The proper balance of human and machine decision making is an important part of a system's design and that has lot to do with making choices. We all recognize that some decisions are more important than others, whether in their immediate impact or long term significance. As a means of understanding the significance of a decision so that we can know how much time and resources to spend on it, three levels of decision have been identified:
1. Strategic. Strategic decisions are the highest level. Here a decision concerns general direction, long term goals, philosophies, and values. These decisions are the least structured and most imaginative; they are the riskiest and of the most uncertain outcome, partly because they reach so far into the future and partly because they are of such importance.
2. Tactical. Tactical decisions support strategic decisions. They tend to be medium range, medium significance, with moderate consequences.
3. Operational. These are every day decisions, used to support tactical decisions. They are often made with little thought and are structured. Their impact is immediate, short term, short range, and usually low cost. The consequences of a bad operational decision will be minimal, although a series of bad or sloppy operational decisions can cause harm. Operational decisions can be pre-programmed, pre-made, or set out clearly in policy manuals.
According to Baker et al. (2001), decision making should start with the identification of the decision maker(s) and stakeholder(s) in the decision, reducing the possible disagreement about problem definition, requirements, goals and criteria. Then, a general decision-making process can be divided into the following steps:
Step 1. Define the problem
This process must, as a minimum, identify root causes, limiting assumptions, system and organizational boundaries and interfaces. The goal is to express the issue in a clear, one-sentence problem statement that describes both the initial conditions and the desired conditions. Of course, the one-sentence limit is often exceeded in the practice in case of complex decision problems.
Step 2. Determine requirements
Requirements are conditions that any acceptable solution to the problem must meet. It is very important that even if subjective or judgmental evaluations may occur in the following steps, the requirements must be stated in exact quantitative form, i.e. for any possible solution it has to be decided unambiguously whether it meets the requirements or not. We can prevent the ensuing debates by putting down the requirements and how to check them in a written material.
Step 3. Establish Goals
Goals are broad statements of intent and desirable programmatic values.... Goals go beyond the minimum essential must have’s (i.e. requirements) to wants and desires.. The goals may be conflicting but this is a natural concomitant of practical decision situations.
Step 4. Identify alternatives
Alternatives offer different approaches for changing the initial condition into the desired condition. Be it an existing one or only constructed in mind, any alternative must meet the requirements. If the number of the possible alternatives is finite, we can check one by one if it meets the requirements. The infeasible ones must be deleted (screened out) from the further consideration, and we obtain the explicit list of the alternatives. If the number of the possible alternatives is infinite, the set of alternatives is considered as the set of the solutions fulfilling the constraints in the mathematical form of the requirements.
Step 5. Define criteria
Decision criteria, which will discriminate among alternatives, must be based on the goals. It is necessary to define discriminating criteria as objective measures of the goals to measure how well each alternative achieves the goals. Since the goals will be represented in the form of criteria, every goal must generate at least one criterion but complex goals may be represented only by several criteria. It can be helpful to group together criteria into a series of sets that relate to separate and distinguishable components of the overall objective for the decision. It is a usual way to arrange the groups of criteria, sub-criteria and sub-sub-criteria in a tree-structure (UK DTLR (2001)).
Step 6. Select a decision-making tool
There are several tools for solving a decision problem. The selection of an appropriate tool is not an easy task and depends on the concrete decision problem, as well as on the objectives of the decision makers. Sometimes the simpler the method, the better but complex decision problems
may require complex methods, as well.
Step 7. Evaluate alternatives against criteria
Every correct method for decision making needs, as input data, the evaluation of the alternatives against the criteria. Depending on the criterion, the assessment may be objective (factual), with respect to some commonly shared and understood scale of measurement (e.g. money) or can be subjective (judgmental), reflecting the subjective assessment of the evaluator. After the evaluations the selected decision-making tool can be applied to rank the alternatives or to choose a subset of the
most promising alternatives.
Step 8. Validate solutions against problem statement
The alternatives selected by the applied decision-making tools have always to be validated against the requirements and goals of the decision problem. It problems the selected alternatives may also call the attention of the decision makers and stakeholders that further goals or requirements should be added to the decision model.
The easiest and simplest way to arrive to any decisions in day to day life is as under : Take a paper and divide the paper in two parts . Name one column as the PROS and the other as CONS. Now, start listing the advantages of that particular project/ career choice / personal and then write the dis-advantages of the same .
When you writing the pros and cons, ensure that you write putting yourself as third person and then do the needful. You will see that the things you listed has already been on your mind yet coming to a conclusion/ decision has been difficult.
Check the list and which ever side has higher weightage to the outcomes, go for it.
The above technique is only for small decisions especially affecting our day-to-day life and that will make
it easy for you to come to a conclusion.
Article by :
Riddhi Doshi Patel
Child Psychologist / Parenting Counselor
Dance Movement Therapist