Decision Making

We talk about evidence-based decision-making… but what is it? Does it make a difference… and how?

Knowledge is power. Systems of knowledge make you powerful.

The science and engineering of organizations and their decision-making practices remains a cottage industry. Leadership and organizational design advice follow traditional recipes, or are learned through trial and error Darwinian experimentation. Academic study of business is placed in the ‘social sciences’ category alongside psychology and anthropology. Whilst behavioral perspectives will always have value, they do not lead us to a disciplined engineering approach sufficient to deal with complexity. Decision-making infrastructure lags well behind all that is required for our organizations to deliver on their potential – and well behind what organizations need to meet industrial-scale decision-making challenges. We need an industrial era, knowledge era, engineering-scale response.

Global organizations invest vast amounts of effort and capital. Any upgrade that improves the effective performance of these investments, in producing financial and non-financial outcomes, is material… and worth pursuing. Equally, any failure to upgrade the productivity of our organizations squanders and frustrates their potential and wastes their collected history, assets, and efforts. More than ever in this new normal environment, a day wasted is a day less that is available to achieve necessary or desired outcomes. Risk is heightened and opportunity fleeting.

There is an emerging multi-disciplinary data science on value accounting, integrating at the leading edge of a variety of disciplines. The good news is that means there is much to learn from existing practices, and the experts in our organisations are familiar with, and motivated to, upgrade their approach. But seeking to engage these upgrades without the a blueprint of integrated practice is shown in the research to deliver poor results. As a Fortune 200 chair observed “We’ve done a couple of those billion-dollar transformation projects to fix them. And, the projects didn’t fail… but… honestly… they haven’t made a difference”. The research describes this as organisations stuck in a “Phase of Maturity” called “Islands of Excellence”.

Research and observations of a small number of out-performers show us how to lift to a phase of “Integrated Maturity” where enhanced quality insight is consistently improving decision-making – in everyday decisions happening at all levels of the organisation. Upgrade is possible.