Clarify Your Important Decisions
The Weekly Needs Assessment is designed to help decision-makers identify and prioritize crucial decisions. By focusing on unmet needs, this tool enhances decision-making efficiency and effectiveness. Deliberate decision making requires significant amounts of energy and time to complete a deliberate decision. The brain monitors this process and will most likely complete if the decision to be made is related to real unmet needs and their associated life roles.
Why Needs Matter in Decision Making
Our ancestors’ survival and thriving depended on making decisions to satisfy unmet needs. Today, unmet needs still trigger the decision-making areas of our brains, driving us to select the best solutions for our situations. Decision-making helps us select actions, products, services, and systems that enhance our stability and predictability by fulfilling our needs.
The Process of Decision Making
Decision-making begins with identifying unmet needs. When our needs are satisfied, there’s no need to make a decision. When we have an unmet need, the first system activated is the Automatic system. This is the most efficient system, relying on prior learning and experience to use the same tried and trusted solutions to met the need. However, when we struggle to meet our needs because the old ways are not working, we must take new actions and adopt different approaches. Upgrading and modifying our actions, products, services, and systems result in more predictable and stable need fulfillment is the goal of the Deliberate system. The most valuable solutions are those that satisfy the most unmet needs, providing the greatest value to the user. By making needs the focus of the Deliberate System, the brain can utilize its full complement of decision-making areas.
How the Weekly Needs Assessment Works
- Identify Unmet Needs: The worksheet provides a comprehensive list of commonly shared needs, each categorized and described with statements on how to fulfill them.
- Assess Current Fulfillment: Evaluate how well your current solutions meet these needs. This robust input highlights the urgency and significance of your state of need fulfillment.
- Prioritize and Plan: Identify inadequate components and plan a change effort to upgrade the solutions supporting your need fulfillment.
The benefits of the Weekly Needs Assessment are immediate and cumulative. With ongoing use of the Assessment, patterns and trends can be discovered and better need fulfillment can be planned. On going use also has the following benefits:
- Enhanced Clarity: Understand what important decisions need to be made.
- Focused Decision Making: Utilize the full capability of your brain’s decision-making areas.
- Improved Stability: Upgrade actions, products, services, and systems for better need fulfillment.
Start using the Weekly Needs Assessment to clarify your important decisions, enhance your decision-making process, and achieve better outcomes for your needs.