Decision and Decision-maker in an Industrial Environment

2Decisions: The Process

How do we decide what to do?

H. Simon

2.1. Introduction

One of the many characteristics of the notion of decisions is that it results from the implementation of a process called the decision process¹. Aristotle and Descartes after him had in fact stated this well before we did (see section 1.2.8).

We distinguished in our previous discussion the act of deciding (decision-making) from the decision, strictly speaking.

Decision-making thus illustrates the action, and the decision illustrates the result of this action. Decision-making can therefore be identified with the process describing the mechanism by which a decision-maker’s intention evolves, for a considered system, towards a decision that they make for this same system. Among the key stages of this mechanism is the stage of choosing the actions to carry out, in coherence with the objectives stated during the previous stages. The objective reflects the concretization of the intention. And the decision becomes the preliminary artifact to carrying out the action chosen by the decision-maker for the system, in view of reaching the fixed objective. The decision is the process concentrated in one image (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1. Decision-making and decision

The decision is the expression of a choice in view of an objective. The process is the pathway that makes it possible to arrive at this choice. ...