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Learn more about Smart decision making
In the process of innovation, decision-making is key. Most ideas will not make it. Resources and budget are limited and businesses need to decide what ideas to follow up on or not. Smart decisions making is the methodology to recognize, score and select the best ideas to follow up on.
A smart decision-making process is vital for every business.
In a world where customer demands and market conditions constantly shift, staying relevant and competitive means making smart choices.
As a business, every decision you make can either advance or delay your success. When deciding between circumstances, you need to remember that:
1. The decisions that you make will establish the direction of your business
As an innovation leader, you are tasked to create many decisions that can affect your innovation activities. Because of the accountability that comes with it, every decision must be made for the benefit and interest of the organization.
Otherwise, unwanted consequences may follow.
For this reason, it might be a little challenging to handle every situation with utmost confidence. After all, everything comes with uncertainty. And no matter how much we reflect on it, a part of the company’s future lies in your hands.
Thus, making smart decisions can lead you to a series of actions that can help you accomplish your organization’s financial goals in time. While bad decisions, on the other hand, can move your business two steps behind.
2. Decision-making skills aside, effective decision-making happens when every choice is made with research in mind
When making decisions, decision-makers should always take facts and other forms of data into account.
Aside from having to assess the present conditions surrounding the company, it is essential for every decision-maker to reflect on any outcome that comes with a particular decision.
Human decision-makers are prone to making errors. Sometimes, our intuition, emotions, doubts, and confirmation bias can get in the way when making important decisions.
Hence, having to rely on tools and highly researched data can make a significant difference in our decision quality.
Now of course, with the company’s risk tolerance taken into the picture, every alternative must be cross-checked with the criteria chosen by the management.
That way, most decisions that you make, if not all, can strongly rely on the framework that the company works with.
3. Good decisions bring plenty of benefits, while bad decisions lead to negative consequences
A crucial component of a leader’s job in the workplace is to make smart and effective decisions that favor the organization.
The goals you want to achieve, the objectives you want to prioritize, and the causes you support can play an integral role in making better decisions.
That way, you can:
- Save time and resources on implementing various projects, or
- Prevent the risks and mistakes that can potentially harm your company in any way
However, your decisions can still affect the company even if you are not occupying a leadership position.
For example, poor decisions can lead to:
- Poor productivity
- An upset in your work-life balance, and
- A dissatisfaction in your number and quality of outputs
Using a tool to make smart decisions can help you outline all the potential alternatives to your choices, their costs, and their success or failure probabilities.
By simplifying your decision-making process, a tool can help you make the best decision every time. Using a tool can also effectively get you through every stage of the decision-making process.
From here, you may consider your alternatives, examine them, and decide which course of action is best for you based on the data that you have.
Regardless of your choice, using a tool for decision-making can help you create decisions you can feel confident about.
Moreover, it may also develop your natural decision-making abilities over time and increase your aptitude for addressing and solving difficulties that come your way.
Your idea management process impacts the progress of your innovation activities and affects your success as a business in general.
However, idea management can take a while as plenty of concepts are involved in the process. Plus, to execute only the best initiatives, you must scour through all your generated ideas and decide which ones are worth pursuing.
The good news is, using this three-gate review process will allow you to implement only the best ideas.
It will help you decide which concept is best for your next big innovation project. More importantly, it will help you fill your innovation portfolio with concepts of the greatest quality and impact.
Peer review
Known as the first stage in your decision-making process, the peer review is completed during the ideation phase.
In this stage, your peers or co-users provide feedback on the ideas you’ve contributed to the organization. They can write comments, suggestions, and ratings while participating in a brainstorming campaign, innovation challenge, or board session.
Peer reviewing is particularly valuable since it allows mission owners to pre-filter many suggestions on or after completing a mission.
Expert review
Now that your peers have reviewed your ideas and prefiltered those that have not made the cut, admin users can now take their place for the second review session, referred to as the expert review.
Once a mission is finished, the members of your innovation team, scouts, and internal experts, collectively called ‘admin users,’ should review your collected ideas and assign their ‘expert scores.’
That way, your best peer-reviewed, and expert-reviewed ideas can be examined for further assessment, analysis, proposal preparation, and validation as a prospective innovation project.
Stakeholder review
The last round of reviews is conducted by none other than your company’s stakeholders. This group comprises internal managers, clients, partners, and external experts.
Because of their knowledge and expertise in innovation, these people are equipped to perform the final examination stage. That way, you can validate your ideas and prioritize the ones they’ve voted best for your next innovation project.
The three-gate review process brings four major benefits:
1. Screened ideas
Aside from the feedback you’ve gained in the entire review process, the ideas you’ve collected have now been examined through different lenses. Various standpoints considered, these concepts have now been evaluated in terms of viability, feasibility, and desirability.
Now, you can determine whether your idea has the potential to make it big in the industry. A balanced review of your ideas has successfully taken place. Now, you can apply all the suggested modifications to improve your idea.
2. Increased creativity
Because your ideas are assessed by people from different backgrounds, your organization has now gained greater creativity for innovation.
You’ve acquired learnings from one another. And now, you’ve had a greater sense and understanding of which concepts can help you in achieving your goals and why.
That way, you know what KPIs to track and objectives to put in place for measurable outcomes.
3. Increased innovation success rate
Because the three-gate review process filters out bad ideas, your innovation team is now exclusively focused on implementing proven, high-priority solutions.
For this reason, you have increased your rate of innovation success. You have also avoided the wasteful use of funds on unproven, less likely-to-succeed concepts.
Idea management is a long and comprehensive process.
At the onset, this activity is not only limited to ideation. It also includes the gathering, evaluation, and selection of ideas at the same time.
However, an effective brainstorming session has to yield at least 300 ideas. So if you have to manually go through these concepts and examine them one by one, your entire idea management process might take a while to accomplish.
For this reason, Accept Mission — a powerful idea management software — has created various features that can help you with processes like:
Collecting ideas
Accept Mission launches different innovation challenges to help you collect ideas.
In the software, you can create hackathons, innovation campaigns, and other missions that would allow your employees to share their ideas on different topics and issues that you want to create solutions.
Using graphs and smart insights for analysis
Accept Mission has plenty of integrations that you can use in analyzing ideas and projects that are truly beneficial for your business.
With our Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and other graphs, you can present relevant information and extract smart insights for analysis.
Selecting ideas with criteria you design
You can also utilize our selection tools in generating a list of top ideas in a certain period.
Then, after validating a subset of them with a stakeholder group on your own specified selection criteria, you can speed up your decision-making process in terms of implementing projects.
Collaborating on the review process
This software allows you to leave feedback on concepts that you can rate and relate to.
Try engaging your employees with our gamification features to amass points, climb leaderboards, and exchange innovation experiences with others.
Approving ideas through a jury/expert group
Because Accept Mission is also a tool for innovation, approving ideas through a jury or expert group is made possible by the platform’s collaboration feature. Just invite your expert group over and have them examine your ideas on the software.
