I’ve written lots of posts this week on decision-making, and that’s because I have run three rounds of The Decision Engine workshop — part three in our Critical Thinking programme.
The Decision Engine imagines decision-making as a production line that we build and operate. A decision travels through this system — starting with how the question is framed, moving through decision criteria, weighing subjective and objective factors, and arriving (eventually) at a decision.
It’s a model I first helped develop at Think Up during our 2015 collaboration with Arup on the Conceptual Design Mastery programme. Since then, I’ve developed it to account for everything from emotional data and gut feel to AI and emergent behaviour.
But the point is not to turn decision-making into a laborious stepwise process, but rather to build critical insight into our personal and group decision-making.
Interesting questions that have fallen out of this week’s workshops include:
Should you start with developing ideas or agreeing your decision-making criteria?
Are we deciding — or are we building the mechanism by which other people decide?
What’s the role of subjectivity, and how do we get better at working with it?
When is a good time to decide?
And how do we continuously learn from our decisions.
Plenty to chew on, including whether we could run a day-long, stand-alone course on decision-making in future. Watch this space.