This article is written by Daisy Ireton, campaigns and communications associate at Apolitical

Every day we make thousands of choices — some estimate as many as 35,000.

Strategic decisions are the most important of the many choices we make. Working in government, strategic decisions are often made at pace and come with high stakes, involving long-term impacts that can be hard to predict or quantify. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has shown this to be more true now than ever.

At an Apolitical workshop in May, 600 public servants and policymakers discussed the barriers that hinder good strategic decision making. Below are 6 ways to make better strategic decisions that came out of the workshop.

1. Use a framework to structure your decision making process

Creating a framework and structure for your decision making process is key to making better strategic decisions. First, identify the different strategic elements of the decision: the different factors, objectives and considerations at play. The group making the decision then needs to reach consensus: How important is each factor? How much weight should it be given?

To help you reach a consensus, have each member of the group score the importance of each dimension, breaking each dimension down into a point estimate which informs a composite score. The point estimates then give you a numerical bound of how much the decision making process should move the needle one way or another.

This numerical bounding will also prevent the conversation devolving into a free for all, with different players representing conflicting interests and incentives lobbying against each other. Frameworks are key to shifting decision making away from the randomness of politics and culture that can derail the process of strategic decision making.

2. Acknowledge the political

Although you cannot eliminate the political from decision making, you should always acknowledge and account for it. For instance, political decisions may be smuggled in via a technocratic approach, allowing decision makers to declare that decisions were apolitical because they were made according to frameworks. This fails to acknowledge that how you build the framework is political in itself.

Uncertainty in decision making is a given

Another example of this is the distinction between primary and secondary effects. This often tells us more about the values and priorities of those making the distinction than it does about the factual importance of the different effects. This is not to say that you should ban the political from the decision making process. But decision makers should be more transparent and honest about when politics affect discussions and how frameworks are put together.

3. Trust your gut

Sometimes no matter how carefully you put together your decision making framework, you find yourself with a decision that just doesn’t sit right. In these situations, how much can or should you trust your gut?

The best way to think about this is striking a balance between the decision passing the “gut test” and the decision throwing up new considerations and realisations. If there are no surprises, then the process you’ve gone through to reach that decision hasn’t added any value. But if the decision doesn’t pass the “gut test”, it’s a sign you probably shouldn’t trust it.

When this happens you should revisit your framework. You can think of the framework as getting a second opinion from yourself. If your gut and the framework don’t agree, you should ask why that is. It could be that your intuition is picking up on something which you didn’t consider in the first place. In other words, have you omitted something from your framework?

4. Create your contingency plan before you need it

Uncertainty in decision making is a given. You can’t know everything and many factors will be unpredictable or out of your control. But this doesn’t mean you should ignore uncertainty. Instead you should prepare for it by creating a contingency plan.

Building a contingency plan, you can find yourself overloaded with information. To help you manage the cognitive load, go back to the basics. Oversimplifying the problem will help make the issue tractable. Putting your foot down where you’re sure you’re going to get some purchase — even if it is not what you’d like — is better than being stuck with no actions to take.

Unfortunately, more often than not we have to make decisions without all the parties in the room

And remember: contingency plans aren’t something you sit down and write in a crisis. Once you find yourself in the unexpected situation it is already too late — so be prepared!

5. Don’t rely on algorithms to save us from ourselves

Algorithms can be a controversial way to make decisions, but you shouldn’t write them off completely. The important thing to remember is just as there are good and bad decision makers, there are good and bad algorithms. The first mistake people make when thinking about algorithms is to see them as wholly separate from the human decision making process, when in fact that is simply not true.

When thinking about algorithms, first consider the design of the algorithm itself. The steps that the algorithm works through have themselves been prioritised one way or another, and that in itself is a work of strategy. We cannot rely on algorithms to save us from ourselves. What we can do is spend the time to distinguish when algorithms can best be put to use.

6. You have to care about representation

Unfortunately, more often than not we have to make decisions without all the parties in the room. This can result in a lack of diversity and representation with decisions disproportionately affecting certain groups. In these situations, ensuring the decisions are still nuanced can be tricky. Of course, there are procedural steps you can take to make sure you make inclusive decisions; stakeholder mapping, for example. But procedural approaches can only take you so far. In fact if you rely solely on the procedural, you will typically fail to make inclusive decisions.

Beyond thinking about who has a seat at the table, you also need to think about the many people who will be affected by the decision who aren’t considered at all in the decision making process. You have to care that those groups aren’t there. It’s key that you hold yourself responsible, even if no one is there telling you that you need to feel responsible. Only then can you make better, more inclusive strategic decisions. — Daisy Ireton

You can watch a recording of the full workshop here by entering the password 8Q%29?+5.

(Picture credit: Unsplash)