Unlike technical trade-offs, value conflicts involve deeply held beliefs that resist simple calculation. What is a value conflict? And how can a decision-maker know that they are facing a value conflict?
Several psychological and sociological mechanisms have been proposed to explain the formation and change of values in individuals. What variables and relationships do these mechanisms highlight?
Values influence moods, attitudes, and emotions in decision-making. Why and how does this occur?
How public expectations form is interesting for decision governance because they concern decision situations in which there is considerable distance between stakeholders and decision makers. How do expectations form about distant decision makers?
Values influence attitudes, behaviors, and decision-making processes by providing a sense of what is important. How does this influence decision making?
When we are in a decision situation with others, we form expectations about their behaviour, which becomes an input to our own subsequent decisions and interactions with them. How do these expectations form?
If we want to influence the expectations someone forms in a decision situation, we need to start with an understanding of what an expectation may be.
Competence plays a significant role in shaping authority and influence in group decision-making. Individuals perceived as competent often hold greater decision-making power, influence group consensus, and guide the strategic direction of collective choices. Why is this common?
Attitude is a stable, learned predisposition to respond favorably or unfavorably toward an object, person, or situation. How does attitude influence decision making?
The ability to make effective decisions is closely linked to an individual’s expertise, cognitive abilities, and confidence in their knowledge. Why and how is this the case?
One of the questions when designing decision governance is whether to motivate an individual with authority to delegate it to someone else. Why would they do it?
If we design a decision situation or process in a way which influences attention, then we will also, indirectly influence emotions of people involved in that decision. If we take their perspective instead, they can, by controlling their attention, influence their emotions. Why and how?
Mechanisms that explain how emotions influence attention in decision making suggest that when we design decision governance, it needs to stimulate positive emotions during decision making.
To influence how you and others make decisions, it is useful to understand how mood and emotions interact. This text summarizes mechanisms which were proposed to explain that interaction and its influence on decision making behavior.
Attention influences what information is processed and retained in a decision situation, and consequently how memory changes through decision making. This text outlines main mechanisms used to explain this dynamic.
Memory influences attention and consequently how decision-makers prioritize information, evaluate options, and sustain focus. Decision governance can be designed to influence variables in these mechanisms, which makes it useful to know about them.
Goal displacement refers to a situation where an individual, group, or organization shifts its focus from the intended objectives to secondary or substitute goals. Which factors increase, and which decrease the probability of goal displacement?
On how to amplify the decision-maker’s intrinsic motivation to make good decisions.
On how not to deteriorate the decision-maker’s intrinsic motivation to make good decisions.
Let’s assume that decision governance in a firm includes an incentive mechanism which is designed to financially reward decision makers in proportion to the number of options they consider in a decision situation. What could go wrong?
Let’s say that a new decision process for capital allocation needs to be introduced in a firm. Based on factors which accelerate social learning, what can be done to accelerate the adoption of the new process?
Social learning accelerates under conditions where respected models demonstrate behaviors, reinforcement and repetition increase exposure, observability clarifies benefits, similarity between the observer and model exists, perceived risk is low, and benefits are high.
Social learning is the notion that individuals acquire beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors through observing and interacting with others. How can social learning influence a decision maker’s behavior?
An important question that power, as control of resources, raises for decision governance is this: How to make sure that specific decision governance is credible when specific individuals whom it assigns roles have different levels of power (occupy different levels in a power hierarchy)?
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?
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.
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?
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 significantly influences decision-making behavior, often leading to overconfidence, insensitivity to others’ perspectives, and increased risk-taking.
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.
Understanding how individuals choose goals can provide insight into human decision-making and inform strategies for influencing the choice of goals through decision governance.
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.
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 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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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 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?