Word of your management expertise is starting to spread, and recently the CEO of VoxSigns, a company that develops and maintains electronic billboards similar to this one in Times Square, reached out to you for advice. Lynn, the CEO, is trying to determine whether she should lay off 20% of her employees due to declining revenues. Lynn wants to know if you can help her make the right decision.

First, you help Lynn get an overview of the decision-making process by outlining what steps effective decision makers use to arrive at a solution to problems.

Identify the order in which the steps are usually taken.

Decision-Making Step Order
Generate alternative courses of action 4
Define the problem 1
Identify the decision criteria 2
Evaluate each alternative 5
Weight the decision criteria 3
Compute the optimal decision 6
Next, you and Lynn discuss some of the problems that can occur in the various phases in the decision-making process. For example, when defining the problem, Lynn should be careful:

To generate new ideas, instead of considering only tried and true solutions

To fully understand the gap between current and ideal states

Not to use satisficing, rather than maximizing, as a decision-making approach