Decision Mechanics? Or Judgment?
Ms. J. Stillman presents a great summary of a book (Finkelstein et al.: Think Again – Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You) which itself, unfortunately , does not seem to come up with great new ideas.
I suggest that the book, in fact, suffers a subtle blind spot like that of the people who made-off (sorry, couldn’t resist) with Other People’s Money.
It wasn’t poor abilities to make decisions. Those people were in fact too effective in making decisions, and ingenious with their execution. Part of that scene was saying we only needed actuarial risk hedging, in place of regulation. Did we step back, and see the larger “frame” – the context?
The lessons learned should include the structure, not just content. We so fall in love with our technology, forgetting the lessons like those we should have learned in 1987. Only this time, the afterquakes are global – the other side to that wonderful newly minted coin, globalization. Perrow has written about system accidents. In a later blog, I will write about Stanford’s excellent model for strategic execution.
Take our increasing use of quants and analytics. What about those soft issues that we cannot quantify nor fit into a spreadsheet cell? They tend to clutter our tidy logical constructs, don’t they?
Zoom out. See the goal in its context of competing goals and the larger community of stakeholders. But it’s a catch-22: to have that vantage view, one must want to rise to the next level beyond goals: Values. Maybe even confess to some morality? There is a subtle blindspot to not being able to use those words, and instead reduce them to decision-process mechanics.
Context. Values lead to clarity, and clarity might lead to accountability – if we wanted to.
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March 25th, 2009 at 12:26 am
Your use of “decision” in contrast to “judgment” here implies that a “decision” is objective, or based on a mutually accepted reference basis; “judgment” then would be more of an interpretation, an opinion or a choice based on non-absolute references such as moral standards. Is that a fair summation?
June 4th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
I am reposting what seems to have been a lost reply to your comment, Mary; my apologies.
I think “decision” has been defined into different scopes and limits by different literature – but the short answer is yes, “decision” here is meant to denote a reference to an external or objective basis – though not necessarily mutually accepted.
“Judgment” seems to connote something more amorphous, perhaps involving personal values. In the old days, we’d hear of judgments based on this or that law or precedent – external or objective norms. Now, judges are limited to merely ruling on procedures and are not supposed to “legislate” or impose their own moral values from the bench. But the common usage seems to denote a preponderant reliance on personal bases.
That said, in neuroscience writings, I see “decision” used more generically as the end result of however the analytical process might have been.
The semantics are all over the place.