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The Inclusive Decision-Making Process

- Life has a way of teaching real valuable lessons. It has a way of allowing humanity to learn from its past and with some hope of correcting its future path. The assumption is that those decisions made today are influenced by the lessons learned from the past. The words from George Bernard Shaw come to mind when he said, "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." So if life is built upon experiences from the past, then why do humans tend to runaway from mistakes?

Is it fear? Or is it the feeling of insecurity and the worry of becoming the laughing stalk and being scoffed at by one and all? The message that has been reiterated from ancient times and sometimes overstated is the fact that mistakes are costly. They cost money, resources, and in some cases lives. The bottom-line is simple, the fewer mistakes made the better off everyone will be. That is why "an important goal of Six Sigma management is to reduce or even eliminate the COPQ (cost of poor quality) which for traditionally managed organizations has been estimated at between 20% to 40% of budget" (Brue, 2002, p. 23). But without mistakes, where would the lessons come from? Here is where the secret lies.

Accounting for mistakes in a budget or an operational diagram should not be the game plan. A better solution maybe to incorporate those lessons learned from those past mistakes, and thereby avoid them in the future. What would this require? This will require gathering "people's ideas and inputs before decisions are made" (Catlin & Matthews, 2002, p. 221). Since everyone has made mistakes in the past, having their input into a decision should avoid errors. By including these people into the decision-making process one would reduce the chances of repeating the same mistakes and increase the chances of organizational buy-in.

But as you can imagine, this is easier said than done. People are very difficult, and sometimes they hold back. They are sometimes not real about things and are not upfront. They may have political persuasions or even a sense of not wanting to share because of job security or some unexplainable inhibitions. Well for what ever reasons these nonproductive actions occur everyday in corporate America.
So what is the solution? How does an organization overcome these nonproductive actions? The answer is to create an atmosphere of trust. An environment where everyone feels they belong and are

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