Social hierarchies often arise naturally as a means of organizing around complex issues and goals by facilitating the flow of information, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and delineating decision authority. How do they influence decision processes?
Understanding explicit hierarchies and detecting implicit ones is important in decision governance because hierarchy influences possible assignments of decision rights and responsibilities.
Let’s assume that we need an incentive mechanism to stimulate employee performance by allocating bonuses based on peer opinion. How do we design it?
A bonus scheme proportional to sales performance is a common incentive mechanism used to motivate sales staff. In this text, the mechanism is used to illustrate components of incentive mechanisms.
An incentive mechanism is used to influence behavior. What are the components of an incentive mechanism, and how is that related to decision governance?
Motivated reasoning consists of processing information in a way that aligns with one’s desires, beliefs, or goals, rather than neutrally evaluating evidence. How to mitigate it through decision governance?
Impressions of others influence our confidence in the information they provide and the predictions we form about their behavior, which can shape decisions and their outcomes.
This text is about so-called policy windows, situations in which three streams of activity – the problem, policy, and politics streams – align to create an opportunity for policy change within organizations.
This text looks at signals to look for when applying a decision process, to determine if that process cannot be incrementally improved, but needs to be significantly changed.
Incrementalism prioritizes pragmatic adjustments of the current state over transformational solutions, focusing on feasibility and continuity. What are the conditions in which it is interesting to implement incrementalism through decision governance, and what risks does that create?
When a decision process is adapted to comply with a policy, it will include new components – new actions, roles, responsibilities, among others. At the same time, the process needs to be further adapted to ensure that when it is executed, data is collected that can be used as evidence of compliance later on.
Given a specific policy that an organization needs to comply with, how can we adapt the organization’s decision processes to comply with that policy? Or, how does that organization’s decision governance change to help ensure compliance?
This text outlines how the mechanisms for public policy compliance influence various stages of decision-making. If we understand how this influence can occur, we can build decision governance in ways that ensure compliance with the right amount of resources.
Public policies create requirements and constraints on how and what decisions can be made, and as such are a critical input to the design of decision governance frameworks.
Public policies shape decisions and consequently incorporate decision governance. It is interesting to understand how public policy develops and changes, as this helps understand how decision governance can develop and change.
Decision governance is used to change decision-making processes in organizations. This text outlines various models of such processes, which were proposed in research on organizational theory.
Models of individual decision-making in psychology identify psychological factors that shape individual decision-making. Decision governance will influence these factors, which makes it necessary to at the very least be aware of them, as a basis of thinking about how they may interplay with guidelines and processes introduced through governance.
This text is an outline of common approaches in economics research for modeling group decision-making, focusing on their main concepts, applications, and the questions they raise for the design of decision governance.
Decision-making models in economics are simplified descriptions of how decisions are made. Understanding these models is useful for designing decision governance.
How do alternative decision governance designs impact attention, memory, competence, expectations, reputation, and how do they in turn affect the steps a decision maker takes to reach a goal?
If we know who the stakeholders are, when designing decision governance, then we need to know their interests, so that we can make sure these are met through the decision process.
If the decision maker is distracted, they should pay the price of reaching their goal after more effort. A simple simulation can be done to show just how much distraction may cost relative to a case when the agent’s attention is directed to the goal.
Social distance, in the context of decision making, refers to the decision maker’s perception of similarity to others that may somehow matter for the decision at hand.
What are the parameters of a decision situation that we want to influence through decision governance?
If we want to influence preferences away from specific options, we should invest more effort to change high-level construal of their distant outcomes, rather than low-level construal of their immediate outcomes.
If we need to design governance that influences attention, then it matters if we know or not the goal of the decision maker. This text provides a simple simulation that illustrates the differences between the time it takes for the decision maker to reach the goal in both cases, all else being equal.
Three decision governance strategies are compared in terms of how they influence the ability of an agent to reach their goal in a simple problem: the first strategy involves no governance, the second complement’s agent’s memory, and the third draws their attention.
Decision governance can be designed to make decision makers aware of their and others’ emotions in a decision situation, and to help everyone move to a more neutral stance, if that can lead to a better outcome. This text outlines common strategies for doing so.
Ease at which memory will be accessed, accuracy of memories, association of stimuli with memories they lead to, will all influence the information that a decision maker will use. Decision governance can to some extent influence what is recalled, how that is related to the choice at hand, and where attention is drawn.
Decision governance can neutralize or amplify factors driving attention in a decision situation. The choice of strategy depends on the observed or anticipated behavior of the decision maker and the desired outcome.