Strategy and Change

5Choice

WE MAKE CHOICES every moment of every day. These can be made casually when the issue is routine, and the stakes are low—such as “where should I go to lunch today?”—or more formally when there are many considerations, and the stakes are high—such as “where should I buy a house?” Equally, in organizations choice has varying degrees of formality. If we focus primarily on issues with meaningful consequences, organizational choices are put into some form of framework that ensures the choices are made in line with organizational goals and managed with relative consistency so as to guarantee the delivery of expected results. By design, many choices in organizations are routine.

This routine is changing. Something dramatic is affecting both the context and activity of “choice” in organizations. As we have seen in Chapter 1, a combination of factors alters the underlying structure of decision-making. The increased speed in adoption of new technology, the dynamics of disruptive innovation, and the rapid influences of AI-powered machine learning all introduce rapid change in both the external factors and the internal forces that make up the decision ecosystem we all work within.

For organizational decision-makers these rapid changes are affecting how, when, and even if they are in a position to make particular choices. Some decisions remain relatively simple—the relevant data are available; the options are clear and once decisions are made, they will likely produce the expected ...