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Will Good Legal Decisions Lead To Bad Laws?Will Good Legal Decisions Lead To Bad
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 The Idea: We spend much of our lives making decisions. Too often we use the wrong tools to make them, and, not surprisingly, end up making the wrong decisions. Or putting off making a decision at all. When I was in university (1970s) everyone thought Decision Support Systems would be the wave of the future. Computers would be able to factor in all the criteria and information and virtually make the decision for us. But while technology has been helpful in organizing the information needed to make decisions, it has only simplified and streamlined the decision-making process in a few narrow areas, where little or no judgement is called for. Most of us still spend an astronomical amount of our time making decisions (or putting off making them) and looking for information pertinent to decisions we need to make next. I mentioned recently Dave Snowden's multi-ontology sense-making project, diagrammed above. His thesis is that before you can make sense of a situation (or make decisions about it) you need to understand whether the underlying environment is simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic. So in a simple situation, such as prioritization of a small, fixed number of 'to dos', simple tools like Getting Things Done can help substantially. The decision-making process in these situations is linear. Answer a set of simple questions and the decision (what to do next) is obvious.  In a complicated
situation, such as deciding what an allergic patient is suffering
from,
more sophisticated tools are needed to understand all the variables
(decision criteria and alternatives) and how they affect the decision.
Systems Thinking
methodology, and the NASA process illustrated at right, are examples
of
tools appropriate for complicated decisions. The decision-making
process is systematic.
Understand the information underlying the decision, and the
cause-and-effect relationships between elements of this information.
From this understanding of the 'mechanics' of the system, identify all
of the decision alternatives. Then assess the criteria that affect
your
decision, and how important each criterion is, and the best
alternative
'pops out'. Review the decision to ensure that it 'makes sense' (and
if
it doesn't, go back and change the 'map' of the system, the
alternatives, the criteria and/or the weights until a sensible
decision
is produced).There are two main dangers with this methodology. The first is that if the environment is actually complex, and we have reduced it to merely complicated, the system map will be incomplete and erroneous, and so will the list of alternatives from which the decision is made. The second danger is that we will have actually made the decision based on more subjective criteria, and we will therefore deliberately bias the system map, the alternatives, the decision criteria and the weights to yield the predetermined answer. This is bad enough when we do it knowingly and deliberately, to justify a decision we have made in our own minds based on fuzzy or unfathomable logic, or no logic at all. But there is some evidence that we do this all the time, perverting what could be a useful decision-making process into a misleading and slanted decision-justifying process. There is little doubt, for example, that the selective ignoring and distortion of facts, dubious cause-and-effect analysis, selective and incomplete enumeration of alternatives and biased weighting was used to justify the invasion of Iraq on the grounds of its posing a threat to US security. The result was 'sold' to the American public as a logical decision, when it was either nothing of the sort, or else was the result of logic and information that the administration was unwilling to share with the citizens. There are software to ols that take you through the NASA complicated-environment decision-making process in more detail. I don't think they address either of the two dangers above, but they can take you through the process if the number of variables, relationships and decision criteria get unwieldy. I think it is human nature to make initial decisions quickly and on the basis of the best information available that fits with our existing frames of understanding, and to change our minds after that reluctantly. No software or other tool is going to correct that, and make us more open-minded. We need to acknowledge that our decision on what television programs to watch today, or what websites to visit, for example, is unlikely to be changed by adding more rigour to the decision-making process. Even the way we 'map' the system: assess the situation, gather facts, assess unknowns, and connect the dots of causality and implication, are filtered by our existing frames, the mental models through which we perceive and conceive. The best any tool can do is to draw our attention to facts, relationships, alternatives and criteria we might have missed. What would be more useful is a tool that would allow us to see how others facing the same decision process would go through these same steps, and would give us some appreciation of how our frames colour our decision-making. And of course, it would be useful to capture and tap the Wisdom of Crowds -- the collective decision that many informed, independent people would make using the information, alternatives and criteria personally available to them through their frames of understanding.  In a complex
situation, not all of the pertinent information and variables are
known or even
knowable, so cause-and-effect analysis is of limited use, and even the
universe of appropriate decision alternatives is likely to be too
large
to enumerate. In these situations, a more sensible approach is to focus on discovering as much as possible about the environment in which the decision must be made, and as many points of view of the potential alternatives and their likely effects. The decision-making process is emergent. An Open Space discovery process that involves as many of the thirteen activities shown on the framework at right, and involves conversation and collaboration with as many people as possible, is likely to lead to the best decisions. In fact, as I suggested< /a> the other day, it may be best to push the decision-making out to the front-lines, to each individual involved in the discovery process, so that they can each make the decisions in the context of their personal situation. And if all this wasn't difficult enough, often situations are not merely simple, complicated or complex. Some complex environments may have issues or challenges that are simple or complicated, and vice versa. How about chaotic situations? If you were present when the recent tsunami hit, or the current Marburg or avian flu virus broke out, how would you decide what to do? You would probably rely on your instincts -- we are programmed, after all, with three million years of successful evolutionary learnings to handle exactly such situations. The decision-making process in these circumstances is intuitive. Four kinds of thinking -- linear, systematic, emergent, intuitive -- for four types of decision situations. No wonder it's so hard to make decisions. And no wonder we are so tempted to put them off. |
-George Stalk Jr. , Senior VP, Boston Consulting Group
| The Idea: Open Space offers
a process for decision making that is the exact opposite of that used
in most Western organizations: A collective understanding emerges from conversations,
and individuals are then
entrusted to decide what should be done. One of the things that really struck me in my recent conversati on with Chris Corrigan about Open Space meeting protocols, Appreciative Inquiry ("discover pattern, dream/envision, design, do") and the Four Practices ("opening, inviting, holding/making room, acting/practicing") was how it turns the hierarchical business model of doing things on its head. In business, the decisions on what to do are usually made by a few 'experts' (executives, specialists etc.) and then those decisions are carried out (if they know what's good for them) by everyone else. Here's how Chris & Michael explain the process of acting using Open Space: "It is the personal and individual (I, me, my) pursuit of the good that we invite, in the space that we provide." The knowledge and understanding that prompts the decisions on what to do come from collective activity, and the decision about precisely what to then do is entrusted to each individual. The individuals who are (if the process has gone well) inspired to action have the context to know best what exactly should be done in their own area, community, job, or situation. In business, the 'experts' cannot hope to have the Wisdom of Crowds (all of the individual knowledge and context of everyone affected), and hence are prone to make wrong, even dysfunctional decisions. The frustrated, untrusted employees are forced to implement these decisions, or quit, or, as more often happens, find 'workarounds' that allow them to implement what they know really needs to be done without too obviously ignoring the instructions from the top. The result in business (as I keep saying) is that things are the way they are for a reason -- and usually the reason is that the knowledgeable employees have brilliantly found a way to do what needs to be done while still appearing to be conforming to the relatively ignorant and often counterproductive instructions from the boss. It doesn't take new employees long to catch on to this incongruity between what actually happens on the front line and what the manuals, directives, plans and organization charts would have you believe are happening. In fact the whole new field of 'cultural anthropology' in business entails spending enough time to study this incongruity, and gently and sheepishly report back to the executives, experts, specialists and consultants the perfectly good reasons why their advice and instructions are being ignored. Only a few organizations (Semco and WL Gore are reputedly among them) actually use the Open Space approach to run their operations. This is, after all, scary stuff for executives who get paid to make good, tough decisions. Yet most tribal communities (other than those that have been coerced into using Western governmental structures) have used the Open Space approach successfully for tens of thousands of years. In Open Space cultures nobody tells you what to do. Why do our business, social and political organizations ignore this obvious wisdom? Is it arrogance on the part of the executives? Is it a means for 'experts' to justify their large salaries? Are line staff complicit so they can always say they were just following orders when things go wrong? How and why did the mistrust and disempowerment of the front lines arise? Is it because modern organizations, public and private, are just so big they have become unmanageable, and command-and-control is hence a charade to avoid acknowledging the endemic reality of inefficiency, disconnectedness, distrust and chaos in big organizations, to their customers and other stakeholders? Diagram above: The 'classic' decision-making process, adapted from NASA. |
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