DECISIONS .. .DECISIONS

Some years back I was wanting to prepare seminar material before racing down country so I asked my secretary, who happens to be my wife, to fend off any requests for an appointment until my return the next week. But she relented and booked in an evening appointment. A 48 year-old man who had worked over 21 years as a qualified tradesman in the one workplace was summarily called in by management and offered three alternatives:
1. To leave and take redundancy money of just over $25,000.00.
2. To be retrained and eventually be assigned another task and be relocated in another area.
3. To take a lower paid job in the same place and receive a payment of around $5,000.00 as compensation.

Well, he and his wife came and we had a four-hour session. To solve his problem, and it really was a problem as he literally didn’t know which way to jump, I could have used a few of the decision processes that people use.

Firstly the Binary System. This is a computer term which uses the method of either on/off or yes/no. Yes, we will take redundancy; no we won’t take redundancy. Yes, we will retrain; no we won’t retrain. If this is a system you use, you will eventually make a bad decision.

The next is the Voting System. Ask as many people as you can what they think you should do then take a vote.
Or we could use the Intuitive System. “I just have a very strong feeling that I should take redundancy,” or, “I had a dream last night that I was sitting in a rocking chair enjoying the scenery. That must mean redundancy.”
Well I’m not enamoured with any of these puerile systems and prefer to do a feasibility study using the Pros and Cons method.

I quizzed them about retirement. Would they be content to stay in the same house and locality? Had he any skills that would enable him to turn a hobby into a small income? Did they have a mortgage free house? If not would they repay the mortgage if they took the redundancy money? Could they exist on the unemployment income without touching capital and many other questions. It was fascinating as we went through all the options how one started to strengthen with many pros while the others racked up more and more cons.

By the end of the evening he knew without a shadow of doubt what he was going to tell his boss the next day. Then we completed the financial plan (using the unemployment income) balancing with a reasonable surplus. It was rather nice to receive a telephone call of thanks the next day by someone who had considered all the options, weighed up all the consequences, and then made a firm decision.

By the way, I knew right at the start which option they should take and could easily have completed the interview in a quarter of the time. But then it would have been a decision made by external influence rather than considering every angle and together planning the future.
Can you guess which option they took?