FROM DILIP MUKERJEA'S ITINERANT TOOLBOX: THE PREFERENCE GRID

PURPOSE:

To plot your brainstormed ideas. Once captured in hard copy, and located in zones of priority, it becomes incredibly easy to make decisions. You also retain a record of the thinking process that influenced your decisions.

A Preference Grid captures in hard copy all options generated whilst addressing an issue.


The advantages of sorting and recording a range of options in this manner are:

■ extracting clarity out of clutter

■ faster processing

■ easier decision-making

Plotting Procedure:

State the problem, challenge, or issue that needs to be addressed.

Now, start generating ideas, using whatever technique you choose. This could be a brainstorming process, brainwriting, storyboarding, or any of the other techniques described in this book.

1) Section a page with three columns, headed ‘Options,’ ‘Probability of Success,’ and ‘Effort Required.’

2) Write down your list of options under the column titled ‘Options.’

3) Use a rating scale of 1 to 10, for example. Allocate a value (subjectively, no doubt) to each option in the other two columns. Here the variables are: ‘Probability of Success’ and ‘Effort Required.’

4) Transfer your processed options to the Preference Grid.

The example that follows demonstrates both parts of this process. It is titled: “How can we boost employee morale?”


Plot the coordinates for each option. The options will most likely be sprayed across all four quadrants.

To differentiate between the options in the four different quadrants, use symbols of different shapes and colours, with the option number written within them. This method also boosts memory with respect to the location of each cluster of options.

For example, the golden star symbol pertains to quadrant 2, the green oval is for quadrant 4, and so on.

We nominate the quadrants from 1 to 4 starting with the top left as 1, and then moving clockwise. Any option that is on the border between two quadrants, as say option ‘2’ in our example (between quadrants 1 and 2), we give a unique symbol (in our example, a red octagon). Any red octagon would be on the cusp of two or more quadrants.

If you wish, an option that straddles all four quadrants could also be given a unique symbol. This would be for a ‘5/5’ rating when evaluating an option.

Once all options have been plotted, you have an options scenario, a picture, a map. The following page shows the sorted result of the processing just carried out. At this juncture, you are in a position to make a considered plan of action.

Obviously Quadrant 1 may seem to be the most attractive because here we have a high probability of success and a low amount of effort to be expended.

But there could be situations where it is better to expend more effort if the goal is truly worthwhile; we could thus have an option in Quadrant 2 that is valued higherthan any in Quadrant 1.

Quadrants 3 and 4 are of course, less attractive; we should nevertheless, NOT discard the options in these quadrants as they might have immense future value.

Ideas do not come ready to use; they come ready to refine.


[To be continued in the Next Post. Excerpted from 'Surfing the Intellect: Building Intellectual Capital for a Knowledge Economy', by Dilip Mukerjea. All the images in this post are the intellectual capital of Dilip Mukerjea.]