Business Growth: PROACT Decision Making Model

This continues our series exploring strategic tools that can help you grow your business

Business owners make decisions. You make decisions so frequently, you may not have considered how you make them. Perhaps someone taught you. You may have learned Benjamin Franklin’s famous T Form method where you draw a “T” on a piece of paper and list the Advantages/Benefits/Pros on one side and the Disadvantages/Consequences/Cons down the other side.

PROACT: A Stronger Decision Making Model

PROACT represents an acronym for each component of the model:

• PR=Problem: describe what requires the decision (hire a secretary/bookkeeper)
• O=Objective:  outline what you want (accurate letters, graphs & charts, Quickbooks)
• A=Alternatives: list each of the choices (Betty P, Bob S, Sharon W, Sally M)
• C=Consequences: assign a value for how well each alternative fills each objective
• T=Tradeoffs: weight each (Quickbooks is twice as important as graphs)

PROACT includes elements that T Form and other methods neglect. PROACT encourages you to outline your desired outcomes and determine which objective means more to you. Those elements provide better decision making.

Adolphson Excel Spreadsheet Tools (Free download)

Dr. Donald Adolphson recognized the ability of a spreadsheet to create a PROACT template. Andrew Heiss (Dr. Adolphson’s student) created a reusable template. He told me

“…It's free and open source!

It works in Excel 2007 and 2010. You can download it https://github.com/downloads/andrewheiss/AHP-Monte-Carlo/AHP%20Monte%20Carlo%201.0.zip

See the full documentation, file bug reports, etc. at the project's main page: https://github.com/andrewheiss/AHP-Monte-Carlo

Open "AHP Monte Carlo.xlsm" and you'll notice a new tab on the ribbon called "Decision Analysis" with 3 new buttons. Click on "Build full model" to walk through a full decision model, with any number of objectives and alternatives. The macro will build all the pairwise tables, data tables, and graphs you need. If you only want to build one pairwise table (like if you just want to get the relative weights for a set of objectives or alternatives), there's a button for that too.”

Business owners make big and little decisions. The PROACT model will enhance your big decisions.

Join me next Tuesday when examine the Structure Alignment Strategic tool