Understanding the decision making process
The average adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day. And as your level of responsibility increases, so does the multitude of choices you have to make. People use different decision-making strategies in order to cope with the sheer volume of decisions that must be made.
Here’s five common strategies you are most likely to use:
- Impulsiveness — Leverage the first option you are given and be done.
- Compliance — Choosing with the most pleasing, comfortable and popular option as it pertains to those impacted.
- Delegating — Not making the decision yourself, but pushing it off to trusted others.
- Avoidance — Either avoiding or ignoring decisions in an effort to avoid responsibility for their impact of just simply preventing them from overwhelming you
- Prioritizing — Putting the most energy, thought and effort into those decisions that will have the greatest impact.
Start with ideation
Ideation is a dynamic process of generating, developing, and refining innovative ideas with a goal in mind. Rooted in brainstorming and strategic thinking, it serves as a powerful catalyst for exploring and solving problems, crafting groundbreaking products or services, and uncovering fresh opportunities for impact.
Impactor App provides a well-researched and user-friendly interface that will allow users to quickly get all their ideas in one place without many distractions. At this stage it’s important to welcome all ideas, in their raw and unrefined form. Impactor App provides a simple way to merge similar ideas and eliminate those that might not be relevant or out of scope, so you don’t have to hold back ideating.
Ideate on your own
As you start to ideate and put your thoughts and ideas in one place, you’ll start to unlock new perspectives, some you may not have considered previously. This is the magic of ideation.
Struggling with a creative block? Impactor App has you covered with our AI Assistant. Simply enable the click on the ‘Inspire Me’ button and the AI Assistant will generate suggestions based on your project description. Each time you click ‘Inspire Me’, you’ll receive a different perspective for you to consider.
Ideate with others
If you’re collaborating with others, it’s important to have the full perspective on everyone’s ideas and expectations. Without it, you’re going to find yourself misaligned and at-risk of conflicting goals within the group.
Invite collaborators to Impactor App project and invite everyone to add their ideas. Everyone will be able to see all the ideas, however, they won’t know who contributed them. This is to ensure people feel safe contributing their ideas, and are not influenced by individuals who they feel most inspired by.
Anyone struggling to come up with ideas can use the AI Assistant by clicking on the ‘Inspire Me’ button to explore new perspectives based on your project description.
Review and merge ideas
Once you feel you have enough ideas on the board, review the list. As you go review each idea, start grouping similar ones together. This can be done easily in Impactor App using real-time drag and drop functionality, so everyone can collaborate to organize the ideas.
If there are multiple ideas that reflect the same thought or objective, merge them together and create a statement that unifies the ideas being merged.
For example, there may be two ideas that are essentially the same but are written slightly differently to give each a nuance. This is common when multiple people get together to ideate. By merging multiple ideas it is good practice to capture those nuances, when relevant, by creating a new statement which will include those slight differences in one idea.
Once ideas are organized, prioritizing them and identifying what to action becomes easier. Organized ideas, once prioritized, provide a roadmap for impactful decisions and create alignment.
Prioritize using a Logic Model
Impactor App offers a user-friendly interface and powerful algorithm that will enable you to quickly prioritize and see what you need to focus on in real-time.
Once you have organized your ideas, click on the ‘Prioritize’ tab. Immediately you will see two likert scales appear on each idea — one represents ‘Value’ and the other ‘Effort’. The Value vs. Effort matrix is a popular and powerful decision-making method used to prioritize based on each idea’s potential value and the effort required to achieve it.
Here, “value” refers to the benefits or impact the idea will have, whereas “effort” is how much work the idea requires to implement.
Prioritize on your own
Use the likert scale to give each idea a score for value and effort. A score for each dimension is required for the algorithm to start calculating and offering a prioritization of your ideas.
Prioritization happens in real-time, which means right away you see what should be priority number 1, 2, 3, and so on. Once you have scored each idea you can rearrange them by priority order, which will provide you with a clear call-to-action. You now know what to do and in which order.
Prioritize with others
Each collaborator can add their own scores for value and effort for each idea. This means you get a true perspective of what your team really thinks about each feasibility and viability of each idea. Since collaborators can not see each other’s individual score, they also can not be influenced by their peers.
Impactor App uses the average of all collaborator’s scores to determine prioritization. Each collaborator will see prioritization happen in real-time and gain clarity on the true perspective of what they need to do and in which order.
Create focus with commit
Once you have clearly defined priorities, remember to commit. The act of committing ensures clarity and directs effort towards impact that needs to be achieved.
We often say that “Impactor App is a catalyst for culture change”, and the commit feature is a brilliant example of how we de-risk decisions by leaving no room for assumptions. As soon as you select a prioritized idea and click ‘Commit’, every collaborator receives a screen notification making it clear what they need to be focused on.
Activate impact
Once you have made your decision and have committed to an idea, it’s time to create an action plan, define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and hold regular check-ins to ensure you’re on the right track.
Stay tuned for how to activate impact with Impactor App.
