3.1.2 Application to your own case

Course subject(s) Module 3. Goals and Criteria

Five steps to applying the goals to your own case

As in every module of this course, it is now time to apply the new topics of Goals and Criteria to your own case.

In module 1, you selected one or more situations in your life that you want to get a firmer grip upon. Most likely this is your working life, but not necessarily. In the first two weeks, we tried to formulate what your role in this situation is. We also enriched your picture of the situation by including the perspectives of stakeholders.

In this module, we use your own perspective of the complex situation and that of the stakeholders you identified, to come to a clear set of criteria that you can use later on in the decision making process.

Below, I have developed a template with five steps that will help guide you through this process.

Step 1 – Define Stakeholders

For Step 1, select a few stakeholders from your power-interest analysis in the second week.

As we want a set of well-balanced criteria this week to compare our solutions against, your choice for stakeholders should be based on the differences between them.

If you select stakeholders that have comparable views on the situation, comparable interests and comparable objectives, you will most likely end up with comparable criteria as well. This will not help you very much.

In the decision making process, you want to opt for solutions that are robust and get supported by the stakeholders. That support is not only needed for your leadership, but also during the implementation, as only rarely can solutions for complex problem situations be implemented by one person alone.

Effective Decision Making: Dealing with Business Complexity by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://online-learning.tudelft.nl/courses/effective-decision-making-dealing-with-business-complexity/.