A list of decision strategies

Decision Strategies

First aspect

Decision strategies can be considered from two aspects. A strategy is a plan of action or policy which is designed to achieve an overall aim. So on a large-scale, there are four main decision making strategies:

rational
intuitive
recognition primed
the Ultimate Decision Making strategy

Rational strategies have to do with identifying options, evaluating and comparing them and eventually deciding on the highest ranking or best option.

Intuitive decision strategies indicate that there may be no rationale or logic behind the choices made.

Gary Klein's recognition primed decision model is a combination of the first two. Intuition is used to generate a workable course of action and then you consider it logically to confirm it as appropriate.

The Ultimate Decision Making model put forward on this site goes beyond Klein's model in that it teaches you your own personal decision making signals that are built into your own biology.

Second aspect - smaller chunks

This decision making article will cover this second aspect in more detail.

When people think of decision strategies, they typically go straight to the idea of choosing between multiple alternatives. This is the rational approach and somehow it has become the most popular in our teaching institutions and in business, even though it's not necessarily how we naturally make decisions.

How?

The big question, of course, is how to choose between many alternatives. And there have been many decision making strategies described and used in order to facilitate this.

David Welch in his book 'Decisions, Decisions' lays out five decision strategies:

optimization
constrained optimization
preselection
satisficing and
randomization.

Pros and cons

Optimization decision strategies are those where every option, criteria, consequence and risk is considered. He says this is the ideal although they obviously take a lot of time for information gathering and assessment and can often be costly in terms of stress. This option is not so good when they are a huge number of options.

Constrained optimisation means that the number of options considered are constrained or limited in some way. They may be time, geographical, cultural, ethnic constraints and so on. For example, 'my clients have to live in this particular city, or within a half an hour's journey from my office'. Setting the constraints will obviously impact the final result. There are many ways to set constraints which makes this one of the commonest decision strategies.

Preselection of options can also be done on the basis of many different considerations. You can preselect restaurants, for example, based on recommendations of friends or recommendations from a particular magazine. A preselection process of candidates for elections narrows the options available to the voters.

The satisficing decision strategy is where, as soon as you find an option that fits the bill, you go with it. This can be useful when there are a lot of alternatives and its in an area where you have little expertise.

Randomizing decision strategies are those where you toss a coin or throw dice. They are useful when there are few options and no one is significantly better than any of the others.