Decision Quality

Acknowledgments

We have the benefit of standing on the shoulders of giants. The decision quality (DQ) framework for making better decisions is built on decision theory, which was developed over a couple of centuries by great minds like Laplace, Bernoulli, Ramsey, and many others. The thought leadership provided by Ron Howard at Stanford and Howard Raiffa and his colleagues at Harvard over the last 50 years turned this theory into a practical discipline for making better decisions. In addition, the behavioral decision sciences also made great advances in the understanding of human nature necessary to overcome biases and decision traps. Thought leadership in that field was provided by Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, and Ward Edwards.

The authors have been part of the school of thought that grew around Ron Howard (and many of his graduate students) and have benefited from and contributed to this community of decision professionals. Our employer, Strategic Decisions Group (SDG), is a part of this community and has an educational partnership with the Stanford Center for Professional Development that provides a certificate program in Strategic Decision and Risk Management (SDRM). Barbara Mellers co-taught the SDRM “Biases in Decision Making” course with us for about seven years, which led to the framework for the categorization of biases presented in this book.

We want to thank our original co-creators of the DQ framework, in particular, Ron Howard, Tom Keelin, James Matheson, and ...