Decision Mapping : A Fast Start for Marketing Strategy.
Key Sections
Decision Mapping Steps Benefits of Decision Mapping The “ThinDecision” Trap The Mindset |
Decision Mapping is a way of thinking, and a set of tools. While not intended as a complete strategy-building process, it’s an efficient first step to get into action. Any size organization can use it to enhance their strategic decision making.
It also saves time and money. This occurs because decision mapping forces management to think, and think thoroughly and creatively, before rushing headlong into major studies; or worse, making costly, short-sighted strategic mistakes. Analytical work and research will likely needed at some point in the strategy process. By starting out with Decision Mapping, however, management increases the probability that subsequent work will have a high payoff.
Decision mapping is a “fast-start” process. The four core steps of the process primarily call for assessing existing information, ideas, and internal drivers. It is a flexible approach adaptable for quickly responding to a new emerging opportunity, issue or threat.
Decision Mapping is like a “war room.”
The activities and mindset for “mapping” a decision are similar to what goes on in a war room. In a war room, decision makers assemble and inventory resources, identify possible targets, and generate options for deploying those resources for maximum payoff. In a business unit, the goal is usually to beat the competition on various battlegrounds. For business decision makers, as in a war room, the choice of how and where to deploy resources starts by generating and identifying the opportunities and refining options. Everyone must be fully alert, using both creative and analytic thinking, insuring that all possible strategic opportunities are uncovered and debated.
The A-B-C’s of a Decision.
What exactly is a strategic decision?
To “decide” means “cut off” all but one course of action. This implies that there is more than one choice, say, choices A, B, or C. This is a robust decision because it includes more than one real choice. In strategy building I suggest that executives need to avoid the “thin decision” where only one option is evaluated (choosing option A, or not choosing A). In the daily life of an enterprise, managers make hundreds of thin decisions routinely. Otherwise, they would never get much else done. When in the arena of major tactical or strategical decisions, however, the robust decision, or A-B-C model yields vastly better decisions.
Thin decisions usually do not yield optimum results because there has been work on only one option. If the “not A” choice is made, we’re back to square one: The decision is to maintain the status quo. The Thin Decision Trap occurs because is the routine and normal way of day-to-day decisions: a manager identifies a problem and generates a solution. Problem: solution. Over and over. It is the operational norm, and it works. The trap is that when we deal with strategy decisions, the thin decision model does not yield superior results because real options are not fully developed and contested, and rarely is creative thinking applied. It’s risky, and a lazy way of decision-making when big stakes strategy is involved.
The Decision Pathway.
Opportunity generation is the starting point. To create robust decisions I suggest following a pathway where the first step is
scanning and identifying opportunities. These might involve market, channels, technology, process innovation or other opportunity areas.
The triangle graphic shows the pathway narrowing at each stage. This represents the idea that high-leverage power decisions must first focus on opportunity scanning to generate many possibilities.
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| Decision Pathway |
Once many opportunities are found, they are converted into strategic options. Building options takes work: analysis, research, and creative thinking. The team then refines options with strategic intelligence. The refined options are then evaluated against the Crucial Issues.
While decision mapping specifics may vary, four primary stepping stones in a cycle need to be covered for a complete Decision Mapping process.
- Answer key questions.
- Clarify the crucial issues.
- Commit to a decision timeline.
- Identify Strategic Intelligence Gaps.
Below are some typical tools that can be employed. The mix of tools can vary depending on whether time horizons are short or long. Urgent situations require a faster pace.
1. Answer key questions.
This is a checklist of starter questions. They address the larger question, “Where are we now?”
- What are the most critical decisions before us right now?
By forcing the clarification of priority decisions before new data is gathered or new ideas generated, management begins important critical and creative thinking. - What are our options as we see them now?
Can you identify two or three strong options using the A-B-C approach? What opportunity ideas are on the table now?
You don’t need complete answers here. Unclear options will help you identify the “intelligence gaps”, and point the way to needed opportunity scanning. - What do we know now?
By answering this question, decision makers can clear the fog, and get right to work. Here, look at formal analysis from internal
or external sources: studies and analysis done by your organization, competitors, or trade groups. What data is available that could be quickly re-cut and made useful? What stories and anecdotal information are coming in from your sales force and managers? - What do we now? What do we need to know?
Quickly list out what your team believes is vital information. This is a first blush reaction to guide intelligence gathering. This will be refined later, but start here. - What does management want to do?
This gets at the drivers component of your Intelligence Platform. Drivers state knowledge gained from management experience, observations, and views. What’s worked in the past? What has failed? Why? What management drivers need to be challenged and rethought?With this exercise, you may stike out certain options because there is no support or energy for it. Keeping an option on the table is a waste of time and energy, if there is no support for its execution.
2. Clarify the Crucial Issues.
Crucial issues are those facts, goals, and assessments which you identify as key to the choice of one option.
Build a short list of these crucial issues – facts, constraints, and goals — that will drive selection of decision options.
Crucial issues are important because they will determine you choice of a decision option. Take two competitors, for example: each may construct a strategic decision, say for example market entry, in exactly the same way. Yet, the crucial issues for each player will likely be different because of their market position, capacities and capabilities, goals, and view of the market.
3. Construct a Decision Timeline.
The decision timeline plots and anticipates future decisions. Not all important decisions need to be made today: There may be a future timeframe when events will converge. If such points on a timeline can be forecast, decision quality is enriched. By anticipating future decisions, under various scenarios, you give focus to immediate decisions.
4. Identify Strategic Intelligence Gaps.
By working through the key questions in the mapping process, strategic intelligence gaps will surface. During mapping, the goal is not so much to answer those questions, but rather to identify the gaps between “what we know” and “what we
need to know” to move forward in the decision pathway.
The three components of the Intelligence Platform are useful here:
- Where is new data needed from internal and external sources?
- Where do ideas need to be harvested and generated?
- What management experience and knowledge needs to be tapped?
TOP
Decision mapping helps managers move forward efficiently to a decision. This process yields better decisions, plain and
simple:
- Decision Mapping promotes strategic thinking.
Part of the problem in “strategic planning” is that there is too much emphasis on planning and too little emphasis on thinking and action. Professor Henry Mintzberg led the charge on this issue in his famous HBR article, “Crafting Strategy”1, where he asks, “Is it any wonder that formal strategic planning is such a resounding failure?” Decision mapping is an aid to clear thinking. - Getting into action.
Part of the mindset here is to get into action to examine “what we are doing now that’s working” and to force the early creation and clarification options of possible actions in the short and long run. Sure, strategic intelligence will likely be needed before major actions are undertaken, yet the mapping process get it going without delaying because of “a lack of information.” - Useful at all levels.
Decision mapping is useable at the corporate, operating unit, or product line levels. The mindset and the tools apply broadly. - Easily communicated.
Decision Mapping is easily communicated and applied by managers throughout an enterprise. - Gives focus to strategic intelligence requirements.
After years in the business of conducting market research and strategy studies, one problem often repeated:
A rush to do fresh new research was often so great that the needed strategic thinking was overlooked. As a result, without careful attention, research design could become shortsighted due to cloudy management objectives and poorly developed decision options. By ensuring that the needed thinking gets underway first, strategic intelligence requirements become more focused and clear, and the results are far more useful.
An underpinning of decision mapping is an open and exploratory mindset by the management team that seeks to “fill the
hopper” with promising opportunities, and then generate and refine multiple decision options. The result is “faster and smarter” decision making, well-thought out and robust strategic choices, and, in the end, a stronger and well-differentiated competitive advantage and higher market shares and gross profits.
By adopting a decision mapping mindset, such words as “opportunities”, “options” and core strategic goals begin to more pepper management discussion. Here is what the mindset looks like:
- Management encourages aggressive opportunity scanning.
The more opportunities that are found and created, the stronger the strategic options that will be eventually developed from them. There are several tools useful in opportunity scanning. Management has an opportunity scanning mindset that recognizes that in the hunt for strategic opportunities, everything is fair game and an open creative approach yields strong final decisions. - A-B-C multiple option development is the norm.
In “What is a decision?” above, I discussed the basic A-B-C decision model. Undertaking the work to structure decisions in this way is perhaps more critical than the final choice itself. For well developed options forces debate, evaluation, and strong
choices. The push and drive to create multiple options is part of the mindset. - Be both faster and smarter.
Oftentimes, management in the rush to attack the marketplace, or develop a new product do one of two things:
1) move quickly into action without much attention paid to strategic intelligence, or
2) turn immediately to conducting major studies and analysis.
In a sense, both tendencies can be positive, or they can be short sighted. It is good to move quickly, and it is good to harness strategic intelligence. Yet, taking only one path, the “thin decision”, can be detrimental. Decision mapping provides a middle ground to be both faster and smarter by moving quickly and by deploying targeted strategic intelligence.
Conclusion
Decision Mapping is both a mindset and work which provide a fast start for strategy decisions that build market share. The good thing about Decision Mapping is that work can start immediately. It points the way for targeting strategic intelligence and research so that it fits the specific decision making framework rather than a shotgun approach. This saves time and money.
The prime benefits, however, are that Decision Mapping accelerates strategic thinking. That thinking is sharper because of the analytic, evaluation, and creative drills management must do: grappling with tough key questions, defining the crucial issues, and distilling existing data, and identifying critical new information. The bottom line results are better decisions and enhanced competitive advantage.
Decision Mapping : A Fast Start for Marketing Strategy. by Thomas R. Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Footnote
1 Mintzberg, Henry; Crafting Strategy, Harvard Business Review, 1987 July-August, p.67
