Option Solving Blog

It wasn’t so long ago that two workshop partners and I were debating over whether to continue with a planned option solving practitioner workshop. We had set everything up for a New Year launch, knowing that each of us would be individually facing a hectic spell early in the year before the run up to the work-shop. Despite our early promotional activities, prior to our respective hectic-spells: when we returned, our webpage wasn’t working properly and with few indications of responses. We were left with the awkward dilemma of what to do.
We organized a conference call to discuss the situation. But before that moment arrived, I decided to work through the situation privately in advance: another good use of option solving. Quite naturally I set about developing the best question, which started with: “What is our best option for continuing with our planned workshop, considering…” I then developed a list of seven considerations and decided to utilize four of them (a little more than 50%, being an odd number) – both constraints and opportunities – that included: “No firm commitments to date, a week to go before paying for room rental, five people had shown some interest, and reluctance to test patience of co-partners.” The Latest Example displays the full question.
With my question in place, I set about producing two “bookends”: the two extreme, “yin and yang” options that would not only set limits on any overall option picture, but also tease my intuitive mind to draw upon its creativity to come up with other plausible options. Our intuition doesn’t respond well to way-out options, so will quickly start looking for the more feasible ones. After a degree of deliberation, two bookends emerged: “Start from scratch again, which would likely cause my partners to opt out,” and “Make it happen, no matter the costs: even if that meant everyone attending for free.” My intuition pretty quickly started aggressively rejecting these, but now started searching for alternatives.
Now I set about producing at least five potential options; these can be viewed in the Latest Example. My third choice was: “Postpone for one month and fix the technical issues.” My other four options are to be found in the Latest Example. Putting this picture together made me feel much better prepared for the forthcoming conference call with my partners, as well as enabled me to test all the ideas on them.
At some point we allowed for some “emotional distancing” by discussing other issues and then returned to consider our best option in the circumstances. It’s not fair to share our choice, since you weren’t exactly in our shoes. In any event, we did proceed with the workshop as planned and it was pretty successful.
If you have an example of your own, please share it with this blogger, through the COMMENTS area. Thanks Option Solving. (NOTE: Next posting in 2 weeks: “Using Option Solving to decide on ‘What is our best option for reducing vehicle claims?’” Let’s have your COMMENTS or go to peter@ileadershipsolutions.com to connect with the blogger.)

Filed under: Business Decision Making, Decision Dilemmas | Tagged: Last Minute Decisions, Running Workshops |