Decision Making / 1 / 1.10

1.10 BARRIERS TO LEARNING AND EFFECTIVE DECISION MAKING IN DYNAMICALLY COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS

Barriers to learning and effective decision making, arise through various mechanisms, and include:

• Argyris (1991) suggests that many ‘successful’ senior executives have surprisingly poorly developed decision-making skills. Sequences of quite rapid promotion distance them from the legacies of their earlier decisions, so they are not forced to critically analyse their own decision-making failures.
• All decision makers have limited ability to deal with complexity, particularly dynamic complexity where feedback and delay occur. This is exacerbated by an organisational disjunction between strategic decision makers, who often choose to distance themselves from high levels of complexity, and lower decision-making levels where managers often have to confront massive complexity. Contributing factors are:
• Socio-technical organizations and their problems are massively complex, and our cognitive capacity is seriously outmatched.
• Executive decision makers, who are generally amongst the busiest in the organisation, would prefer to avoid the impositions on their time, and the extensive delays that often accompany the application of analytical techniques; for them, the true nature of complexity remains undiscovered. When this understanding is absent or deficient, over-simplification can result. This practice of seeking a single ‘gold nugget’ is probably the most widespread problematic assumption in the current industrial paradigm; one cause produces one effect, find the cause and fix the problem (Meadows, 1989).
• Support to the risk-management process is often untimely. Frequently, it simply does not fit within the decision-maker’s Decision Cycle as described at Figure 1-7. Critical to successful situation awareness in risk management is being aware of and understanding what is really happening. Winning the essential information takes time and effort, as does information processing. Unfortunately, systematic analytical techniques are often circumvented and decision makers rely on their own sources of intelligence and advisers.
• Executive decision makers who are often intimidated by the complicated appearance of analytical methods fail to appreciate their value, mistrust them along with the ‘witch doctors’ in the organisation who advocate their use (Nutt, 1989: 32-33). Powerful and accessible analytical tools are of no value if they are untrusted. Nutt claims after more than 20 years of studying decision making, he has substantive evidence that executive decision makers actually mistrust analytical methods. Many would prefer to, and do, dismiss them. They see them as threatening or time wasting. Whilst executive decision makers rarely, if ever, admit to this belief, both Nutt (1989) and Flood (1999) suggest we need to be careful when using any approach that might threaten the balance among those who have knowledge and hold power.
• There is a strong aversion by decision makers to have their deeply ingrained assumptions, their mental models (Senge, 1990), psychological constructs (Kelly, 1956), schemata and sysreps (Kline, 1995: 31), ‘systems of meaning’ (Flood, 1999: 110-115) revealed, explicitly stated and critically analysed (Mason and Mitroff, 1981). Assumptions and mental models are likely to be incomplete, flawed or immature in their development, when compared with the detail and dynamic complexity needing to be managed. Kline (1995) explains that ‘… precise representations of systems (sysreps) used for analysis arise only in human brains, as far as we know. These transformations of information into sysreps, and the recordation of the sysreps, carry with them the possibility for many kinds of imperfectly mirroring the systems concerned, including outright errors. This is the reason why such close attention needs to be paid to how we form sysreps, how we use them and how they are influenced by the limitations of the human mind.’ (Kline, 1995: 55). Further, aversion is likely to be increased when a decision-maker’s knowledge-power base is threatened. See ‘Systems of Knowledge-Power’ at Section 1.11.
• Key stakeholders in the management of risks are also political players frequently more concerned about their careers in the short-term rather than seeking out underlying systemic structures and root causes, and using that knowledge to inform their decisions, risk-management strategies and policies.
• The structure of many large organisations and the nature of their business activities have the natural effect of shifting the management of complexity to lower organisational levels.
• Information can be compartmentalised within organisations. Compartments can be created and sealed by organisational hierarchies and politics. As a consequence, compartmentalisation militates against the best intentions of the designers of information systems and decision-support systems alike.
• Knowledge markets exist and market forces dictate the extent to which knowledge is shared or traded. Davenport and Prusak (1988) explain that ‘… understanding that there are knowledge markets and that they operate similarly to other markets is essential to managing knowledge successfully in organisations. Many knowledge initiatives have been based on the Utopian assumption that knowledge moves without friction or motivating force, that people will share knowledge with no concern for what they may gain or lose by doing so … people rarely give away valuable possessions (including knowledge) without expecting something in return’ (Davenport and Prusak, 1988: 26).
• The ‘need-to-know’ principle militates against sharing information. This is particularly so in Government Departments and public-sector organisations, though not exclusive to them. Decision makers who are not granted the ‘need-to-know’ are not only denied information but are denied opportunities to be involved in strategy development, except in a controlled and limited sense.
• Reward systems in organisations, particularly public sector ones, are rarely centred on rewarding the sharing of information for long-term gains, rather they reward performance measured against short-term goals. In the private sector these goals are profit-centric.