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Decision-making is the life-blood of all organisations. It is also something that we as humans to continously throughout our waking-hours. Many options are exercised sub-consciously such as selecting this flavour of ice-cream rather than that or taking the lift instead of the stairs. Some personal decisions are much more important and might involve purchasing a new house, selecting a career or a holiday destination and these need contemplation, consultation and sometimes even a bit of analysis.
Within an organisation, decisions made at senior management levels can have wide-reaching and long-lasting effects and need to be taken only after careful deliberation, weighing up the options against the decision criteria that help shape the dilemma.
Decision-making can be thought of as an art. It requires practice and experience, Practice hones artistic skills but experience implies that there is a common structure to a decision, one that gives rise to a reusable methodology, from which good principles and reliable techniques emerge. In this sense, decisioin-makiing is a science too, providing a bedrock of methods, tools, process and models.
In what sense are decisions similar to each other structurally? Consider the following always-present features of a decision:
- There are one or more objectives to be achieved by the decision.
- These give rise to criteria for selection.
- There are multiple options from which to select in order to meet the criteria best.
- There are subjective values and preferences inherent among the decision makers which will influence the way in which they view options.
- There are prevailing conditions constituting the decision context which helps determine our choice of option.
- There are payoffs and penalties associated with various options.
Even in the context of a new decision, the ever-presence of these elements provide comfort and familiarity in the decision. This, ulimately, is the benefit of experience.
In the articles that will follow under this theme, we shall introduce a process for setting preferences, for organising criteria and for arriving at defensible and justifiable decisions in a formal and systematic way. We shall also show how these decisions are easily documented so that they can be revisited, explained, defended or re-used in future situations.We shall show how a database can be set up to capture the information stored so that a practical and useful knowledge management system can arise in the wake of a stream of decisions.
We shall also introduce a series of decision making tools. These will include the famous AHP method, decision tables, decision trees, dedicated software programs and even the trusty old spreadsheet which can serve surprisingly well as a decision making aid.
Tactical vs. Value Decisions
How to Approach Decisions
Building a Decision Context
Will Decision Makers Learn from Project Managers?
Formulating Decisions
Elements of a Good Decision-making Process
Decision Options and Criteria
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