Decision Making

In The Box Podcast

Episode 28: Team Trouble, Leadership, Memory And More – Podcast

Garth Beyer

On this episode of In The Box Podcast, we talked about the point of reflecting on memories, how to address a team member who is doing something that bothers you, leaders playing bad cop, what one makes art special and knowing the best timing for a decision.

Enjoy the episode and remember to download on iTunes here.

Episode 28: Team Trouble, Leadership, Memory And More

Memory – How much emphasis do you place on reflecting on memories from the past?

Team – One trick to addressing a team member / co worker who is doing something that bothers you?

Leadership – Do you think leaders ought to ever play bad cop?

Art – What is one thing that makes something art?

Bonus – One method to recognize when the timing is right for making an important decision?

 

Stay Positive & Now Now Now

Who Decided This?

Garth Beyer

When someone walks through your agency, reviews your strategy plan, considers purchasing your product, can they answer this question?

Do they know who decided to have yellow lights instead of white lights in the chandelier? Do they know who decided to pitch magazine publications instead of Television news outlets?

Next, is that person accessible?

Ignorance is more rooted in not having a pathway for feedback to the person who made the decision than it is them not caring in the first place.

One of my colleagues sets the work flow up perfectly for the team. She says, “Garth, I want you to own this.” If anything were to go wrong, everyone knows who decided it and they have my contact info.

On the other hand, when I go to the bathroom and see the toilet paper isn’t on the right way or when I walk to the bank and I try pushing the door open when it’s meant to be pulled, who can I talk to about that?

 

In a world packed with designers and decision makers, are you making it clear to the customer, the viewer, the attendee, the visitor who decided X or Y or Z?

 

Stay Positive & Communicate Who Owns It And How To Reach Them

The Quicker You Decide…

The Quicker You Decide…

Garth Beyer

Decide

the more time you will have.

The quicker you decide on a theme, the more time you will have to create article topics for it.

The quicker you decide on a name, the more time you will have to brand it.

The quicker you decide on a goal, the more time you have to work toward it.

And my personal favorite,

The quicker you decide, the more time you have to either roll in the success of the decision or the more time you will have to learn from the failure of it.

 

Stay Positive & What’s Taking You So Long?

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Why We’re So Indecisive And How To Make Smart Decisions

Why We’re So Indecisive And How To Make Smart Decisions

Garth Beyer

Weighing Options

When we’re indecisive, we often look at the opportunity cost, which is the benefit you forfeit when you choose one course of action over another. Think pros/cons list. This gets us nowhere.

Why so indecisive?

We’re so indecisive because we’re trying to do an opportunity cost analysis, but we’re refusing to assign a monetary value to intangible things like our time, energy, passion, happiness, effort.

The pros/cons list is flawed in our world of yin and yang. For every pro you write, you can also think of a con for it. The weight in a pros/cons list, then, cannot be determined by the number of items on each side; it must be determined by the weight of all the items added up on each side. And that requires you to assign a monetary value to each.*

To be decisive, measure the collective weight of the pros against the collective weight of the cons.

You don’t make a diet decision based on the number of things you eat vs the number of things you don’t eat. You make a diet decision based on the number on the scale.

 

Stay Positive & Weight Over Quantity

*Certainly you can use some other weight measurement. But, hey, nothing is much easier to understand than money.

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Is A Decision

Garth Beyer

Cutting this to do that… is a decision.

Being busy… is a decision.

Staring at the blank page/canvas/map in front of you instead of forging on… is a decision.

Admitting defeat… is a decision.

Picking yourself up after rejection… is a decision.

Picking yourself to lead… is a decision.

Wearing two different socks… is a decision.

Running from fear… is a decision. So is dancing with it.

“I don’t have time”… is a decision.

Your motivation… is a decision.

Cutting corners and making shortcuts… is a decision.

Being in it for the long-haul… is a decision.

Not moving forward with a project because your partner back out… is a decision.

Everything you do throughout the day you decide to do. So it is with what you think, how you feel, who you talk to, who you ignore. Noticing each decision may not make you feel comfortable or safe. In fact, it will likely be the opposite. Yet, it’s exactly how you will get to where you want to go: quicker, stronger, happier.

Controlling your life… is a decision.

 

Stay Positive & No One Said Steering A Boat In Rough Waters Was Easy

 

 

Making Better Choices

Garth Beyer

From time to time, we all say to ourselves, “From here on out, I’m going to make better/smarter/bolder choices.” Usually, we make a mistake and promise ourselves we won’t do it again.

A good percent of the time, we break those promises. We don’t make better choices, we just find a different way to make a wrong choice. And maybe that’s okay, maybe that still get’s us in the right direction or at least closer to it.

The real trigger to knowing you will make better choices is when you want to go back in the past to make them. It is only when you want to make better choices in your past, that your future choices are guaranteed to be better.

The future, that’s the scary part because the choices you want to make, well, you may not have to make them. The future may have something else in store for you.

To make better choices, you have to break the illusion that better choices come from the past or in the future. The only choice that matters right now is the one you’re currently making.

And if you’re choosing to dwell on the past or fear for the future, you’re not making better choices.

 

Stay Positive & Choose Wisely, Moment To Moment

Garth E. Beyer

A Problem-Solving Tool: SWOT

A Problem-Solving Tool: SWOT

Garth Beyer

To evaluate a public relations project or campaign, you can use the SWOT analysis, a strategic planning method that allows you to get a better understanding of the situation so you can make justified and positive adjustments.

This tool, credited to Albert Humphrey, is one that, if done at the beginning of a project or start of a decision-making process, can certainly be returned to at any point of the projects implementation. This SWOT analysis is the core of your project, its foundation, that if you are ever lost while on the path to making a decision, you can simply refer back to your SWOT analysis to redirect yourself on a profitable course.

Strengths: Attributes of the organization that are helpful to achieving the objective.
Weaknesses: Attributes of the organization that are harmful to achieving the objective.
Opportunities: External conditions that are helpful to achieving the objective.
Threats: External conditions that are harmful to achieving the objective.

What you may have noticed is that this analysis focuses both on internal affairs as well as external. Strengths and Weaknesses are regarded distinctly as internal factors, whereas Opportunities and Threats are regarded distinctly as external factors.

It is extremely important to label the conditions and attributes correctly in relation to whether they are internal or eternal as it is this sort of labeling that assists you in prioritizing, classifying your actions in order of importance.

For a visual examples and more information on the SWOT analysis, I suggest visiting this site.