Besides theory of change, which tessa mentioned, I’ve found myself increasingly focusing on the “front end” of decision-making rather than very detailed tools to choose from among defined alternatives, because in my experience leaders and teams generally need help putting more structure around their decision-making process before they can engage productively with such methods.
One innovation I’ve been working on is a tool called the decision inventory, which is a way for clients to get a sense of the landscape of decisions facing them and prioritize among those decisions. It’s a much more intuitive exercise and can be done much more quickly than a formal decision analysis or cost-benefit model, so it lends itself well to introducing the concepts and building buy-in among a team to do this kind of work. It can be especially helpful for teams because different team members have a different view of the decision landscape, and will have different ideas about what decisions are important for which reasons, so activating that collective intelligence can be educational for leaders.
Besides theory of change, which tessa mentioned, I’ve found myself increasingly focusing on the “front end” of decision-making rather than very detailed tools to choose from among defined alternatives, because in my experience leaders and teams generally need help putting more structure around their decision-making process before they can engage productively with such methods.
One innovation I’ve been working on is a tool called the decision inventory, which is a way for clients to get a sense of the landscape of decisions facing them and prioritize among those decisions. It’s a much more intuitive exercise and can be done much more quickly than a formal decision analysis or cost-benefit model, so it lends itself well to introducing the concepts and building buy-in among a team to do this kind of work. It can be especially helpful for teams because different team members have a different view of the decision landscape, and will have different ideas about what decisions are important for which reasons, so activating that collective intelligence can be educational for leaders.