Much of my work at the moment revolves around the notion of deliberative decision making. In other words, this kind of thing:
The meeting in the prime minister’s Sydney office was to consider raising the stakes: should the government reverse its previous position and seek to end the interminable blame shifting by taking over all public hospitals immediately after the election, if necessary through changing the constitution? The discussion went backwards and forwards for well over an hour. Various other options were canvassed: taking over more hospitals that the states were running down to show how they might be run better; using the Health Care Agreements to force the states to contract out public hospital services; and directly funding hospitals to provide a particular quantum of free services to public patients; in addition to the ‘mega’ option of a full Commonwealth government takeover… An immediate Commonwealth takeover might have looked like responding to the other side. As well, it would have provoked the Liberal Party’s ‘anti-centralism’ brigade, even though it was the states that had run hospitals from head office through giant unwieldy bureaucracies. At that stage in the political cycle, anything dramatic would have been cast as an admission of past failure.
Tony Abbott, Battlelines, p.23
Deliberative decision making considers a range of options in terms of the various pros and cons, and attempts to determine the best option through a process of qualitative argumentation.
As opposed to what? Here are two contrasts:
- Intuitive decision making, where decisions are made on the basis of what “seems right” without any explicit, systematic working-through of the relevant options and considerations
- Technical decision making, which is governed by some strict framework and in which qualitative argumentation is replaced by some kind of calculation (e.g., multi-attribute utility theory)
Here’s why deliberative decision making is worth working on:
- Most important decisions (such as in the example above) are made deliberatively.
- Often, these go wrong; often, with bad and perhaps terrible consequences.
- Deliberative decision making can’t be replaced by other modes of decision making, such as the intuitive and technical
- So we need to figure out how to improve deliberative decision making itself.
Tim van Gelder 
Hi Tim
Your session on Ockham’s Razor this morning led me here. I’m teaching design and project management to budding engineers and I appreciate your critque of formal decision-making.
I have been trying to ‘Bring visual clarity to complex issues’, and a deliberative approach to making design decisions, encouraging students to use Visio and Cmaps to think about their projects and how they can communicate the complexity of design decision making to clients and colleagues to show that they are adding value to projects. Half the student contact time in our BE program involves courses that use a Project Based Learning philosophy involving ill-defined problem situations.
I assume that you have been in touch with the works of Kannemann and Frederick, and also Dijksterhuis on intuitive and reflective human decision-making models in economic theory. In engineering we have tended to value the reflective, cognitive human thinking systems–slow, serial, effortful, deductive, rule-based, abstract and detached thinking. Dijksterhuis’ work suggests this rational human thinking gets confused by complexity, we get buried in the detail; he suggests that intuitive human thinking (that’s evolved over a longer period) is much more powerful (I suppose that’s why advertising works so well). Dijksterhuis also suggests that involving intuitive thinking can lead to better decisions in complex situations –it is rapid, parallel, associative, effortless, draws on experience, focuses on the concrete and specific and engaged, affective thinking. The ‘gut feel’ needs to be listened to and tested by but not over-ruled by reflective thinking.
I have been challenging students to balance and build the intuitive and reflective aspects of thinking to trust intuitive processes to suggest and evaluate solutions and to interrogate options reflectively. I suppose this is what the process of deliberation involves, an appropriate balance between intuitive and reflective human thinking systems.
Your idea of using visual tools to assist us humans to make complex decisions appeals-I recall an old ‘Peanuts’ cartoon where he is teaching his little sister to count. He asks “How many sailboats can you see in this picture?” She replies “All of them.”
The problem with the visual world is knowing what to look at. I suppose the use of rules and symbols in visual aids provides some cues and like a map, indicates paths followed and possible roads to take.
egards, Fons