For decisions, recommendations or suggestions it makes sense to investigate and gather supporting rationale for your conclusion/recommendation /suggestion.

This research can be wide and varied or narrow and focused.  It can take hours,days, months or years to complete.  The results may be fully objective, mainly subjective or as is most often the case, somewhere inbetween.

The Research Balance

High value decisions are arrived at by spending the least amount of effort to achieve the highest quality result.  This leads to the basic question, how much effort should I expend on research?

How much effort is better spent on positioning, marketing and manipulating to sell the recommended solution?

To that end how about making it look like a lot of time and effort was spent on research, that is having your solution accepted because it looks well researched, really though its just effective use of smoke and mirrors.

Things to watch out for

Don’t let the consultant, salesman, researcher, etc pull the wool over your eyes with their magical recommendations and suggestions to support the best decision.

Consider:

• Does the solution advocate have a personal vested interest in the outcome.
• Is there a plethoria of supporting data (I always worry this is asign of misdirection)?
• Is the path to the conclusion twisted with multiple branches or just straight and to the point?
• Can the supporting data be replicated (objectively)?
• Was the research conducted for it’s own sake, that is took a long time so appears well thought out but is really just mainly focused on putting the researcher in a good light and justifying their existence.