Many people make the mistake of going straight to action. Or they start to debate some minor detail. For good planning, it is imperative to do the following:
1. Understand at a high level what the big picture is. Agree on the CRITERIA for success.
2. Understand what the ALTERNATIVE ways to do this are. Make sure you have understood all the alternatives.
3. When you think you have understood all the alternatives, go look for some more!! Make a list of all the SOURCES OF INFORMATION that you can think of and go learn some more.
4. Then, and only then, EVALUATE the alternatives against your criteria to find the best one.
5. And only then, DECIDE and DOCUMENT and DO.
I call this the CASED approach - Criteria, Alternatives, Sources, Evaluation, Decision and Documentation. I made this acronym up for myself when I found that American engineers at Stanford were much better than me at being creative designers. I studied them closely and realized that they would get very upset if someone jumped to a decision before all the alternatives were well considered. While they stayed on guard against "analysis paralysis", they strongly believed that the key to good creative design was an explosion of alternatives before you began to narrow down the search space to arrive at your single decision.
Try CASED when you next get a chance!
9 comments:
Respected Sir,
The CASED approach is really great and can help us in goal setting and implementing the steps to be taken, to make that plan successful.
Thank You,
Proton Chetan Choparia
Fall 09 Indore
Good Evening Sir,
The funda of CASED is a great idea to evaluate the beat available option. Thanks for researching this method and sharing it with us.
Just one question, what to do when we don't have time for alternatives?
Regards
Vidit Shah
Carnegie Hall
Dear Sir,
Thank you for sharing such a wonderful pearl of learning from your ocean of knowledge and practical learning of your life.
CASED approach is a best strategic management technique.Project's success depends on best strategical planning and good documentation.
It helps to get more output with utilization of minimum resources ant time. Team building is most important part of best strategy.
Sir, in fast changing environment(global competitive market) how can we apply CASED approach more effectively? If we have minimum resources. Because some global market like- Retail sector, situation changes very fast.
Regards,
Meenketan Patel
Spring-09 Indore
Dear Sir,
This was indeed a clear change of perspectives of Indians and Americans, their analogy and thought processes are entirely different and they don't jump to any conclusion just like that. My question to you is that who is a better analytically an Indian engineer or an American Engineer?
Sir, its a great motivational artical. This will help me a lot in my future
thank you sir
Chetan, Vidit, Meenketan, Charchit, "MY WAY", I am glad you found the article informative. A couple of you have asked, "What if we don't have time?" I guess if you were in the middle of the road and a car was coming towards you very quickly, I would say you should not use an approach like CASED. Otherwise, mostly there is enough time.
One of you asked who is better analytically - an Indian engineer or an American engineer? I think a top Indian engineer is typically better analytically (though not better creatively) than a top US engineer, but an average US engineer is probably slightly better analytically than an average Indian engineer. But it's changing, and our engineers are getting better!
Respected Sir,
Thank you for giving us a deep insight into this theory of your's. This will definitely help us in achieving our desired goal.
Hi Sir,
CASED approach is really helpful.
Regards
Hello Sir,
This is awesome thought that you have given us, it is helpful to increase our analysis power and interpretation skills.
Thank You for such an effort for us.
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