Decisions

Relating to a project at work which has been recently starting, I've been looking a bit into decision analysis and stuff like that. How to take a formal approach towards analyzing and making decisions, so that when the day is done you'll still have something hard to justify your decisions with. It's an interesting topic, although I have to admit that I'm firmly in the Intuition camp. And in very many ways, decision making is applicable to all aspects of life. Sort of like strategy. And recently these two fields have provided interesting lenses with which to view the real world with; I'm still not entirely convinced that they're good tools for maintaining your personal life with, but oh well.

As already mentioned, I'm a firm believer in intuition (heck, just look at the MBTI test results...). I prefer expert opinions over rigorous analytical frameworks. Granted, calculating things is useful most of the time, but you just have to keep yourself in check when approaching issues that way. I think the problem is that if you calculate things, the calculations never end and you're always missing that little bit of fuzzy logic, that anomaly that might slightly weigh the results in the right direction. And at some point you just have to make a decision and in the end the person making the decision will have to make a call in regards to whether or not he believes the numbers. And there's intuition again.

I guess I have to admit that I'm becoming slightly old. You see, I acknowledge completely that both formal frameworks for analyzing decisions and intuition are needed. One without the other won't work. Some wise men said something about the problem with being absolute. The world isn't black or white. It's in fact neither, since it's all grey. I know it's such a cliché, but personally I very often succumb to treating it as merely black and white and completely fail to acknowledge the subtle shades of grey. And there are millions and millions of shades of grey. And because of that, even though I don't believe in formal models as much as I believe in intuition, I'm still going to try to fit in some decision analysis into my degree as well as tackle some projects at work.

I could go on about strategy, as I've recently witnessed first-hand some truely terrifying applications of it and I'm not certain that in all circumstances the world is such a nice place when viewed through the lens of strategy. But I think I'll blog about that later, if at all.