This week I am writing about how we make decisions in design. I’ve written before about David Snowden’s way of describing systems using a games analogy (see reference below). To recap:
- A simple system is akin to a game of noughts and crosses. You know the rules and you can quickly work out the answer.
- A complicated system is like a game of chess. There are lots of rules, but given enough time you can work out all the options and choose the best one.
- A complex system is like a game of poker. The rules are one factor, but the game is made much more difficult by the interaction between the players. This is the domain of unknown unknowns. It is not possible to determine the best course of action from the start – the best approach emerges.
- A chaotic system is like a game with children in which they are constantly changing the rules. Here it is very difficult to make sense of what is going on as the ground keeps shifting.
Let’s look at decision making through these lenses.
A decision might appear to be a simple question of A versus B. But many factors might begin to complicate the process. For example, opportunity cost of one option over another. Or competing priorities that don’t make one option clearly better than another.
When we start to include human factors, the picture becomes much more complex. First, there are the vast array of factors that push and pull our own decision-making – not all of them conscious; not all of them we want to admit to. And then there is how the groups of people around the poker table of design (whose interests might not necessarily be aligned) show up and play the game.
The complexity grows when we we start to consider the interconnection between lots of the factors that we might consider in design: the long-term versus short-term business model, community wellbeing, ecosystem wellbeing, etc.
Finally, we have a chaotic decision-making environment when the rules of the game start changing. This could be the case when, say, in a major project one part of the team starts shifting the goals of the project without informing the rest. No one is clear anymore about the conditions in which they are trying to make a decision.
All of this is to say that decision-making is often much more complex than a simple A versus B. So we need to prepare ourselves for decision-making in complex environments.
As ever, our guiding principles can be: to work iteratively, and to look for the emergent patterns.
Playing poker by the rules of noughts and crosses is a losing strategy.
References
Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, November 2007 Issue.