15 questions to gain clarity when making complex business decisions

Business can be confusing. There are a million decisions you need to make with very little time to formulate your decision, and usually these decisions are made in complex situations.

We can make rapid-fire decisions easily when we can wrap our minds around the situation but the more complex the situation gets, the harder it is to make a decision.

So here are 15 questions you can ask and answer to help you gain clarity when you make complex decisions. You won’t know the fully answer to each one of these but even the exercise of attempting to answer these questions will help the fog to lift so you can see the path toward an answer.

  1. How would I describe this situation?
  2. How would I describe this situation to a child?
  3. How long will this situation last?
  4. Will the situation increase in severity, decrease in severity, or remain constant?
  5. Am I the only one experiencing this? If someone else has experienced it, how did they handle it? (Even if they didn’t handle it well, that information is still helpful to me.)
  6. Have I ever experienced a similar situation before? If I have, how did I handle it? (Even if I didn’t handle it well the first time, that information is still helpful to me.)
  7. What was the cause of the situation? What was the cause of the cause?
  8. What were the Political, Economic, Social, and Technological influences that allowed this situation to come about?
  9. Are there any influences (organizational or individual) that will continue to influence this situation, perhaps changing it as time goes on?
  10. What is the true cost of this situation?
  11. Who is impacted? (There are usually more people impacted than you realize.)
  12. What are the most likely outcome(s) of this situation if I do nothing?
  13. What are ALL of the actions I could take in this situation?
  14. What are the outcomes of each action that I could take?
  15. Which actions and outcomes deliver the greatest benefit to me, my business (in the short-term and long-term), and my customers?