The Decision Making Steps:
I work at a major bank based out of Michigan. With the bank running into 15 quarters of losses and recently incurring a huge expense as a part of a lawsuit filed by the US government, the bank is looking for innovative ways to get as much money as possible. The first and most important thing that the team decided to look into was the collection of money from delinquent borrowers. The bank is trying to improve its collections efforts to gain more money from the numerous delinquent borrowers. The collection efforts fall into First Mortgage, Home Equity Line of Credit, Consumer Loans, CD Secured Loans and Overdraft Line of Credit categories.
The team decided to use a few Critical thinking methodologies in the process of solving the problem. According to Richard Paul and Linda Elder “Critical thinking is the art of thinking about thinking to make thinking better. It involves three interwoven phases: It analyzes thinking, it evaluates thinking and it improves thinking”. The team first decided to identify the problem at hand. We saw that one of the first problems faced by the banks were the number of times customers missed the payment dates due to lack of knowledge of due dates. There were a few borrowers who could not pay their mortgage due to reasons like job loss, loss of an earning person in the family or a bad personal experience resulting in loss of any disposable income. The collection agents failing to recognize inherent problems in a specific loan, was identified as another problem.
The teams next task was to define the goals to be achieved through this decision making process. The common goal identified by the team was to collect more money. This would mean the process used by the collection team, on the whole, had to be modified to make it more efficient, quick and effective. Due to the above mentioned problems the bank was not