Decision Quality Blog

A decision table is the “best practice” tool for doing the following:

• Breaking a complex decision into component parts.
• Generating a wide range of interesting choices in each of those sub categories.
• Creating multiple possible scenarios for answering the larger exam question.

Here is a brief tutorial on how to build one.

Goal of the Activity

Building a decision table is an activity that can be done with the internal team or the client.  It can be done in small or large groups. The goal of this activity is to explore the key drivers of a complex decision-like thinking through a complex deal or developing a new strategy–to generate multiple possible scenarios. These scenarios can be further refined using a variety of tools and techniques until the team finally arrives at single, fully integrated strategy. The work is based on the principles of Decision Quality.

Typically this work is driven by a standard Decision Playbook: Either one we already have, or one we pre-build as part of the customization process.  In some cases, the team will build a Decision Table from scratch.

Categories of Choices

The team starts by identifying all the relevant categories of choices. These collectively comprise the framework you’ll use to develop and test strategic scenarios. There are many ways to do this, but success looks like topic headings in some sort of logical order.  For example, if we wanted to develop a ”’human resources strategy”’, the topic headings might look like these:

• Talent model
• Sourcing
• Recruiting
• Hiring
• Onboarding
• Training
• Coaching and Mentoring
• Career Path
• Rewards and Recognition

Note: This isn’t meant to be a complete list, just an illustration. The implication here is that we want to make choices in each of those areas. The sum of the choices, one or more from each category, becomes a possible strategy.
These topics become individual column headings. MS Excel is an excellent tool to organize the work.
In an even more complex setting, we might want to identify headings in multiple areas. For example, in a large outsourcing deal, there might be a section or table for each of these areas:

• Desktop
• Servers
• Infrastructure
• Service Desk
• Human Resources
• Financial

Note: You can imagine that under each of these super headings, there would be multiple topics or columns we would want to explore.

Ranges of Choices

Once you have laid out the story line, or the topics you want to explore (we use the idea of story line because you should be able to imagine describing your preferred strategy by simply narrating across the tops of each of the columns), the next step is to think through the full range of choices in each of those columns or categories. This is an activity best done in groups, and should be a creative, brainstorming, lateral thinking exercise.

Values are what we want, choices are ‘what we can do.  A choice is something tangible, something you can buy with time or money. So while we might want customer satisfaction, that’s a value, not a choice–only the customer can choose to be satisfied. But we can choose to invest in training our people (for example).

• Choices should be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.
• Choices should range from least to most, easiest to hardest, cheapest to most expensive, etc.

It is too often true that we gravitate immediately to choices that are familiar and safe. There are few better ways to kill innovative thinking. So the key thought here is to explore the full limits of each category of choice. For example, if we have a category called PRICE, here are some of the choices we could identify:

• More than anyone else
• Top of our peer group
• Par with our peer group
• Below peer group
• Lead the market
• Free
• Pay the customer

Note: Whether you would build a range of choices using those thoughts isn’t the point. All you need to notice here is that the range explores a FULL span of ideas. Why is this important? When we start to develop possible scenarios, exploring some extreme thoughts is often the key that unlocks the second and third idea that lead to a keen insight or sparkling strategy.

Strategic Lenses

The whole point of building a decision table is to build strategic scenarios. Think of a strategic scenario as a potential story line, competitive response, or strategy for cracking the problem you’re trying to solve. Common problems we’re trying to solve are the tendency to favor solutions we’ve seen work in the past, solutions that are favored by politically powerful people, or strategies that seem easy to do. Along the way, we often start down a particular path without fully considering all the interdependencies and follow on effects. So to do these things, we build strategic scenarios, using a decision table:

• Consider a wide range of alternative strategies before we land on one.
• Ensure that we’re thinking about all the dependencies (that’s why we built the table).
• Ensure that we’re getting multiple and different points of view early in the process (that’s why we do this in teams).

The process generally works like this: Once the decision table is built, we identify three to five strategic lenses, each of which highlights a different but interesting thought. In a competitive sales situation, those scenarios might have names that sound like these:

• What Will a Competitor Likely Do?
• The Solution We Think Our Customer Wants
• Win on Price
• Change the Game Using Services
• Compliant Solution
• If the problem you’re working is internal, the strategic lenses might sound like these:
• Quick and Dirty: Just Get it Done
• Maximize Customer Experience
• Minimize Roll Out Risk
• Aggressive Cost Reduction
• Compete for Talent

Scenario Development

A team is assigned to each strategic lens. The teams can be of any manageable size. The teams create strategic scenarios using their lens and the common decision table, making choices in each column that best support their lens. For example, you can easily imagine that the team most focused on how Competitor A will bid will be making different choices that the team looking through the lens of “Changing the Game.”

This activity is done simultaneously, so the teams are all working in parallel, using the same tool set, at the same time. When they’re done, the teams present their strategic scenarios using the decision table to guide the process. Teams use some sort of code or color to mark their choices on the decision table. The different strategic scenarios are overlaid, often using dots on MS Excel documents, to show the individual choices, as well as how they cluster and compare across strategies.