Thursday, May 21, 2015

Big Decision to Make? Try My New Decision-Making Worksheet


I have created a Decision-Making Worksheet. With its roots in the Benjamin Franklin method (see below), it is an innovation of my own. You will find it on my LinkedIn Profile, in the Summary section.
I hope you find it helpful!

More About Making Decisions

Decisions are always about the future, and life pivots on them. Turn right? left? We will never know fully how life would be different today, had we turned a different direction in the past.

Some choices are small and inconsequential. On other choices our future prosperity and happiness may rest.

Here's the rub:
When consequences of an action are separated from that action by great amounts of time or space, it can be difficult, not only to predict the consequences, but to correlate the two later. In other words, when something great happens today, we may not fully recognize what we did (or what happened) that set that up. The opposite is also true: when something terrible happens, we may never fully recognize that it would never have happened had we not done x.

Benjamin Franklin innovated an oft-repeated decision-making tactic - the T chart. Picture a vertical line down the middle of a page, and a horizontal line across the top. On top of the left side, write "PRO"; on the top of the right side, write "CON". Then make a thoughtful list of pros and cons of a certain choice. Ben Franklin was a brilliant man, a self-made millionaire that was irreplaceable to the founding of the republic known as the United States of America. His advice remains useful today.

Today, more is possible. It should be easier to connect the  dots between cause and effect - both to understand the past, and to shape the future. Today we have lots of specialized expertise, and we have social networks that can collect and gather collective wisdom. What if I created a site where people can input their own stories and dilemmas, and receive that crowd-sourced wisdom.

hmmm....