9 thoughts on “Decision Making”

  1. I think I have seen all of these modes of decision-making in my career.

    But… so what? The real challenge of decision-making is not mentioned in the article. The challenge is gathering the inputs required to make the right decision, and operating on those inputs through a rational process to arrive at commensurable trades. Failing that, it’s …. all … just … gut … feelings. And I have never met a manager whose gut was so finely tuned to the universe that he could make good decisions in the absence of operable inputs.

    Perhaps someone should write a column on modes of data-gathering and rational processing. We have “Mandates”, “Threats”, “Pleading”, “Consultation with Experts”, “Surveys”, and (my personal favorite) “Thinking”.

  2. Shocking isn’t it that he didn’t include the most common of all…

    “This is what we are going to do.” said fearless leader.

  3. There’s one for two-party resource contention that’s worth repeating. It sounds silly, but it gets to the heart of the matter quickly.

    One person ‘cuts the cake’, the other gets first choice of slices.

    Scientific American did a write up (Martin Gardner I think) on how to do multi-person, or multi-item deciding with the same approach. It does get involved, and certainly works best with a single item of contention (because money is darn fungible.) But it leads to ‘maximum happiness’.

    One note from the article that’s repeatedly glossed over on the ‘Compromise’ methods: Too often the compromise is only a superficial compromise. “Your method is 200 million, theirs is a billion, we’ll call it 600 million and quit.”

    That’s nice. But the opposition didn’t stem from the amount of money, but instead the methods. Perfectly happy paying an overall dramatically larger slice of income into retirement if it were -entirely- IRA based. Don’t have any interest in paying a dime with my estimated rate-of-return at -75% or so. (Output capped, then taxed, life expectancy quite short due to personal genetics.)

  4. Who cares what the process is … if the results stink.

    12 NASA employees in a room “reach consensus”, “vote”, “negotiate”, or possibly have “spontaneous agreement” — to launch a shuttle in January.

    *Boom*.

    The results matter (And taking responsibility for the results) much more than the pathway to get there.

  5. Many thanks to Rand for linking to my post, and thanks to all of you who commented here.

    I may not have addressed every aspect of decision making you wanted or expected to see, and that’s fine. The conversation has to start somewhere.

    As one of you pointed out, you can get 12 NASA employees in a room, etc. etc., and BOOM. We’ve seen that happen more than we care to see. What happened? Was it a failure of decision making? Clearly. Was it a failure of the consensus-bases decision making that we’re all taught is the “best”? I think so.

    My motivation for writing this piece was to make the following point: not all decisions need to be made through consensus. Other options – whether it is that one person decides, a compromise, etc. – are valid options in certain situations. I picked trivial examples to illustrate this. Yet for each of those trivial cases, there is a non-trivial case that may prevent the next Apollo 1, Challenger, or Columbia.

    1. Joe — I didn’t mean to give the impression that your column was meaningless. It is definitely worth the read (MfK asked) — in fact I printed a copy to PDF for future reference for the next time I get stuck in an interminable NASA “board” meeting.

      But my point was the same as Fred K’s — without operable inputs, the process is headed for failure. As he put it much more eloquently, *Boom*.

  6. The article discusses group decision making. Heuristics for decision making by individuals form a separate, complementary topic that is at least as important in the scheme of things.

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