Turbocharge Your Next Move: A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Informed Choices
Introduction
How often do you charge headlong into a decision – whether personal or professional – only to realise later that you didn’t fully understand the problem?
When it comes to making decisions, clarity is power. Yet we’ve probably all been lost in a swirl of possibilities, gathering endless data, and stuck in a state of ‘analysis paralysis’.
What if a systematic, creative way existed to define the real issue and generate fresh ideas before evaluating your best path forward?
Enter the art of “informed choice,” a process that can transform confusion into clarity and move you from stuck to soaring.
In this month’s edition of Mindset Matters, we’ll explore a simple blueprint for helping individuals make well-informed choices. We’ll begin by discussing how to define the problem clearly, offer strategies to think creatively, and then show how to critically assess your best way forward.
You’ll discover practical steps you can apply at work – or in any facet of life – to consistently make better choices that serve your work and personal goals, and avoid getting stuck or creating false starts.
1. Clearly Define the Problem
Start With ‘Why?’
Making more robust and informed decisions starts with clearly understanding the goal or problem. There is no point in making an informed choice unless you know both your desired outcome and why it matters.
Start by asking yourself: “What problem am I trying to solve?” It’s incredible how often we realise we’ve been working on the wrong problem. “I need more salespeople” might actually be “I need better-trained salespeople.” Or “We must cut costs” might be “We need more innovation to drive revenue.” If you don’t define the issue accurately from the start, any decision that follows will be off track, time will be wasted and your people are likely to be disengaged.
Consider Multiple Angles
I once changed a process that opened the floodgates to unprecedented levels of cross-sales. I was amazed when sales increased by over 400% and I felt great about my decision. That is, until one of my operational colleagues, responsible for processing the sales, called me to say they couldn’t cope with this unexpected surge. As a result, my sales team started getting complaints from customers who chose to take their business elsewhere because our service wasn’t up to scratch. If only I had reached out to share my plan with others!
Look at your problem from many perspectives. You will see it one way, informed by your beliefs, biases and agenda, whereas someone else will view it from a different angle. Learn from my experience, consult with other departments, engage team members affected by the decision, and explore different perspectives within your customer base. Gathering these viewpoints will paint a more accurate picture of the problem and ensure any decision is grounded in reality and gains buy-in.
Put It Into Writing
Take your problem and define it; What precisely is the problem? Who does it impact? What are the consequences on performance? The video below walks you through the ‘Five Whys’ technique, which helps you reach the root cause. From here you can create your problem statement. For example, “Our poor sales performance leaves customers without valuable solutions to their problems.”
Then, reframe it. Changing the frame is a cognitive ‘trick’ that moves your thinking from problem-focused to solution-focused, focusing on the outcome you want, not what you don’t want. Continuing with the sales example, this would become: “Improve our sales performance by solving more of our customers’ problems.”
You should then turn this into a SMART goal in a single sentence: ‘To improve sales by X% by solving more of our customers’ problems.’
2. Be Creative: Generate Possibilities Before Judging
Don’t Jump Straight to the Matrix
Now that you have clearly defined your problem or goal, it can be tempting to jump straight to action. However, this is a classic pitfall in decision-making. Leaping straight into action with only one or two options is like placing all your eggs into one basket and is likely to cause frustration from a false start or wasted effort. It is better to engage in creative thinking first, broaden your possibilities, and increase your chances of success.
Brainstorm to Break Barriers
Encourage a short, focused brainstorming session where all ideas are welcomed, no matter how outlandish. In a team setting, declare a ‘no judgment’ zone for five or ten minutes. This period of open-ideation helps people break from tried-and-tested thinking patterns, leading to fresh options that might not have come up in a more conventional discussion.
Remember, better solutions arise from a broader pool of possibilities. Tapping into creative thinking is vital before you start sorting and evaluating ideas. Otherwise, you might never consider what could turn out to be your game-changing solutions.
Top Tip: Always encourage your team to begin by spending some time thinking on their own before socialising ideas, this will minimise authority bias, confirmation bias and grouthink.
Creative Tools
20-Idea Method: This simple tool encourages you to design an outcome-based question, write it down, and answer it in at least 20 different ways. It can also be helpful to give yourself a short time frame to do this – this can help you avoid prioritising ideas too soon. This template helps with this approach.
Download the 20 Idea Method template to creatively generate ideas to solve a problem or achieve a goal.
O! Ideas Method: A build on the 20-Idea Method, this tool gives a selection of pre-prepared questions designed to prompt a high number of ideas across the headlines of Options, Others and Obstacles. Again, the following template helps with this approach.
Download the O! Ideas Template to generate a broad range of possibilities to achieve your goal.
SCAMPER Method: SCAMPER is a powerful tool that helps spark creativity by challenging the way we think. It stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Rearrange, each prompting fresh ideas for innovation.
Download the SCAMPER template to generate creative solutions.
You can use SCAMPER to improve products, solve business challenges, refine marketing strategies, or enhance processes. To apply it effectively, start with a clear goal, go through each SCAMPER step systematically, capture all ideas without judgment, and refine the best ones for testing. Whether you’re stuck on a problem or looking for breakthrough ideas, SCAMPER is a simple yet effective way to think differently and drive better results.
3. Critical Thinking two by two
Great news! Creative thinking has helped you generate many ideas and possibilities, as they are at this stage. You now need to critically evaluate which ones are worth pursuing.
Why a 2×2 Matrix?
A 2×2 matrix is a simple yet powerful framework for structuring and comparing options. Its power is in minimising the effects of bias and personal preference on your decisions. When using a 2×2 matrix, one person’s agenda doesn’t dominate in a team situation, and you won’t get caught taking action on those things you feel are right; it introduces objectivity.
Typically, you place two factors or criteria along the vertical and horizontal axes – common examples include “ease vs impact”, “risk vs likelihood,” or “cost vs benefit.” Plotting your ideas in a grid allows you to visually cluster them based on how they measure up.
For example, imagine you’re evaluating potential customer service improvements. You might use “customer impact” as the vertical axis (low to high) and “cost to implement” as the horizontal axis (high to low). Now each idea can be placed in one of four quadrants:
This visual spread helps you quickly see which ideas are easiest, require more resources, and provide the biggest payoff.
Steps to Implement
1. Define Your Axes: After clarifying your problem, identify the two most critical factors to guide your decision (e.g., cost, resources, impact, time, complexity).
2. List Your Options: Take your possibilities and briefly describe each.
3. Plot Your Ideas: Assign each idea to a quadrant based on how it ranks against both axes.
4. Discuss and Debate: Review how the options cluster. This conversation is often where hidden insights emerge – why certain ideas land in specific quadrants.
5. Decide Your Next Move: Typically, you start with quadrants that offer high impact at low cost, but don’t overlook ambitious ideas that could be game changers even if they are more challenging to implement.
Ready Made Tools
Download the Ease vs Impact handout to assess which ideas will have the most impact for the least effort.
Download the Risk vs Likelihood Matrix to assess which risks you might need to pay attention to as part of your goal or project thinking.
Download the Eisenhower (Urgent vs Important) Matrix to help you decide what you should be doing and what you should not be doing at all!
Download the RACI Matrix to help you clearly understand who is impacted and their role, whether they need to be kept in the loop, whether we need to involve them (think about my experience above), who is responsible for what, and who is accountable for the goal.
4. Five Practical Steps to Help Individuals Make Informed Choices
- Create a ‘Decision Toolkit’: Put together an essential document (you could try our business challenge kit) or template that outlines each step: define the problem, brainstorm, and evaluate options using a 2×2 matrix. A straightforward process can ease the burden on individuals overwhelmed by decision-making.
- Encourage Reflection and Self-Awareness: Ask reflective questions: “Why is this choice important now?” or “How does this align with my (or the team’s) bigger goals?” Self-awareness helps ensure that the choices align with deeper values and objectives, rather than being purely reactive.
- Use Collaborative Platforms: If you’re in an organisation with distributed teams, use online whiteboards or collaboration tools. This way, everyone can contribute to brainstorming and matrix-plotting in real time. It’s also a living document you can revisit to measure progress or reconsider options when circumstances change.
- Build in a ‘Pause & Check’: Once a potential solution emerges from the matrix, pause to revisit your original problem statement. Ask: “Does this solution truly address the defined core problem?” This simple step avoids scenario creep, where you solve an offshoot problem without noticing it.
- Test Small and Scale Up: Test your chosen path on a small scale before rolling it out company-wide. This pilot approach allows you to gather accurate data, refine the solution, and build confidence in your decision. If the results look promising, scale it up. If not, return to your matrix for fresh options.
5. Overcoming Three Common Pitfalls
Pitfall 1: Failing to Acknowledge Bias
Confirmation bias and other mental shortcuts can derail an otherwise solid decision-making process. Acknowledge that everyone has blind spots. Ask someone outside your immediate team to challenge or test your assumptions.
Pitfall 2: Overcomplicating the Matrix
Yes, you can plot multiple factors, but a simple 2×2 approach is often enough to provide clarity. Don’t let the framework become so elaborate that it defeats the purpose of a quick, straightforward assessment.
Pitfall 3: Inertia After the Matrix
A thorough review is fantastic, but please don’t let your efforts sit on a shelf. Turn your resulting insights into concrete actions, assign accountability for each selected option, and set deadlines for follow-up and measurement.
Conclusion
Making informed choices isn’t about having a magic wand that always guarantees success. It’s about stacking the odds in your favour by grounding your decisions in a clearly defined problem statement, opening yourself, and your team, up to creative possibilities, and then applying a logical, visual framework like a 2×2 matrix to weigh your options. From there, the real magic lies in translating insights into action—testing, iterating, and refining your approach.
Adopting this disciplined yet creative process makes you far more likely to make choices that align with your goals and values, and empower others to do the same. Whether you’re leading a small team or a global organisation, informed decision-making can be the difference between spinning your wheels on autopilot and sparking the kind of breakthroughs that drive tangible results.
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