MAKING DECISIONS

There is a common misconception that creative thinking, and therefore the
ability to make innovative decisions, is an inborn talent that cannot be learned. Try to develop the quality and originality of your ideas by adopting new methods of thinking.

EMBRACING NEW IDEAS People - and organizations - form habits of thinking just as they form other habits. Many organizations that reject new thinking outright
do so because they view change as risk. There
are, however, ways to defeat this negativity and encourage an acceptance of the new. For example, in any type of ideas meeting, forbid the use of
the response "Yes, but. . ." - a classic idea-killer - until a predetermined number of new ideas
have been explored and discussed.
THINKING POSITIVELY
If you are cautious by nature, you are not very likely to think adventurously, but if you are highly creative, you may be impatient with sceptics who see only the objections in a discussion. Do not allow colleagues to get locked into these or any other mind-sets that prevent them from listening to other points of view with an open mind. If you think that a debate is becoming too negative, say so and ask everybody to try and make a positive, creative contribution. This will help you avoid sterile debates in which everyone defends their own fixed position and attacks all others.
DECIDING ON ACTION
The object of generating new ideas is to find the best one and act on it. Expert Mark Brown uses
a five-stage model (given the acronym AGISA) for the group thinking process. It starts with Analysis, in which you seek to uncover the issues affecting the decision. That enables you to set Goals -
either "opportunities" (coded White) or "problems" (Grey). Then you search for Ideas, which are
either "conventional, mildly original" (Soft Blue)
or "unconventional, needing further discussion" (Blue). At the Selection (Red) stage, ideas are examined for weakness and solutions are discarded or adopted. Those adopted call for Action (Green), in which the accepted decision is implemented.
178

REACHING A DECISION

. Assumptions should always be challenged.
. Conventional thinking should
not be rejected just because it
is conventional.
. New ideas are as valuable as any others but should not be adopted simply because they are new.
~
Allelllnl
opportunltlel
~
T GATHl!:RING IDEAS
In the AGISA thinking model, you mu.\t complete each .\tage or idea generation before moving on. In any given situation you may need to follow either one or both qr the possible routes shown here.
179