerably higher salary. Your gut reaction is ‘‘Great, just what I wanted!’’ But careful thinking about your full set of objectives gives you reason to hesitate. While the new position would be advantageous financially, the move would disrupt the lives of your spouse, your 12-year-old twin boys, and yourself.
Working with your family, you determine your most important objectives: to promote your family’s quality of life, to further your professional development, and to contribute to your firm. When you look back at the offer in light of these objectives, your view changes dramatically. You realize that your family’s love of warm weather and outdoor recreation makes it likely that their quality of life would suffer in New York. You see that, although your new position would be challenging and satisfying, it’s actually less suited to your talents and interests than your current job. And you decide that your contributions to your firm would be about the same in either position. The money would indeed be better in New York, but maximizing your income, you now see, is only one of your fundamental objectives. Your decision is suddenly clear-cut. You decline the promotion, explaining your reasoning in clear and compelling terms to your boss.
Even when the answer isn’t so obvious, the objectives you set will help guide your entire decision-making process, from defining alternatives at the outset, to analyzing those alternatives, to justifying the choice you ultimately make. Specifically:
• Objectives help you determine what information to seek. You’ve been offered a job at a new employer. In setting out your objectives, you realize that the work environment is critically important to you. You log on to the Internet and browse through your prospective employer’s web site to find out what it indicates about the firm’s culture.
• Objectives can help you explain your choice to others. Your boss asks you to justify a recent decision to sign a long-term service contract for your company’s photocopying machines. Armed with your list of objectives, you walk her through your thought process, showing how your decision fulfilled the key objectives better than the other alternatives.
• Objectives determine a decision’s importance and, consequently, how much time and effort it deserves. If the time of tomorrow’s dentist appointment makes little difference in what really matters to you, why fuss over it?
Whenever you feel that your decision process is bogging down or heading off course, always focus back on your objectives. They’ll keep you on the right track.
Watch Out for These Pitfalls
Remember the old saying ‘‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any route will get you there’’? Too often, decision makers don’t take the time to specify their objectives clearly and fully. As a result, they fail to get where they want to go.
Why? Often, decisions makers take too narrow a focus. Their list of objectives remains brief and cursory, omitting important considerations that become apparent only after they have made a decision. They concentrate on the tangible and quantitative (cost, availability) over the intangible and subjective (features, ease of use). ‘‘Hard’’ concerns drive out the ‘‘soft.’’ In addition, they tend to stress the short term (enjoy life today) over the long term (have a comfortable retirement).
These missteps occur for two main reasons. First, many people spend too little time and effort on the task of specifying objectives. They feel they already know what they want and need. Without further reflection, they immediately pick an alternative that seems to ‘‘solve’’ their problem and they move on. Only later, when things turn out less well than anticipated, do they realize that they didn’t really understand their objectives after all. By then, of course, it’s too late.
Second, getting it right isn’t easy. Objectives don’t just pop up in nice neat lists. While you might think you know what you want, your real desires may actually be submerged—buried beneath the desires others have for you, beneath societal expectations and norms, beneath everyday concerns. For important decisions, only deep soul-searching will reveal what really matters—to you. This kind of self-reflective effort perplexes many people and makes them uncomfortable. But the more relentlessly you probe beneath the surface of ‘‘obvious’’ objectives, the better the decisions you’ll ultimately make.
Master the Art of Identifying Objectives
Identifying objectives is an art, but it’s an art you can practice systematically. Follow these five steps.
Step 1: Write down all the concerns you hope to address through your decision. Thrash about as much as necessary. Don’t worry about being disorganized or mixing up major concerns with ones that seem trivial. This early in the process, too much orderliness will only inhibit your creativity. Use as many ways as you can think of to jog your mind about present, future, and even hidden concerns. Don’t worry if you sometimes seem to be saying the same thing in different ways. Rephrasing the same concern may help you uncover important nuances.
Flesh out your list by trying some of these techniques:
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