Clarifying the future for effective decision-making
Communicating the promise of your organization
Prioritization and motivation for achieving goals
Considering short-term and long-term implications
It's time to take action:
The most important thing for the listener to do after listening to the podcast is to download the decision activator tool mentioned in the episode, which can be found at simplifyingentrepreneurship.com/fiveFs.
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Want to know how aligned your business really is? Download the Business Alignment Scorecard to measure your Promise, Product, Process, People, Promotion, and Profit, and see where you need to focus next. Download here
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What's the most important thing you do as a leader of your business? Well, you make decisions, and it's all about the steady progression of moving from operator to owner in your business. Ultimately, decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of your organisation. And if you're making all of the decisions, you've got some work to do. And in this six part series, we'll go through the five F's of better decision making, the framework will help get the craziness out of your head and onto paper so that you can reduce procrastination and advance the ideas you have even faster to download a PDF copy of decide already the five apps of decision making, as well as a downloadable worksheet on the subject so that you can make faster and better decisions in your life and business. Slide on Over to simplifying entrepreneurship.com five apps, that's simplifying entrepreneurship.com forward slash number five, the letter F and the letter S. Well, setting goals and envisioning outcomes is where the future starts, for decision making. And that's the first of five apps. Remember, the five F's of decision making are the future, the facts, the figures, the feelings, and the feedback in today's episode is all around the future. It's like setting the goals and envisioning the outcomes. If you don't have a clear vision of what you want this decision how you want it to come out at the end, then it's going to be very hard to make this decision. And that's one of the reasons why business leaders procrastinate, because they think about things and they think about things, but they haven't clarified the future. Yes. And they haven't clarified the other four F's as well. And that's why this whole process is important. But starting things off and understanding what the benefits of this decision will be, not only to you, but to your team and to your most of all your clients. Because remember, everybody buys a better life. And if you can't depict how that future is going to be better for your client, chances are, the decision you're making now that fulfils the client need is probably not going to be a beneficial one for either you or for them. And that's why really understanding the future of this decision. So we always start off, I've come up with a little tool called the decision activator. And you can download it as part of the package in this series download at simplifying entrepreneurship.com forward slash five F's, but the one sheet is called the decision activator. And it always starts with, what do you need to decide upon. So pick that decision, and then outline the impact of the future. And when we outline the impact of the future, you should always be outlining not only what it looks like to win that decision, but what it looks like if we don't win the decision. Because when you have clarity of both sides, it helps in capture what it is you need to do. And you know what, not every decision you're going to move ahead with because sometimes at the end of using this framework, the decision activator to actually Decision Factor is we're not going to move ahead with this idea. And that's a win. Sometimes just going through these frameworks allows us to put things to bed. And that's a really important piece of deciding. Because if you're using all of your decision juices, and by the way, there's lots of talk out there around how we make 35,000 decisions in a day. I mean, 35,000, it's crazy, but I get it as a business owner, and I'm sure you do, too. The idea here is that we're making decisions that are of the highest level impact in our position, I've got another saying that goes like this decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of the organisation. If everybody in the organisation understands what the promise is that you're making to your clients, then they should be able to understand the future of what we want the decision to be right. And that's one of your primary jobs, as the leader of your organisation has to be forever communicating the promise and saying, This is what we do. This is why we do it. Because everybody buys a better future. Every client that puts down their dollar or their 1000s of dollars or millions of dollars, whatever business you're in, for your services is buying a better future. So in order for you to make this decision in your business, whatever it may be, maybe it's hiring your next person, maybe it's bringing in the next machine, maybe it's bringing on a new point of sale system, or it doesn't really matter. It could be buying a vehicle that you need for service in your business. But all of these decisions, we need to outline the future. That's where it all starts the impact of this. How will it make our business better so that we can make the business better for our clients? I'd like to break down the future segment of this exercise with a few different segments and one is prioritisation. And a lot of times when we talk about prioritisation of this future impact. It's about the timeline, right? When you have the clear vision and the set of goals, you're able to prioritise these decisions based on the potential impact of your business's success, you know, it ensures that you invest your time and energy and resources in the most critical aspects of your business. And the next one is motivation, your goals and your vision serves as a source of motivation and inspiration. And it drives you and your team, right, we talked about your team to make decisions that contribute to achieving the desired outcomes of the decision, driving you and your team to make the choices that contribute to achieving the desired outcomes of the decision. How important is that you got to be motivated to get it done, you have to understand with full clarity the future, and then we align it all up with the other five apps, right, the facts, the figures, the feelings and the feedback. Often, when I'm doing this part of the exercise, I'll look at evaluating the short term and the long term implications, just a couple of quick jot notes. I mean, ultimately, we're flushing this out. But at the same time, if all you have time for is a few minutes, get them down on a piece of paper, so you can go back to it and dig into it a little bit later. Right. When making decisions, it's essential to consider both of the immediate and long term consequences. And think about how the choices will impact your business in the short term, or long term. How does it align with all of the things you've set up in your guiding principles? And how does this decision align with the scope of all of the things that you want to get done? Got to think also about some of the potential obstacles, like what is going to be put in the path here of making this, either win or lose this decision, as we talked about, think about not only how you can win this decision, but how you lose this decision? What are those obstacles, lay them out, identify the challenges upfront, so you can develop the strategies to overcome them and to mitigate essentially the potential risks. Consider those worst case scenarios. It's important, and we will consider them a little bit deeper as we go into the facts and the figures. But get your general feelings here on the future. When we start looking at that by incorporating the futures, setting a few of these goals and visioning some of these outcomes into your decision making process, you'll just be better equipped to make more informed choices. So if you've got a decision make now where do you start? You start with envisioning the future, the good and the bad, the obstacles, the priorities, and how does it align with your guiding principles? And how does it make your client's life better? When you make your clients life better, your business is going to be better. And when your business is better, you're going to have a better life. And that's why we all get into business. Because we want to have a better life. So think about that as the first half of the five apps of better decision making. It's where to start a better future. What's the decision that's been keeping you up at night, you probably have one you've been procrastinating it for a while now you know it's there. It's taking up your valuable use of time it's taking up your mental energy taking up some of those decision making juices. Take out a sheet of paper and write down what the future outcomes are right now so that you start getting the stuff out of your head onto paper so that you can take action upon the decision that you need to make. Stay tuned next week for the next edition the next F which is all around how facts play into better decision making. Here on the business owner breakthrough podcast. Now go and make it a great day and ironic media production, visit us at our ONICK media.com
