How to Make Decisions

Decision making is a science as much as it as an art. It requires not just practice but also experience. Practice hones artistic skills. Experience implies that there is a repeatable element in decision making from which we can form principles and techniques can be re-used. It is this element of the decision making process that we shall outline in this thread of articles.It turns out that the underlying structure of all decisions is the same. Consider that the following are always present:

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.