Power: What If High Decision Authority Is Combined With Low Power
What if decision authority is assigned against the power hierarchy? That is, what if individuals who have more power are given lower decision rights through decision governance?
Power: Stability and Destabilization of Legitimacy
Understanding the factors that stabilize or destabilize various sources of power legitimacy can provide valuable insights into how institutions maintain authority and when they risk losing it.
Power: Sources of Legitimacy and Implications for Decision Authority
The legitimacy of power refers to the justification and acceptance of authority by those subject to it. What can be the sources of legitimacy of a decision maker’s power, and how is this related to decision processes and decision outcomes?
Power: Relationship to Psychological Factors in Decision Making
If the behavior of a decision maker is shaped by the psychological factors discussed as those we want to influence through decision governance, then what is the impact of having low power or high power on each factor?
Power: Influence on Decision Making and Its Risks
Power significantly influences decision-making behavior, often leading to overconfidence, insensitivity to others’ perspectives, and increased risk-taking.
Goals: How to Improve Alignment to a Team Goal
Given some factors which influence goal selection, what can we do to help a team member select a goal that the team needs to achieve? In other words, how can we align an individual’s goals to the team goals? This is the topic in the rest of this text.
Goals: Factors Influencing Goal Selection
Understanding how individuals choose goals can provide insight into human decision-making and inform strategies for influencing the choice of goals through decision governance.
Goals: Factors That Stabilize and Destabilize Goals
Goal stability and change are influenced by a complex interplay of commitment strength, feedback mechanisms, external pressures, cognitive dissonance, and social reinforcement. Understanding these factors allows individuals and organizations to design decision making environments that either reinforce goal persistence or facilitate adaptive goal adjustments when necessary.
Goals: How Goals Form and Change
Understanding these mechanisms can help improve decision-making quality, improve leadership effectiveness, and help organizations design better incentive structures to align individual goals with priorities.
Goals: How Goals Shape Decisions
Goals shape how decisions are made by influencing information processing, risk preferences, decision complexity, strategy adaptation, and trade-offs between short-term and long-term objectives.
Social Hierarchies: How They Form and Change
Decision governance can play a critical role in creating, maintaining, and adapting social hierarchies. The design of decision governance systems influences both the stability and adaptability of hierarchies.
Social Hierarchies: Benefits and Limitations in Decision Processes
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?
Social Hierarchies: Why They Matter for Decision Governance
Understanding explicit hierarchies and detecting implicit ones is important in decision governance because hierarchy influences possible assignments of decision rights and responsibilities.
Incentives: Building An Incentive Mechanism From Scratch
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?
Incentives: Example of a Common Incentive Mechanism
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.
Incentives: 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?
Governance Dynamics: Case-Based Development of Decision Governance
If decision governance in a firm were to develop in a manner analogous to the development of English Common Law, it would develop in response to lessons learned from cases of past decision making.
Governance Dynamics: Change Driven by Cases and Principles
Why does decision governance change in a firm? Change to decision governance is motivated by either the implementation of principles, that is, abstract rules, or because of lessons from past decision making.
Slow & Complex Decision Governance and Its Consequences
A common problem with governance is that rules accumulate over time. They are added and adapted to handle new situations, new behaviors, and, or have a broader and deeper impact. As rules accumulate, and become more interdependent and specialized, complexity of governance increases. What are the consequences?
Motivated Reasoning: How To Detect And Mitigate Its Risks
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: How They Influence Decisions And How To Regulate Them
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.
Policy Windows: What They Are And When They Occur
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.
Punctuated Equilibrium: How To Know If A Decision Process Is Ready For Disruption
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: What It Is, And When/How To Implement It In Decision Governance
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?
How a Decision Process Can Create Evidence of Compliance
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.
Adapting a Decision Process to Comply with a Policy
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?
How Does Public Policy Influence Decision-Making?
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.
What is the Role of Public Policy in Decision Governance?
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.
Dynamics of Public Policy Development
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.
Group Decision-Making: Common Models in Organizational Theory
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.
Individual Decision-Making: Common Models in Psychology
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.
Group Decision-Making: Common Models in Economics
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.
Individual Decision-Making: Common Models in Economics
Decision-making models in economics are simplified descriptions of how decisions are made. Understanding these models is useful for designing decision governance.
Decision Governance Is Interdisciplinary
Designing effective decision governance systems requires drawing on a wide range of academic disciplines, each of which provides valuable insights into different aspects of decision-making.
Simulation of Attention, Memory, Competence, Expectations, Reputation in Decision Making
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?
Level of Detail Can Influence Probability Estimates
What if the level of detail given about an option influences the perceived probability that the events it describes will occur?
What Interests Do Stakeholders Have in Decision Governance?
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.
Who are the Stakeholders of Decision Governance?
As decision governance influences how decisions are made, everyone who participates in preparing a decision, makes the decision, and lives with the consequences of it, is a stakeholder in the design and change of decision governance.
What Is Decision Governance?
Decision Governance refers to values, principles, practices designed to improve the quality of decisions.
When to Override a Decision
To override a decision, you need to know a decision was made (observability), have rights to override it (authority), and believe that doing so will lead to a better outcome, including preventing undesirable outcomes (superiority).
How to Price Distraction in Decision Making?
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.
Increased Social Distance (Over)Simplifies Explanations
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.
The Design Space for Decision Governance
What are the parameters of a decision situation that we want to influence through decision governance?
Why Perception of Long Term Outcomes Should Be Influenced First?
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.
Drawing Attention to Known vs Unknown Goals
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.
How Can Governance of Attention and Memory Change Choice?
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.
Emotions Mediate Decisions Always and Everywhere
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.
Random Decisions Are Expensive
It seems obvious that it makes no sense to randomly choose between options we are presented with. In this text, I’ll set up and run a simple simulation that illustrates this. The simulation is another way to think about the impact of decision governance, even if in a very simple setting.
Selective Memory Can Be Desirable
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.
Attention Depends on Stimuli & Goals
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.