Your Email:
Your Name:
To:
Subject:
Message: Hi, I thought you might be interested in this article I found. The Eight Step Process to Rational Decisions for Your Law Firm Rainmaker lawyers are strategic thinkers. This is especially true when it comes to attorney marketing. Strategic thinking requires a cool head. Remaining calm and rational, even in the face of extreme pressure, is the hallmark of highly successful attorneys. A calm veneer doesn’t mean that you are unfeeling; it simply means that you are engaging the logical aspects of your thinking process. The following process can help you rein in your emotional response and smooth the way for successful strategic thinking. Step 1: Disassociate Yourself If every strategic thinking situation has an emotional aspect, then how do some people make decisions that appear to be more rational than others? Attorneys who make decisions that appear to be more rational often disassociate themselves from the project or process. This is difficult to do but it is essential to good decision making. Follow the example of surgeons, firefighters, and military commanders. They are forced to make decisions that have life and death implications – and they must do so under extreme pressure. They have mastered the ability to temporarily separate themselves from emotion of the situation. A successful strategic thinker views a problem as though she is completely detached from the circumstances surrounding it. By viewing the situation through this lens, he is objective in his assessment of the challenge. He prevents his personal emotional investment from playing a role in the moment. Step 2: Define Specific Outcomes Identify what this decision making process or plan will accomplish. It is always helpful to start with the ideal outcome. Once you set the ideal outcome as the goal for your decision or plan, you activate the creative side of your brain. At this stage, you only want to make certain that the outcome is possible. You are not concerned with probability. Step 3: Acknowledge Your Instincts What is your gut feeling or intuition? Is it something real, tangible, or merely a thought that pounds at you like a base drum? It is important that you acknowledge any feelings you have about the problem or the desired outcome. At the outset of your decision making process, list possible solutions based solely on instinct. These hypotheses will free you from the nagging of your emotional subconscious. Generating purely emotional solutions up front will put them into perspective as you complete your research. Step 4: Research the Problem Next you must find the root cause of the problem or the most basic critical factor in your decision or plan. The goal here is to get to the heart of the matter and address the issue once and for all time. Even something as simple as the case of a restaurant owner who is having trouble with complaints of cold food from dinners in the restaurant can be solved by rational decision making. The key in this process is to trace the problem down to the root cause and find out why the food is cold when it reaches the customers’ tables. There are several factors that may contribute to this problem, such as distance of the dining room from the kitchen; not using plate covers; the speed of the service; the waiting time from preparation to service; and the temperatures of the dining room and the kitchen. However, none of these contributing factors will make any difference if the food is not cooked to the proper temperature in the first place. In this example, improper cooking temperature is the root cause of the problem. Looking for the root cause is the primary purpose of your research. In the case of strategic planning, the goal is to get to the most basic level of the desired outcome so that you can take as few steps as possible in order to achieve your goal. You are looking for the shortest distance between where you are now and where you want to go. For example, let’s say you are a salesperson working on commission and your goal is to increase your salary by 20 percent by the end of the year. For planning purposes, the shortest distance to your goal is to sell more products to your customers. Therefore, researching ways to increase product sales is the best place to begin. Step 6: Generate Alternatives Once you have identified your goal and have conducted enough research to recognize patterns that will lead to its achievement, you should begin to look for potential actions that can help you move from your current state to your desired state. Because you’re apt to react more emotionally when you are backed into a corner, give yourself options in assessing the situation. Step 7: Assess Risk Now that you have a list of options to help you achieve your goal or solve a problem, you need to look at each of the options in front of you and evaluate each of them from a risk perspective. In doing so, you need to look at two factors: the amount of risk and the probability that negative consequences will occur. Step 8: Select a Solution Your goal is to select the option that will help you achieve your goal or solve your problem while minimizing your risk. You are, in essence, selecting the best option or, depending upon the situation, the option that is least bad. In the case of the restaurant manager, he will minimize his risk by closing his restaurant on the day of the week that generates the least revenues. This eight step process may appear to be a very involved task but once internalized, it will become second nature. Step 5: Recognize Patterns After finding the root cause of your problem or the shortest distance to your goal, you should begin to work backwards towards your current state. In doing this, you will notice factors that contribute to the root cause of the problem. In planning, you will find steps that will contribute to overall goal achievement. You should look for patterns in these contributing factors. As patterns emerge, you must begin to look for ways to enable desired behavior and permanently discontinue undesirable behavior. Link: http://www.rainmakerlawyer.com/site/permalink/the_eight_step_process_to_rational_decisions_for_your_law_firm/