Making Sense and Making Decisions: An engineer's guide to project decision making

PRELUDE It occurred to me early in my career that decision-making is as important as technical skill in engineering design work. I have spent thousands of hours studying decision-theory over the past 30 years. Making Sense and Making Decisions is a book/course that summarizes the important things I’ve learned. No Easy Answers Many of the business advice books that sell offer simple solutions to difficult problems. This book doesn’t provide easy answers – they probably don’t exist. Decision theory isn’t actually hard, but there is a lot to it and it is combinatorially complex the way chess is complex. It will take some work to grasp the important concepts and to integrate them into a working whole. If you are willing to work at it, this book will make you a better decision maker, and a better engineer. I promise you that it is worth the effort! ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK Decision problems come in all shapes and sizes. Some problems are fast-paced requiring immediate action. In such problems situation assessment is usually the key to success. Technical design problems are slower paced and the key to success is often in effectively identifying the design objectives. Sometimes choosing the right option is very important; other times implementation is key and it’s not that important which alternative you select. A study of decision making should include all facets making decisions. Making Sense and Making Decisions is organized as follows: 1. Situation Assessment: In many problems situation assessment is the most important aspect of the decision-making process. In all cases we use of available data to craft our beliefs, and our preconceived notions affect our interpretation of new data. 2. Setting Objectives and Alternatives: Identifying the objectives is key in solving technical problems. Failure to do so is a major cause of rework. But identifying objectives is difficult. In part this is because we are naturally alternative-focused. This section of the book focuses on use of our values to identify valid objectives and suitable alternatives (value-focused thinking) 3. Deciding: This is what most people think decision-making is; selecting the best option given a set of objectives. This is not usually the hardest part. It is important when dealing with uncertainty, conflicting objects and diverse stakeholders. 4. Acting: Most decision-theory books stop at the decision. But choosing the best option is not our goal; effective action is. Even the best laid plans may succumb to systems theory, human error, and defensiveness. 5. Learning: We are pretty effective at learning easy stuff such as identifying human error in implementing a procedure. We are not good at learning important stuff. The more important is lesson is the harder it is to learn. 6. Impacts of Stress and Expertise: Most decision-theory research is done by university professors with students as subjects. The students are not subject matter experts and are ususally not under significant stress in these experiments. The results do not translate well to the real world where important decisions are made under some time pressure by subject matter experts. 7. Impact of Teams and Interfaces: Project engineering is one of the most fascinating environments for the study and practice of decision-making. Some project decisions are made by individuals, some by groups, and many of the important decisions are made by groups of groups. Decision-making can be facilitated and improved by teamwork, but often the opposite is true. Teams defend turf, polarize opinion, create coordination problems, affect motivation and usually inhibit learning. 8. Summary and Suggestions: The book concludes with a suggested decision strategy and with examples of the use of decision theory to answer important engineering process questions such as “why do we repeat mistakes?”