Making Effective Decisions: the mistakes that cost you marks
Most weak Making Effective Decisions statements fail on the same handful of mistakes, and all of them are fixable in a redraft. Here are the seven we see most often, what they look like, and how to put each one right.
Why these mistakes keep appearing
This behaviour is scored on reasoning, which makes it different from behaviours where a good outcome carries the statement. Writers naturally focus on what happened; assessors are scoring how you thought. The seven mistakes below all hide your thinking in one way or another.
Read your draft against each one. If a mistake applies, the fix rarely needs new material, just a different emphasis and usually fewer words than the original.
Mistakes 1 to 4: hiding the decision
Common mistake
1. Narrating events with no visible moment of choice. 'The van was delayed so I rang the customer and rearranged' is a sequence, not a decision. Fix: insert the point where you chose between at least two options, and name both.
Common mistake
2. Writing 'we decided' throughout the action. If the assessor cannot isolate your judgement from the team's, there is nothing to score. Fix: rewrite the action with 'I', and use 'we' only for outcomes the group genuinely shared.
Common mistake
3. Claiming the choice was obvious. 'There was only one real option' tells the assessor there was no judgement to make. Fix: show why the rejected options were plausible and what tipped the balance, even if the answer now feels clear.
Common mistake
4. Skipping the evidence. Jumping from problem to action suggests you decided on instinct. Fix: add two or three sentences naming what you checked, data, policy, people, and what each source told you.
Mistakes 5 to 7: weakening the judgement
Common mistake
5. Ignoring risk and trade-offs. A decision with no downside reads as a decision with no thought. Fix: name the risk you accepted, the cost of being wrong, and any contingency or review point you set.
Common mistake
6. Breaking the rules silently. If you bent a policy, ignoring that fact reads as recklessness; explaining it reads as judgement. Fix: acknowledge the rule, show you understood it, and give the reasoning and authority for departing from it.
Common mistake
7. Ending at the decision with no result. 'I decided to proceed' leaves the story half told. Fix: close with the outcome and at least one number, plus any wider effect such as your approach being reused.
A quick self-check before you submit
Once you have fixed the mistakes that apply, run this checklist. Every 'yes' is evidence an assessor can score; every 'no' is a gap to close.
- The moment of decision is explicit, with at least two named options.
- The action section uses 'I', so my judgement is unmistakable.
- At least two sources of evidence are named, with what each told me.
- The risk, cost or trade-off I accepted is stated in concrete terms.
- My authority is clear: what I decided alone, and what I escalated.
- The result has at least one number and a consequence beyond me.
For example, changing 'I looked at the options and chose the best one' to 'I compared the £130 agency cost against moving our strongest worker to the floor, and chose the floor plan because it kept service familiar on our busiest night' fixes mistakes 1, 3 and 4 in a single sentence.
If you want to see the fixes applied in full, compare the HEO example statement with the assessment criteria assessors use.
Frequently asked questions
Invisible reasoning. Writers describe a good outcome but never show the evidence they gathered or the options they rejected, so the assessor has no judgement to score. The fix is cheap: add the two or three options you considered and one sentence on why each loser lost.
No. Difficulty is evidence of judgement. Statements that present every decision as effortless remove the very thing assessors score. Name what made the decision hard, conflicting data, time pressure, competing needs, and show the reasoning you used to resolve it.
Usually, yes. Think back to what you personally did inside the team decision: the analysis you ran, the option you argued for, the check you performed. Write those actions with 'I' and keep the genuinely shared parts, like the final sign-off, as 'we'. That is accurate, not invented.
Pair every risk with its control. 'I accepted the risk of X, so I limited it by doing Y and set a review point on Z' reads as proportionate judgement at any grade. Risk accepted with no mitigation reads as a gamble; risk avoided altogether reads as a missed decision.
Next step
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