What are the elements of a decision, what is the basic structure that every decision can encompass.

Access to information

Most decisions will require some information, especially if we want to make an informed decision. Information comes in many forms of course. Ideally we have direct access to all the information to make our decision immediately. In reality we will likely have access to some, have to hunt for some, and have to rely on experience or guesswork when we cannot expend the time to collect or discover the gaps.

And of course, before we worry about the quality of that information, we have to be able to get to it. This remains the biggest blockage for user - actually getting access to information. Most information workers - 60% in recent survey by the economist - continue to lack access to the information they need to complete their tasks:

 

Source: “Enterprise Knowledge Workers: Understanding Risks and Opportunities” - available here 

Understanding of the quality of our information

The next thing we need is to understand the quality of the information we have found. Give us the good and the bad, but tell us which it is. If there is no quality information, then we may choose to use the poor quality stuff. And there are lots of aspects to quality, for example: knowing that there is a perfect trace of the information right back to where it was originally collected is very important if not critical, at the same time this is not synonymous with ‘useful’ to us. So we also want to know the what our colleagues think of the information source, its reputation, its application and its issues.

Interpreting that information

Its not enough that I get a statistic, a fact or an opinion, I need to be able to understand what that fact is telling me. I have to interpret the information, and we should really have a good record of the assumptions I am making as I interpret the information.

It is this interpretation or insight where we add our value to the process. Decisions are rarely simple yes or no and as Timo says in his blog:

“A decision is a situation where information is lacking by definition. Many executives define their jobs as “making decisions” — i.e. tasks that can’t be automated. As computers take on the lower-level tasks, they’re free to move on to more complicated choices.” - link

Our ability to interpret the data, and determine how we could change our future based on this imperfect information, is what is key.

Create a proposal

Once we have decided that we can, should or must create a change then we need to come up with a proposed change, or a set of alternate proposals.

Too many alternatives, and the decision makers are swapped with alternatives wasting time testing and reviewing each, or walking down branching trees that lead to smaller and smaller optimizations and the cost of time. Too few, and your choosing between republican and democrat or constantly being sent back to refine those alternatives. Rarely do we get offered a clear unequivocal alternatives like:

“If we choose A the world ends, if we choose B we are all crazy rich and everyone will loves us - my recommendation: B”

More usually its something like:

“If we choose drug A we would cure you but your would lose a limb, the alternative is drug B which might cure you and would involve losing your house - my recommendation: don’t get sick in the first place”

Get feedback

We love to pretend were omnipotent, but as the Open Source people, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, which really says that the more people that look at something the less errors you get. So the next stage is one where we need to review our proposal with others and collect their opinions. We need to record these opinions too, so that we can show who has and has not been informed, provided input or been ignored.

Make a decision

Someone needs to actually sign on the dotted line and state that a decision has been made. So often in organizations one of the great challenges is knowing who is able to do that, or willing to do that. I believe that an enormous amount of energy in organizations is lost by information workers attempting to resolve this question.

For the decision making to be effective, we want three things. Decisions should never be made higher up in an organization than necessary, otherwise we create bottlenecks, stopping decision being made quickly. Decisions should never be made too far down in the organization where we result in loss of control and run the risk decisions being overturned, duplicated or ignored. Finally, we want actual decisions to be made, the alternative is non-decisions that may or may not be executed.

Communicate the decision

Few decisions do not require people to “get on board”, change is a big challenge, managing that change can be as important as making the decision. We spent all our energy getting a great decision, and now we are assuming that everyone knows.

This is where storytelling comes in and our ability to convert the available information into something that everyone can understand. Personally I believe that storytelling is a critical element of successful communication and successful decision making.

Monitor the change

How do you know when the decision is in effect. It is essential that you measure its success/failure.

“What’s measured improves.” - Peter Drucker

Of course we need to measure the performance of our business or endeavor, but at the same time we should also try to measure the impact each decision has on that business or endeavor so we can ensure we improve as decision makers. Not that this, measuring impact, is easy. First, you are likely only measuring the outcome of the change, without a control to allow you to see what the other choice(s) would have resulted in. Second, likely the change is not happening in isolation as there are lots of other changes that impact whatever metric you use - so it is the cumulative effect of all these decisions reflected in the measurement. Google Finance has an interesting take on this, they connect news stories (which we could consider the changes being enacted in the business) to the performance graphically so we can see the accumulated impact of all these factors.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Decision Making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.