Stay The Course Or Chart A New One - Decision Models

Posted by Brad Loetz on Mar 21, 2014 3:32 PM


Our blog themes of late have been loosely connected...Shopping for Integration Software, Maximizing Your Investment in Integration Software, and Non-traditional Integration Suite Use Cases...to name a few.  Within each of these blogs, and in your everyday business/personal life, you are confronted with decisions.  There are many decision models to utilize when you are presented with life's forks in the road.  Here is one often utilized by Remedi and it's clients.

The Pain/Gain Decision Making Model is for the more complex decision involving a current state or situation and a contemplated future state or situation as compared with the pain and gain associated with each state.  Job related pain/gain can be company related, but underneath, listed items in each quadrant are more often personally related like seeking to avoid embarrassment or to assure performance based accolades.  A common personal example often used when explaining this model is it's use in the decision to stop smoking or keep smoking.  Below is a graphical depiction of the Model. 

Pain-Gain_grid

Typically one would traverse the model with the decision(s) under consideration from Current Pain, to Future Gain, to Current Gain, to Future Pain.  Traversed in this manner you will notice that the items you list in the top left / bottom right are reciprocals of one another while items listed in the top right / bottom left quadrants can also be somewhat opposite of one another.  

In the example above you will see I applied a decision often faced by our clients, stay the course with EDI translation software versus the deployment of more modern comprehensive B2B integration software.  There are many more considerations than those listed, but given some of the considerations I'm sure you get the idea.

Good luck with the decisions before you. We hope this model will assist in some way. 

Contact us for help with your integration pain/gain challenges...

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For more information on Pain/Gain Decision Models here are a few useful links...

http://dailybetty.com/Pain_Gain_Decision_Model.pdf

http://thecrossroadscoach.com/newsletter/pain-gain-model/