The Progress Model

The key to making wise decisions is to choose the course of action with the strongest reasons in its favour. But how do you think of this option, and how do you know its a good choice? Progress provides five stages to help you achieve this.

See an overview of the stages

Stage 1. Understand the Situation and Decision

You need to understand the decision you are facing, and the situation it is located in, accurately, fair-mindedly and fully. Without this understanding any attempt to make a decision is likely to be flawed through making errors about what the situation is really like and through not choosing the best problem to work on. For example, you are unlikely to make the right decision about whether to help a drowning man if you think they are waving, not drowning

Advice on understanding the situation and decision

Stage 2. Work out What Matters.

Think as widely as possible about what you want to bring about. What do you think matters? What values really matter? And which of these matter most ? Unless you have thought carefully about what you want to achieve you're unlikely to achieve it! For example your angry partner criticises you - should you respond angrily or let it pass? To decide on this wisely, you need to think about whether asserting yourself now matters, or whether asserting yourself at the right time, is most important.

Advice on how to work out what matters

Stage 3. Generate Options.

Creatively generate options. We easily get stuck in ruts of thinking so you need to be imaginative. Once you have understood the situation fully you are in a good position to creatively think up options. If you want a quiet life now and to assert yourself, then you might decide to let this criticism pass, and choose a better moment in which to raise the question of how the two of you communicate with each other.

Advice on how to generate options

Stage 4. Assess Options

The fourth step follows on logically from this - you need to evaluate each option, and you do this, of course, in terms of what matters (stage 2). Select the option that, while based upon the reality of the situation, best captures what you have determined matters most.

Advice on how to assess options

Stage 5. Implement Your Decision

Finally, you prepare for implementing the solution, armed with a fallback plan and follow-up activities. Once you have made your selection of the best option you need to make a final check on it, and work out how to implement and monitor it. Finally you need to commit yourself to carrying it out. The best decision, if not carried through is not going to be much help to you.

Advice on implementing your decision

The Stages In Order

To increase your chances of coming to a wise decision make sure you do the five stages in this order.

If you don't understand the situation and have a clear idea of the decision you want to make you can hardly start to work out what matters in it. You cannot think up or evaluate options without an idea of what you want to achieve with your decision. And of course you cannot implement a solution until you have selected the best option.

As you are working on later stages your understanding of the situation, the decision you want to make, what matters, or the options you have might change radically. If so there is nothing to stop you iterating back through earlier stages.

The Theory Powering Progress: A 5 step Wise Decision Making Procedure

PROGRESS was developed to cover what its authors see as a gap in counselling and management practice. While counselling takes as its main aim helping people to live well the different schools within it have remarkably little to say about how to help people to make wise decisions. Management theorists have devoted considerable resources to producing models of decision-making but, we believe, these models have tended to focus on providing a means for people to make 'purely' business decisions rather than the personal and interpersonal decisions that are part of the fabric of our private and work lives. These models have also tended to ignore the role of the emotions and insights from the values and critical thinking literatures.

This position, and the theory behind it, is more fully explained in our series of articles "Towards Wise Decision-Making" published in Practical Philosophy.

The practical consequences of the theory are to be found by looking at

• the stages and their explanation
• the various exercises designed to help carry out the different stages
• the case studies

The main theoretical sources powering PROGRESS are:

1. values: values are central to making decisions because the whole point of a wise decision is to bring about something that is valuable. Theoretical insights from ethics are used in order to help us ask the right questions to judge what matters, both prudentially and ethically. There is a vast literature on this. An inspired introduction is Weston's A Practical Companion to Ethics. James Rachels' The Elements of Moral Philosophy introduces ethical theories and John Kekes' The Examined Life prudential values. PROGRESS author Tim LeBon's book Wise Therapy: Philosophy for Counsellors provides many techniques to help think through their personal values. We have drawn heavily on Covey's, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic for the idea of win-win thinking.
   
2. emotional wisdom: wise decision-making is not purely a matter for the head. Awareness of emotions and how they might both undermine and help wise decision-making is vital. In order to prevent us from misperceiving the situation, and also to inform us about what is valuable, we need to use our emotions wisely. Our emotions provide information about the situation and decision facing us, about what we value, and motivate us to carry out our decision. See for example the account of emotions in Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thoughtand Solomon's The Passions. PROGRESS author Tim LeBon's book Wise Therapy: Philosophy for Counsellors examines the various roles of emotions.
   
3. creative thinking: we use creative thinking skills, in particular when thinking up options, but also to identify potential values.The ubiquitous Edward De Bono offers many tips in, for instance Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step By Step. An early influential text is Osborne's Applied Imagination.
   
4. critical thinking: critical thinking is used at all stages, and especially to understand the situation we are in, to weigh up the kinds of values we wish to bring about and to assess our available options.There is a rapidly growing philosophical and psychological literature on critical thinking. Philosophical texts, among many excellent ones, include Anne Thomson's Critical Reasoning in Ethics, Johnson and Blair's Logical Self-Defense, and Robert Ennis' Critical Thinking. Social psychologists Nisbett and Ross cover the dangers of the power of vividness very well in Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of social Judgement.
   
   
5. decision-making: wise decision-making involves being aware of the different stages involved in the process. Our favourite book on this is Smart Choices by management consultants and decision theorists Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa. One of the few books in counselling that looks at decisions is Egan's, The Skilled Helper.