Chapter 3 - Choosing to Act
Sometimes it is best to deal with an issue immediately, and other times it is better to leave it for a more appropriate time. Choose whether to act immediately, deal with it later, or decide to delay action while you gather more information.

Stimulating action
Think about what stimulates you to act. It may be a customer, your manager, or a stimulus such as an order form. Some triggers regularly go to be more important to the achievement of your objectives than others. Work out which these are. Make sure these triggers happen early enough for you to be able to deal with them in time.


Acting immediately
On receiving a trigger, it may be appropriate to act immediately. You may have encountered the situation before or there may be a set procedure in place. In these circumstances, you should act now rather than putting the action off. Act now when you have all the information you need to respond to the trigger, and you do not need any thinking time to decide what needs to be done.


Making decisions
Some triggers offer you options of what action to take and, in this situation, the correct response to the stimulus is to make a decision. Suppose a team member reports a problem with a computer terminal. If you know that they are inexperienced with the terminal, you may choose to go and see if you can make it work. If you know the team member to be expert in using the terminal, you may choose to call for technical help immediately.

Always remember:
Many decisions are complex, and there may be numerous options that could be taken.
Gathering ore information can be an important stage in a decision-making process.
The right decision can be taken in less time if a decision-making process is used.

Getting information
With some stimuli, it may be impossible to act immediately. In fact, an immediately response can cause problems if you make a wrong decision. It may also be impossible to act if you do not have all the information required. Recognize when this is the case. Initiate actions to gather the facts you need to make a decision. Often, the best response is to gather as much as information as you can.