Looking for ideas on teaching independent decision-making
Feb 11, 2016
I have a course where I'm teaching people how to use our organization's policies and procedures to guide their decision-making when providing customer service. Because there will never be a policy for everything, I also want to put in a segment about how to make decisions when there is no policy to guide you. Our official stance on those situations is, "there are a couple things you can never do. Outside of those, if you use good judgment, we'll support you."
What I'm having trouble conceptualizing is how to turn that into a brief module (15 min or less). There are a half dozen don'ts and essentially unlimited do's. Has anyone worked with this type of problem? How did you design it? How do you elicit creativity and problem-solving from people when you don't have a predetermined set of decisions for them? Thanks!
2 Replies
Hi Jennifer,
Even with independent thinking, there is usually a structure and/or guiding principles that one uses in order to reach a good decision. You may want to think about pulling out and teaching those first.... then allow them to use that way of thinking to face some challenging and unique situations. This could be a general decision-tree of sorts if it's truly high-risk decision making, or just stand alone principles to follow.
I might include some situations where there is no right answer per se. But rather they need to make a decision then justify whey they made it calling back to the underlying principles/structure. The last part of this is key.... have them prove WHY they made the decision, not just what it was.
GREAT project.... hope this helps!
This sounds like a cool (but challenging) project. Maybe a mini branching scenario? You could teach the policies, and at the end, create a scenario where there is no policy to guide the learner. Then give them a few realistic choices (maybe including one of the things they're never allowed to do). Make sure each choice is realistic and something that could be mistaken for a good answer. Then take the learner down a little path to try to fix it or try again. With 15 minutes, it'd have to be short, but there's nothing wrong with that! Maybe even show the company supporting the learner as they made a good decision?
Another option might be a good, better, best situation. Let the learner rank possible decisions and spot something that could land them in hot water.
We like to say at Artisan that people don't argue with their own beliefs. A compare my answer could be a good choice here. We often use that if we want to get buy-in as well as teaching.
If there are organizational values that could guide the long list of do's, that might be another avenue to explore. Good luck!
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