The founders of DQI have a deep, deep interest in something called “decision quality” or what others call “decision analysis.” In fact, Clint Korver has a PhD in the stuff from Stanford where he studied with Ron Howard, the guy who basically invented the discipline.
So what is it about decision quality that’s so important? There are a bunch of signal ideas, but here are a few that come immediately to mind . . .
- Focus on what is important
- Avoid decision traps
- Divide and conquer
- Actionable thought
Every hard decision I have worked on using the principles of decision quality has gone the same way . . . bang away until suddenly there is this clarifying moment when you suddenly get what is really important about this problem and then the rest is easy. Sometimes that clarity shows up in framing the problem . . . looking at the problem from a bunch of different angles? Sometimes the “aha” shows up when you realize there’s a new and better alternative available. One you didn’t know existed. Almost always clarity shows up in the information mapping / evaluation process.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
A couple of years ago, my wife and I were trying to sort out where we wanted to live. At the time we were living in suburban splendor in Northern California, feeling restless and bored. Our search took us all over the American West. Increasingly our attention was drawn to the Seattle area. But what about all that rain?
What snapped everything into focus for this decision process was the notion of a “sun day.” As I said, and as you probably know, the folk lore about Seattle is that it rains all the time. It’s not true of course. It turns out that you can actually do research and understand how many days of cloud cover there are in Seattle and in San Francisco and compare the two. As an aside, there are plenty of cities with more precipitation and more cloud cover than Seattle.
And then, there is was. The big “aha”. We called it “sun day.” As we reasoned it through, it wasn’t even the difference in cloud cover or precipitation. It was the number of weekend days between Thanksgiving and Memorial Day that were likely to be cloudy. We figured that during the week, we’d be working and wouldn’t particularly care what the weather was doing. It would be the weekends where we might start feeling a bit stir crazy if it was in fact gray all the time. So now we’re down to 48 days. Except they weren’t all going to be gray and we wouldn’t care anyway. So call it maybe 12 days that would really matter.
So what’s the value of a “sun day”? That’s the clarifying question. In our case, it’s two airfares and two hotel nights. That’s it. If it got to be Thursday and the weekend weather was going to be crappy, and we cared, we could buy two tickets to any number of cities, and voila, problem solved. So as part of our decision making process, we simply factored in the possibility that we might spend $12,000 a year to, in effect, rent the sun. Given the economic advantages of leaving the Bay Area, it was a no-brainer.
I mention all this because I find myself ruminating on one of the things we learned from some consumer testing we did a while ago in conjunction with another company. When a decision gets hairy, people start to get afraid. Afraid of what? That they’ll miss something. That they will never find what they are looking for. That they would not know it when they saw it. That they do not know who to trust. That they don’t know when to stop. They have all these little short cuts and short hands for decisions they’re familiar with, but when the ice gets thin, they don’t know what to do.
kah
Technorati Tags: Decision Analysis, Decision Making, Decision Quality
