DECISION WHEELS

A visual exploration process that assists people to move from either/or blocked thinking towards conscious, confident decision making and to progress to achieving their goals.

The Decision Wheels is a powerful visual reflection process. It reduces the stress, confusion and loss of time in taking decisions substantially. It assists people to elicit the key criteria for making a specific decision and to weigh each available option agains that criteria. At the end of the process people have a clear visual representation of their choices that they can objectively compare, confidently choose from and move consciously forward towards what needs to be done to achieve the optimal benefits.

USE THIS TOOL LIVE DEMO

Steps

Step 1

Select the Decision Wheels Process

Select the Decision Wheels Process from the available templates. What are the options you want to choose from? For example “buying a new apartment” or “renovating the old one”. Name each option by selecting the Option Area and typing the name in the Title field. You can add as many options as you like but we recommend working with not more than the top three options.
You can add or remove options with the +/- option on top of the screen.
Use the > button on top of the screen to move to next step.  

Step 2

Create a Criteria Wheel 

To avoid “comparing apples and pears” each decision requires a set of criteria. Select each area and type the name of the respective criterion in the Title field. Here are few questions that can assist defining the criteria:
“What are the criteria that the ideal decision meets?” or “What are the values that the ideal decision satisfies?” or “What does the ideal decision bring? “

Scale the importance and priority of each criterion from 1 to 10 where 1 is "least important” and 10 is “most important”. Priority/importance is used in estimating the ratio between each of the options.

Use the > button on top of the screen to move to next step.  

Step 3

Assess each Option

Scale options one by one agains each of the criteria. Rate how each of the options satisfy the particular criterion from 1 to 10 where 1 is ‘this option does not meet this criterion at all” and 10 is “this option meets this criterion fully and completely”. How to rate? Click on an area to mark it first and drag the NOW slider to the number of choice. Change the colour if you want to at this point as well.

Use the > button on top of the screen to move to next step.  

Step 4

Compare Results  

After rating each of the options move to the final Decision Wheels screen to see:
Ratio Wheel - comparing each of the options accounting for the criteria priorities and the options scaling against the criteria.
Criteria Wheel - visualising the importance of each of the criteria.
Options Wheels - visualising how each decision looks like compared to the criteria.

Explore the preferred choice based on the visualised results. Ask questions such as:
“What do you notice?
What do you decide based on the process?
What do you need to clarify next?
What are some of your next steps?”, etc. 

Alternative explorations

To ensure that the decision is in alignment with all important areas of life you can also do the Life Wheel exploration. 
Depending on the needs other wheels such as Action Steps Wheel can be created using the Blank Wheel Template.