Mapping Out the Options: How Technology Helps with Decision-Making
Business decision mapping helps IT managers and executives make better business decisions when confronted with multiple options, arguments and decisions. Business decision mapping assists in the weighing up of diverse, usually qualitative considerations, improving decision-making and collaboration. Knowledge Center contributor Tim van Gelder explains how business decision mapping keeps the complexity of decision-making under control by laying all the options out in a special kind of diagram called a decision map.Benjamin Franklin offered famous advice on decision-making to his scientific colleague, Joseph Priestley. His counsel was take a sheet of paper, divide it into two columns, and write down all the advantages of a certain path of action in one column and the disadvantages in the other. Then, by "cancelling out" items in one column with items in the other, assess which column is weightier. Simple but powerful, Franklin's Moral Algebra continues to be relevant today, when critical business and IT decisions must be made under conditions of great uncertainty and time pressure. Research has shown that such methods reliably produce better decisions than ordinary, unstructured deliberation. The basic principles of Franklin's Moral Algebra, combined with today's decision-mapping software, can improve and accelerate organization decisions.
We must also acknowledge that in its classic form, Franklin's advice can't do justice to many business decisions. Most obviously, the Moral Algebra frames the problem as whether to undertake a particular action. But most decisions are not yes/no or go/no go. Rather, most decisions involve choosing from a range of possible actions.