Ideas and claims about decision making (collected edition)

A collection of ideas and claims published earlier on this blog. Clicking the picture will lead you to the original post.

Obvious solutions have already been found. However, they can be based on assumptions that do not hold. Questioning those assumptions is an effective means to developing new creative solutions.

Being creative at Systems Thinking Applied meeting.

If one doesn't know what she's after, she may well end up in wrong places.

Structure of the system in which one is acting determines the effects of her decisions. What should fundamentally matter, are the consequences to things that one values.

Career related choices are among the most important decisions for young educated people.

Decision making should be value-focused. Structuring values may help at becoming a better decision maker.

Should you make the decision now or delay it? 

Decision trees provide a valuable tool for structuring one's thinking about a decision. The ease of reversing a decision plays a major part in deciding how to deal with electromagnetic hypersensitivity.

Importance is only half of what should count in prioritization. 

Studying while working may enable better learning.

Threats to educational equality in Finland can be analyzed by considering the likelihoods and impacts of those threats.

How are Systems thinking and Value-focused decision making related?

The idea behind systems thinking is to view problems as systemic phenomena. System is a whole consisting of parts and their interrelations.  To effectively solve a problem one must understand the system around it. The better one understands the system, the more capable she is at developing an effective intervention.

The basic idea in value-focused decision making is that decision making should begin by identifying our values instead of our options. We choose between our options to best achieve what we value. Therefore, we should not narrow our thinking to the options given to us, but think creatively about what would be the best ways to achieve the things that we value.

Helping a friend with value-focused thinking

Last spring I simultaneously worked as an assistant for and took the course ’Value-Focused Thinking and Decision Making’ by Professor Ralph Keeney from Duke University who was visiting Aalto University.

One of the homework assignments for the course was to select a good friend outside the class and to have an in-depth discussion with her about her values related to some important decision she will be facing soon. I had my discussion with Kati and it was about her values related to choosing where to work after she would graduate.

I promised to Kati that I would compile the results and later present them to her in a nice format. This took some time but I got it finally done. I thought the resulting material were quite nice so I asked her if it’s okay to share them on my blog. Thanks for letting me do that Kati!

Four cornerstones of good decision making

Apart from things out of our influence, the consequences of our actions (and omissions) determine how good our lives are. Probably most of our actions are based on routine and instincts. However, many are based on our conscious decision making. Some of these decisions are small, such as what do you choose to have for lunch today, but some are big, such as what education you want to pursue or whether you want to invest your time on writing a blog.

I am a PhD student in Systems Analysis and Decision Making. I created this blog to share my ideas about how to make better decisions to live better lives and to make the world a better place. In this post, I will explain what I see as the four cornerstones of good decision making.