Decision Options
In PrioMind, options are the more granular bits on which to decide. They represent proposals for potentially good outcomes of a decision. Options often are the result of some research and pre-selection process.
EXAMPLE
If you want to decide on who to appoint as new CEO for your organization, you need to know the candidates first. In this case, the candidates are the result of some executive search and selection process. They are your options.
RESEARCH
Research – or the process of how to come up with good options for your decision – is out of scope of PrioMind.
Pre-Selection
Pre-selecting is already making first decisions by filtering or eliminating options that were generated during your research. So, what options should make it into PrioMind? Here's our general recommendation:
- Entirely leave out options that objectively fail to meet the formal requirements for your decision (like going way over your budget).
- Limit the overall number of valid options to what your group can digest.
- Options that technically meet your formal requirements, yet are considered of lesser value by whoever is pre-selecting and would push the total of valid options over what your group can handle, should be documented as discarded options.
This approach fosters transparency and trust while still keeping the focus of the group on the arguably best options.
Identifier
Options might be already documented elsewhere in more detail with some sort of shorthand or unique identifier like A.01 or OU-14/7. Referencing such identifiers separately from your options' titles allows you to sort options in an additional, meaningful way.
Valid Options
New options are valid by default. They stay valid unless they have been discarded (or become valid again after being recovered from discarded options).
Valid options focus your group's attention. They should be taken into account when rating options, addressing diverging positions and making the final decision.
Discarded Options
Options can be discarded. This removes them from the list of valid options and helps keeping your group's focus on, well, the truly valid options. Discarded options are still kept for the record to improve transparency and traceability and can be recovered later if necessary.
When discarding an option, users can provide a reason for discarding it. This way, others can understand why the option was discarded – even moths or years later.
Top-Scoring Options
Options receive a score based on their ratings. Their score is independent of how often it was rated (i.e., an option that was rated by one user can score as low/high as an option that was rated by 100 users and vice versa). It's an absolute number out of a total possible range, i.e. 128/150.
Scores factor in the confidence level of each option. The less confident a group is in a given option, the lower its final score. In other words, options get a score penalty for low confidence.
Top-scoring options are helpful to determine the most valuable options for taking your final decision.
PrioMind lists the three most scoring options under "Top-Scoring Options" or lets you sort all options by score.
Top scores only encompass valid options and are shown for decisions in status assessing and later.
Top-Diverging Positions
For each option, a confidence level is calculated based on its ratings. The more the ratings diverge from each other, the lower the confidence level. The confidence level is a percentage, with 100% meaning that all people rated this option identically and 0% meaning that exactly half of all people rated the option exactly in the opposite extreme than the other half.
Top-diverging positions highlight the three options with the lowest confidence level. These are helpful as possible signal that part of your group might lack knowledge relevant for the assessment. To address such low confidence levels, you can check out diverging positions in detail.
CONFIDENCE THRESHOLDS
In PrioMind, we use thresholds of 70% and 80% for confidence levels:
- Any value of
< 70%is considered a low confidence level. We strongly recommend addressing any such diverging positions at least once before deciding. - Values above
> 80%are considered high confidence levels.
PrioMind lists the three options with the least confidence level under 80% as top-diverging positions. PrioMind also lets you sort all options by confidence level.
Top-diverging positions only encompass valid options and are shown for decisions in status assessing and later.
Description
Use an option's description to provide sufficient detail so that it can be assessed properly against the decision's criteria.
In general, here are a few guidelines on how to write a good description:
- Desirability: What makes this an attractive option? What opportunities does it exploit, what threats does it alleviate?
- Viability: What's the sustainability of this option, what existing strengths does it reuse or what weaknesses does it compensate? What risks does it increase or mitigate?
- Feasibility: What's required to execute this option? What are the challenges in implementing this option?
Keep the description concise and useful as overview. If you want to provide more details, use links to your team's file sharing platform (like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and alike). PrioMind is designed to complement such platforms and ill-equipped to host larger documents itself.
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