Introduction
Thinking critically and making decisions are important parts of today’s business environment. It is important to understand how the decision making process works and the steps involved. The nine steps of the decision making process are: identifying the problem, defining criteria, setting goals and objectives, evaluating the effect of the problem, identifying the causes of the problem, framing alternatives, evaluating impacts of the alternatives, making the decision, implementing the decision, and measuring the impacts. (Decision, 2007.) By using various methods and tools to assist in making important business decisions an individual can ensure the decisions they make will be as successful as possible. In this paper it will be examined how the decision making process can be followed using various tools and techniques to make successful business decisions by using these same tools and techniques during a thinking critically business scenario. The paper will also discuss how different tools and techniques could have been used to make different, yet still successful decisions.
The techniques of the stimulation gave an outline of achieving the companies goal to identifying the problems, how to fix the problems and implementation. The criteria matrix was the technique used to identify the problems. The criteria matrix provided a simply way of prioritizing, organization, and sorting out issues into categories deemed critical or non-critical and whether each on was urgent or non-urgent. This was also a controlled way of making deciding what the problem was because you had all the information to start making decisions. This technique helped determine the criticality of the issues, from identifying the problem to evaluating the decision process w ...