Case Studies

3.8. C. Generating alternatives

This section deals with different ways in which the problem can be resolved. Typically, there are many and being creative at this stage helps. Things to remember at this stage are:

• Be realistic! While you might be able to find a dozen alternatives, keep in mind that they should be realistic and fit within the constraints of the situation. The alternatives should be mutually exclusive, that is, they cannot happen at the same time.
• Not making a decision pending further investigation is not an acceptable decision for any case study that you will analyse. A manager can always delay making a decision to gather more information, which is not managing at all! The whole point to this exercise is to learn how to make good decisions, and having imperfect information is normal for most business decisions, not the exception.
• Doing nothing as in not changing your strategy can be a viable alternative; provided it is being recommended for the correct reasons, as will be discussed below.
• Avoid the meat sandwich method of providing only two other clearly undesirable alternatives to make one reasonable alternative look better by comparison. This will be painfully obvious to the reader, and just shows laziness on your part in not being able to come up with more than one decent alternative.
• Keep in mind that any alternative chosen will need to be implemented at some point, and if serious obstacles exist to successfully doing this, then you are the one who will look bad for suggesting it.

Remember, every problem lends itself to more than one solution. Keep looking for good ideas, even when you have already thought of one that will solve the problem. Listing possible solutions is a form of brainstorming that will later permit you to assign values or weights to those ideas: is one solution less expensive than another is? Will one be more effective than another will? Will one idea work more quickly? Will one of these ideas have a more enduring effect? Once the alternatives have been identified, a method of evaluating them and selecting the most appropriate one needs to be used to arrive at a decision.