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Foreword
It is a curious fact that although ability to take decisions is at the top
of most senior executives’ list of attributes for success in management,
those same people are usually unwilling to spend any time developing
this quality. Perhaps decision making is considered as fundamental as
breathing: essential for life, a natural and automatic process. Therefore,
why study it?
In this book, Paul Goodwin and George Wright show why: because
research over the past 30 years has revealed numerous ways in which the
process of making decisions goes wrong, usually without our knowing
it. But the main thrust of this book is to show how decision analysis can
be applied so that decisions are made correctly. The beauty of the book
is in providing numerous decision-analysis techniques in a form that
makes them usable by busy managers and administrators.
Ever since decision theory was introduced in 1960 by Howard Raiffa
and Robert Schlaifer of Harvard University’s Business School, a succession
of textbooks has chronicled the development of this abstract
mathematical discipline to a potentially useful technology known as
decision analysis, through to numerous successful applications in commerce,
industry, government, the military and medicine. But all these
books have been either inaccessible to managers and administrators
or restricted to only a narrow conception of decision analysis, such as
decision trees.
Unusually, this book does not even start with decision trees. My
experience as a practicing decision analyst shows that problems with
multiple objectives are a frequent source of difficulty in both public
and private sectors: one course of action is better in some respects,
but another is better on other criteria. Which to choose? The authors
begin, in Chapter 3, with such a problem, and present a straightforward
technology, called SMART, to handle it.
My advice to the reader is to stop after Chapter 3 and apply SMART
on a problem actually bothering you. Decision analysis works best on