1. What is the importance of identifying a number of alternative solutions to good decision making?
A couple points to make:

1. Good decision-making starts with gathering the facts. You should seek out all available information. If you don’t you are handicapping your decision-making ability.

2. Understanding your alternatives is the key to “economic” decision-making. Decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. You have to consider your “opportunity costs” or what you are giving up when you choose one option over another.

For example, what is the cost of going to college?

The answer is NOT just the tuition. It is also the money you would have made if you would have been working instead of going to class. Understanding the pros and cons of each alternative is the basis for making a strong decision.

One caveat:
Sometimes marketers and other salespeople will try to take advantage of you by giving you a false set of choices. A car salesman may show you a $50k car and then show you a $35k car and claim it to be a good value relative to the first car. But he did not show you the first car to give you “more alternatives.” He showed it to you to warp your perception of “good value.”
It is a best practice to identify at least three alternative solutions that will meet the requirements to solve the problem. Requiring a minimum of three alternative solutions forces the integrated project team to identify solutions that may not be obvious. It helps to prevent automatically adopting a "pre-selected" solution because of the prevailing biases. A meaningful investigation of alternative solutions will often identify a solution that produces substantially superior results compared to what initially appeared to be the obvious solution. Individuals who have a pre-existing strong bias toward a specific solution are often not aware of other potential solutions, especially