The Decision Intelligence Handbook

Chapter 6. Decision Reasoning: The Decision Assessment Process

Congratulations: you’re a good way through the DI processes. You’ve modeled your decision and you’ve run it through, from actions to outcomes. You might have even run it backward, to see if a computer simulation can help you find the best actions. You have a recommended action in mind. Are you done? Or is it time to go around the loop again, maybe building a better model, to gather more data, interview more experts, dig up more research? Or have you learned what you can from the decision model?

Welcome to Process C2, Decision Assessment. This second process in Phase C, Decision Reasoning, is where you make the most important concerns, risks, sensitivities, and uncertainties of your decision explicit. These may stem from single elements of the decision (like an external element on the CDD that represents the weather) or larger subcomponents (like a financial modeling part of a CDD). Either way, in this process, you’ll record them so that you can assess and manage the risks and opportunities that arise from how you built your decision model. Much like Process C1, Decision Simulation, this process can involve both human and computer techniques.

Figure 6-1 shows the Decision Reasoning phase in the context of the other process phases.

Figure 6-1. The Decision Reasoning phase includes Process C2, Decision Assessment (this ...