When you are faced with many alternatives, it can often be very hard to choose between them. They will be strong on some things and weak on others; but hardly ever the same things. The sort of problem you face when choosing a car or a new staff member for example. A quick and effective way to work through such a maze is to use a Weighted Scores technique described below. Yellow Belt and Blue Belt
Table of Contents
Mini Weights and Scores (Yellow Belt)
This is a stripped-down version of the Weights and Scores process that is much faster to apply for less critical decisions.
For most alternatives, you will be able to imagine the Impact of that alternative once you have successfully applied it.
Example: Let’s say that you have 3 choices in front of you but can only do one at a time:
- Increase your Revenue.
- Decrease your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) or
- Decrease your Overhead Expenses.
This sort of list is typical of, though much shorter than, of the Candidate list you will have if you are following our GamePlan System.
Basic Scores Only Approach
You will have a mental impression of the relative Impact of things that you can do on any of those 3 alternatives.
Impact Score:
- Choose the one that has the most Impact and give it a 10.
- Then rate the other alternatives against that 10.
- Score these from 1 (virtually no Impact), to 9 (high but not highest Impact) .
Ease of Implementation Score:
You will also have an intuitive understanding of how easy or difficult each of these options is to implement.
- Choose the one that is easiest to implement and score it 10.
- As above, rate the other alternatives against that 10.
- Score these from 1, virtually no Impact, to 9.
Now work out the Preferred Alternative:
- Multiply the Impact score by the Ease of Implementation score for each option.
- This means you have taken into account both how hard it is to do and the Impact it will have once you have done it.
- One of these alternatives will stand out as the one you should begin with.
In the screenshot below, in the “Unweighted” version you can see the highest scoring option is “Increase your Revenue” so that is the one you would focus on.
Scoring
As mentioned above;
- start Scoring by picking the best and give it 10
- now look for the second best and give it a lower score. And so on
- try to keep the Scores wide apart – say 10, 8, 6 etc. If they are all very close together, many of your Candidates will end up with similar Total Scores which makes them hard to choose between.
Basic Weighted Scores Approach
Sometimes, you want to put a different emphasis, or “Weight” on some of the selection criteria.
In the “Weighted” section of the example above, you can see we have given the most Weight (10) to Impact and a lesser Weight to Ease (5). Essentially, we are saying “I think Impact is more important than an Easy solution“.
When assigning “Weights” always give the most important a 10 to start then give the others weights according to how they rank against the most important. Try to keep the “Weights” a bit apart in value. So not 10,9,8 but rather 10,8,5
Given the same Score, you can see that the impact of Weight changes the preferred option. We would now focus on the “Decrease Cost of Goods” option.
The formula in the spreadsheet is (Impact Weight * Impact Score) + ( Ease Weight * Ease Score) for each alternative.
Choice of Score Criteria
We have used the fairly common Score Criteria of “Impact” and “Ease”.
But you can change these to other Score Criteria if you wish. You might be more interested in “Speed” than “Ease” for example so you can swap them out.
You can also add more than 2 Score criteria if you wish. You might want “Speed”, “Ease” and “Impact” for example. Your use of Weights for each Score criterion will give relative importance to these as you see fit.
Wrap-up Basic Weights & Scores
This a a simple but remarkably powerful technique.
It assigns your gut value to each alternative and turns it into a score.
The required spreadsheet is quite simple to construct but you can also do on a sheet of paper if spreadsheets are not your thing. If you would like a template spreadsheet from us, send us an email to request one
Full Weighted Scores Method (Blue Belt)
Often your decisions are more complex than the basic example above. You have many alternatives to evaluate and you want to Weight and Score them on more criteria.
By way of example, buying a car or choosing where it buy a house are more complex decisions.
Weights and Scores work just as well for these decisions. But you need the grown-up version of the Basic Approach above.
Case study: Buying a car
Let’s say we are choosing a car. First list all the selection criteria that you think are relevant and mark them ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’ in importance. We might identify the following criteria:- Resale value (high).
- Affordability (high).
- Environmentally responsible (low).
- Bluetooth connectivity (low).
- Safety (high).
Set up the Weighted Scores Table
The process is as follows:- Draw up a table (a spreadsheet is ideal for this as you will see) like the one below. Put the alternatives across the top row (Car A, Car B etc.).
- List the selection criteria down the page ( 4 seats, resale value etc.)
- Convert the criteria importance to a number between 1 and 10 with 10 being the highest importance. We call these the “Weight” (for importance) given to that criteria.
- Through experience I have learnt it best to be pretty tough on these weights. If they are all in a narrow range, say 7-10, they will not be much use later. I usually give the best a 10, highs a 9, mediums a 6 and lows a 3 value.
- It is helpful when doing this to choose the one in the column of criteria that you think most important and give it the highest weight (a 10). Then consider the next most important criteria in the column and weight it in comparison (maybe a seven against a ten), and so on. Usually you can separate out the options fairly easily this way.
- Write the weights into the second column.
- Now cross out any of the cars that fail the 4 seat ‘must have’ test as it is not worth looking at them any further. In this case, we have failed Car B.
- For each of the remaining criteria one at a time, see which of the choices best meets this criteria and give it a “score” of 10. Then score each of the remaining choices in comparison to the highest ranking. Once again, be pretty tough here and get a good spread of scores between choices or the results will be a bit muddy. Often many will end up having a similar score because they are not very different. Most cars today are fairly safe, for example, so it might be a bit had to score them too far apart. If this happens with several of your selection criteria, you might need to find even more selection criteria that the choices will score differently on so as to force them apart in the selection process.
- Now multiply each weight given to a choice by the score for the row. In the example table below, the score is in ( ). For example, Car A is a weigh to 6 times a score of 10 = 60 on the “resale” criterion.
- Add up the (weight X score) result for each choice column and write them in the total row. For example, Car A has a total of 241 whereas Car C has a total of 157. Work out the perfect score by multiplying each number in the Weight column by ten and adding them together. Because the best choice in each row gets a 10, a perfect score would be all tens. In the example, the perfect score is 310.
- Calculate the percentage each choice gets of a perfect result. The percentage is Car A (241) / Perfect Score (310) = 78%
Criteria | Weight | Car A | Car B | Car C | Car D |
| 4 seats | must | FAIL | |||
| Resale value | 6 (60) | 10 (60) | 5 (30) | 5 (30) | |
| Affordability | 9 (90) | 7 (63) | 3 (27) | 10 (90) | |
| Environmental | 3 (30) | 6 (18) | 10 (30) | 3 (9) | |
| Bluetooth | 3 (30) | 10 (30) | 0 (not there) | 10 (30) | |
| Safety | 10 (100) | 7 (70) | 7 (70) | 10 (100) | |
| Total Score | 310 | 241 | 157 | 259 | |
| Percentage | 100% | 78% | 51% | 83% |
Find the Best Choice from Weighted Scores
From the original seething mass of uncertainty, we can now see the best scoring option is Car D. Given your assessment of your preferences and how well each car scores against them, this is a logical outcome. Doing the percentages at the bottom row helps to show how different they are. But it has another purpose as well. If all the options scored fairly low percentages (I would suggest under 60%), it might well mean that none of them really satisfy your needs and you should cast your net wider to get more choices. Also, if two percentages are close together, the selection is not clear so you should widen your range of choice and/or of selection criteria. As this will often happen if the scores for each criteria/choice option are very similar, you could go back and re-score tougher. This is the problem I alluded to above when the weights and scores are too close to each other.More Opinions in Weighted Scores
This process can be improved sometimes by having several people contribute to the scores and weights. This can become problematic though if you have people with widely varying opinions about the right value and you average them out to get consensus. The result is that every choice will average out and all will be very similar. It is healthy to get various opinions but make sure you end up with a choice that is not a compromise!Weighted Scores Template Spreadsheet
To make your computations easier, we have put together a template spreadsheet in Excel for you to download. Do the following to get a copy;
- click the template link to download a copy
- it will open in Excel or other spread systems that accept Excel format
- If you think you might make repeated use of this template, either make a copy of the tab and work on that newly created tab or make a further copy of the whole spreadsheet. That will save having to edit out data in an existing spreadsheet to use again.
- add your own data
- check a few computations to make sure it is working correctly. As this is a public document others can edit, we do not guarantee its correct operation.
Advanced Weighted Scores Alternatives (Brown Belt)
Although the system of scoring mentioned above will generally be sufficient, there are a couple of other approaches you might use sometimes.
Instead of scoring from best (10) down, you could start with worst (1) and score up. Once again, use fairly large jumps in scores (e.g. 1, 3.6.9) otherwise all the results will ‘average’ out and you won’t get a clear choice. Note also that the percentage of the maximum possible (perfect) score is likely to be lower because you are starting with lower scores so the 60%+ test mentioned above might not apply.
A second alternative approach might be of use when some options are radically better than others and/or if you keep getting all the results about the same.
Instead of using 1-10, you can use a so called Fibonacci series. This works by setting Scores like;
- 1
- 1+1=2
- 1+2=3
- 2+3=5
- 3+5=8
- 5+8=13
- and so on
Each new number is added to the last one. This forces the Scores further and further apart and lets you really put emphasis on outstanding options.
This article was provided by Scott Williams AO FAIDC. It describes the way best practice in many management areas has been brought together in the 12Faces GamePlan System. The Goal is to provide an easy to use and repeatable “flywheel” to improve small business owners’ outcomes. Scott is the Founder of NFP small business support services 12Faces and MentorSME and has a Philanthropic Foundation supporting students in education. Scott’s business Petals Network was National Small Business of the Year and 4 times in the Top 100 Fastest Growing Australian Businesses LinkedIn