Smart Decisions ─ The Art of Strategic Thinking for the Decision-Making Process

Decision makers need to modify their thinking about how they deal with acquiring and analyzing information in each of the decision-making process steps. This approach requiring thinking modification will lengthen the process, make it more complex and to some more arduous, but the comprehensiveness of the new thinking approach should lead to improved and more effective decision making. The overall thinking modification framework presented in this book begins by suggesting that a decision-making process has to be uniquely applied to each of three different situational states—a current state, a future state and finally, a transition journey state are occurring between the current and future states. In each of these three different situational states, the linear, five-step process is the same, but the underlying issues within each step are different because the three situations themselves are different. The first step consists of a situational analysis to determine which situations in each respective state really need to be changed. For these change-needing situations, identifying and framing the challenges and determining what seems to be their underlying causes become the focus of the second step. Then generating and developing numerous solution possibilities or alternatives to either enhance or reduce/eliminate the causes of the previously-identified challenges constitutes the third step. Deciding which of the solution alternatives will form the solution set or sets constitutes the fourth step. The fifth and final step involves the decision maker planning how to implement the various chosen solutions and to also plan out a set of aftermath separate monitoring, learning, and sustainability control systems.

In order to comprehensively develop and investigate each and every one of these five process steps, the decision maker is asked to engage in thoroughly performing the seven thinking framework elements recommended in this book. Again there seems to be a linear mode of conducting these seven thinking elements until feedback looping analysis is performed, then nonlinearity enters the decision-making process. These seven thinking framework elements are described more fully in the succeeding chapters in this book. Suffice it to say that complex and even arduous thinking is required to complete creative and critical thinking, develop end state outcome expectations and evaluation criteria and conduct feedback looping analysis and consequence analysis before arriving at the final output for each step.

Various tools and/or techniques to create many of these thinking framework elements are also described in this book. All of this information is captured in the following six chapters of this book.

Dr. Thomas N. Martin, PhD is a Professor of Marketing and Management at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His research interests include decision making, turnover and retention, and organizational management. He has been published in several publications, including Academy of Management Review, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Personnel Psychology, Human Relations, Organizational Dynamics, Business Process Management Journal, and Journal of Change Management.