Handbook of Decision Analysis

CHAPTER FIVE

Use the Appropriate Decision Process

STEVEN N. TANI and GREGORY S. PARNELL

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.

—W. Edwards Deming

5.1 Introduction

5.2 What Is a Good Decision?

5.2.1 Decision Quality

5.2.2 The Six Elements of Decision Quality

5.2.3 Intuitive versus Deliberative Decision Making

5.3 Selecting the Appropriate Decision Process

5.3.1 Tailoring the Decision Process to the Decision

5.3.2 Two Best Practice Decision Processes

5.3.3 Two Flawed Decision Processes

5.4 Decision Processes in Illustrative Examples

5.4.1 Roughneck North American Oil Strategy

5.4.2 Geneptin Personalized Medicine

5.4.3 Data Center

5.5 Organizational Decision Quality

5.6 Decision Maker’s Bill of Rights

5.7 Summary

Key Terms

References

5.1 Introduction

This chapter presents how to choose the appropriate process to provide decision support to senior decision makers who have the responsibility and authority to make an important decision for their organization or enterprise. We address several questions. What is a good decision? How much time and effort should be devoted to the decision? Who should be involved in making the decision? How should the decision process be structured?

We first discuss the goal of any decision process—making good decisions. We present a definition of a good decision using the six essential elements of decision quality. We describe four common decision processes: two that we believe are best practices and ...