Decision Making Model Essay

Decision-Making Model essay

Whether we realize it or not, decision-making is a part of our daily lives. Everyday we have to make decisions. Some of those decisions are minor and some of them are life changing. Some of the decision we make, sometimes, are pretty obvious. We decide to get up, get of bed, with the assumption that the floor will be there. Personally, I begin to think of what I need to accomplish that day and what would happen if I did not tend to certain things. These thoughts make me uncomfortable when I find no alternative course of action other than getting up and doing what needs to be done. In the end, I get up, get dressed and begin to tend to the things I consider important. By this time, I have already engaged in using a decision-making model called rationalization.

Rationalization is a decision making model process that helps individuals comes to a conclusion using logic and critical thinking. There are many different decision making model. The rationalization process is made of six different steps that are as follows: Defining the problem, generating possible solutions, choosing the best solution, implementing the solution, evaluating the success of the chosen solution, modifying the decision and actions as necessary (Lunenberg & Ornstein, 1991). Most of us go through this process on a daily basis without realizing it.

As a president of a radio station, decisions need to be made on a daily basis regarding clients, finances, marketing etc… Not too long ago, the staff realized that the financial situation of the station was not at its best. This was our first step: defining the problem.

The second step that we went through was to generate possible solutions but in order to generate possible solutions, we had a meeting and called on everyone’s attention regarding the financial status of the radio station. Our main focus was to figure out where the problem came from. In our case, the problem came from our listenership; it was down. So in order to be able to come up with ideas, we had to figure out the trouble area. Now that this task was done, as a team, we sat down and started to brainstorm different ideas and wrote them down. My husband, being the C.E.O., and I, being the president, decided to take everything in and look over all the different ideas that were given to us. We had to look at each idea and present a scenario for each idea and, in this manner, we narrowed it down to a few ideas that would be suitable to fit our situation. This is when the third step came in.

We had to choose the best solution, and we did. We decided that the best way to increase out listenership was to market our station to more people. We, then, executed the fourth step, which is implementing the solution. We contacted different media sources and decided to make ourselves more “visible”. Everyone worked hard at getting our radio station in different playlists and different websites. We then were entering the fifth step: evaluation the success of the chosen solution.

This process was the longest and made us very nervous. How would we know that all our efforts would pay off? Only time and numbers could tell now. We watched the station’s numbers daily. We made comparison charts and decided after six months that it was time for a meeting. At the meeting, we assessed the