Rehearsing the Future:

Preface

Extract's Table of Contents:

• Decision Enhancement as a lens

Four photos of four typical decision making meetings:   People   Computers   Papers   Binders   Graphs and charts   PowerPoint presentations   Screens   Expert advisers Facilitators		An open meeting; built around discussion
		An executive group; built around data and review
		An expert team: built around simulation models and analysis
		A participative team; built around brainstorming and debate

The photographs above show four very typical decision-making meetings in progress. All of them make use of information technology – computers and telecommunications links. But the photographs tell us nothing about their contribution to the decision process. In the top photo, the laptop is being used by one person to display a PowerPoint presentation. In the second, it is clearly not central to the discussion, which is focused on the bound printed report that includes spreadsheets, pie charts and statistics, all of which would have been generated by computers, organized by expert advisers and then printed out.

The third photo shows the technology dominating the people. This is a space age room, which must have cost a million dollars or so to set up. The people sitting at the consoles are linked to the Internet, data bases and computers powerful enough to handle the large-scale simulation models whose results are being displayed on the giant screen. The final photo shows a more low tech room where every participant has a PC that is linked by a local area network to software for structuring the group’s interactions. At present, they may be reviewing a list of suggested ideas and will vote anonymously on which ones to make a priority.

The photos also cannot tell us anything about the quality of the decision process. Perhaps the first and largest group is going through a ritualistic discussion where they are careful not to make waves because the boss is making the PowerPoint presentation. Or the presenter is a skilled facilitator who will help the team address the issues openly and creatively. Maybe the small group of executives is arguing about whose whose “numbers” are correct and losing sight of the wider decision context. Or they are collaborating – which includes arguing with each other – to generate insight, apply their individual experience and making sound judgments that go well beyond what the figures and numbers imply. The four people standing at the giant screen may be analysts who will have little influence on the policy makers to whom they will report the results of the simulation modeling. Or they are the real decision makers. Finally, the team looking at the shared screen may end up reaching a consensus on ideas and recommendations but not making any commitments to action. Or they may use this forum to arrive at a creative, collaborative real decision.

Beneath the surface of the four photographs are the same basics of decision-making: people, process and technology. They are increasingly interdependent. People make decisions; their skills, values, judgment and experience shape the decision. The decision process influences the likelihood of their making effective decisions. The technology can provide multiple types and levels of support to both the people and the process.

Improving the combination of all three of these factors in decision-making makes a substantial organizational impact. In general, they do not move together and may even be in conflict. People may resist process. Process may limit people. Technology may not fit with the needs of either. When they come together, the four photographs will still look the same but are fundamentally different. They are no longer meetings, but studios. Studios are environments designed around process. They include technology suites; integrated sets of tools focused on enhancing the process and the people contribution to decision-making. The studios and suites plus the facilitators and experts brought in to help people get most value from both of them constitute services.

Rehearsing the Future defines effective strategies for fusing people, process and technology through services, studios and suites. We term this Decision Enhancement.

Decision Enhancement as a lens

Decision Enhancement is a management lens, a way to look out at the dynamic and volatile landscape of complex private and public sector decision-making and, increasingly, their interdependencies and necessary collaborations. What that lens brings into focus is the opportunity to significantly enhance executive decision-making through professional practices that fuse human skills and technology and to do so in areas where the combination of people, process and technology has in general been of limited impact. We call these “decisions that matter.”

Figure 1 Decisions that Matter

The goal of Decision Enhancement is to help companies improve their processes for handling decisions that matter, not to apply technology.

The practices of DE extend thirty years of experience in building decision support systems, interactive technology tools for personal and group use by managers, in applying change management and facilitation methods for helping teams collaborate for the purpose of innovation, and in deploying analytic models and methods developed in the fields of computer science, economics, and management science. Decision Enhancement expands on this base to leverage decision processes for a new generation of decision situations and demands, a new generation of managers and a new generation of technology. It creates a space that we term Decision Enhancement Services (DES) composed of collaboration “studios” - facilitative environments - and “suites” - integrated sets of technology tools.

DE enables a new style of decision process that has one and only one purpose: to make a real impact for stakeholders in handling the decisions that really matter in their sphere of responsibility. Decision Enhancement makes this impact by bringing together the best of executive judgment and experience with the best of computer modeling, information management and analytic methods. This facilitates the scenario-building and evaluation, collaboration, and appropriate use of interactive technology-based tools – the new generation of integrated sets of visualization-based simulations and models plus the ever developing Web-based capabilities – that literally rehearse the future in complex decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, urgency and risk. The rehearsing is analogous to war gaming in the military – decision gaming in the DE context.

Just a few examples of DE in action that are described in later chapters of Rehearsing the Future are studios and suites for:

• Public-private sector infrastructure development: airports, roads, transportation, cargo handling, ports and shipping. The DE contribution here has been three-fold: to bring together stakeholders in studios that help them share views and perspectives, to provide them with visual tools that make the many available simulation and modeling tools meaningful and of value to them all, and to facilitate a collaborative process. More typically, many stakeholders are excluded from the process, models are used only by experts and are not see as helping in addressing the uncertainties, complexity and policy trade-offs inherent in these decision arenas which are high-risk, high-cost, long time frame and high political, social and economic impacts.
  
  
• Global risk management in an insurance firm. The DE contribution has been to turn a process that is generally seen in most companies as a bureaucratic nuisance and a waste of time and energy into a collaborative and systematic new process.
  
  
• Coordinating decision-making in time-dependent key business processes, such as special bids on large customized sales, new product development and opening new customer service locations. Here the main contribution of DE has been to help teams visualize complex organizational processes in order to reach decisions on how to transform them.
  
  
• Creating a transformation plan for new leadership in a government agency. The DE contribution was to provide a shared visual “road map” as the core for a systematic decision process.
  
  
• Developing a real-time simulation suite that was the base for the design and implementation of a global portal for supply chain management decision-making. The DE contribution here was mostly technical in embedding visual simulations in a highly distributed real-time decision process.
  
  
• The management of large multi-contractor projects in the technology field. Here, the DE contribution was to enable a collaborative process that reduced the atmosphere of conflict and replaced indecision with joint commitments.

These are all decisions that matter. They all involve multiple actors and stakeholders. Decision enhancement in all cases rests on a fusion of people, process and technology. There is one extra ingredient to add to the DE recipe: that fusion rests on helping enhance visual thinking through suites of visual technology tools. For stakeholders to work together effectively, they must build shared understanding. For DES, this translates to shared visualizations. Our mantra is that “If you can’t see it, you won’t get it.” DES suites, several of which have been used in the airport decision arena at Schiphol, Frankfurt, JF Kennedy and other major locations, rely heavily on visualization-based simulation models, multi-media interfaces and multi-level displays of information, including animation which adds the dynamic time dimension to representations. The studio is the forum for facilitating “what if?” scenario generation, analysis and collaboration. One of the central axioms of DES is that effective collaboration in handling decisions that matter rests on vision: envisioning, insight, and scenarios.

Note that so far we have not discussed technology except in passing. Technology does not make a studio. Such suites are effective if and only if stakeholders in a decision situation actually use them. This is why we describe Decision Enhancement as, first, a lens that looks at the decision landscape to highlight stakeholders and their decisions that matter and then as an invitation to them to enter the studio. This is not necessarily a physical room; a studio is often implemented as a Web portal or via videoconferencing. The key point to be made here is that the studio is a shared space.

Decision Enhancement as a field of practice needs two more sets of invitations to make it useful and usable. The first invitation is to experts in domains relevant to making DES studios effective and the second to the suite designers and providers of technology capabilities needed to provide the tools within the studio. Decision Enhancement is not in any way new in its components; the innovation is to fit them together and also to add an extra capability or dimension to individual elements. So, for instance, one of our continuing invitations in the public-private infrastructure decision arena has been to colleagues who bring domain expertise in such areas as airport planning, organizational leadership, multi-criteria decision making methods, simulation modeling, and the arts.

This may seem an eclectic or even arbitrary mix. Drawing on the arts could too easily be just a gimmick, dressing up simulations with pretentiousness and flash. But the DE interest is in artists’ understanding of visual communication and excellence, abstraction, display and the relationship between person and art form. This is invaluable in helping improve the quality of interactive suites and the translating of complex information into appropriate representations.

Similarly, experts in many disparate areas have contributed directly to Decision Enhancement initiatives, to mutual benefit in terms of innovation and impact. For example, there are many powerful and proven simulation tools for airport planning. They provide a wide range of capabilities. However, their impact on the decision process has been constrained by their original design, which was not for integrated, real-time modeling. This means that they are used by planners and analysts but not directly by most stakeholders. Add to these capabilities the skills of DE suite designers, multi-media interface experts (many of whom work in the visual arts), and skilled DE facilitators and the simulation tools become even more powerful.

There are many such areas of “invitation” that are rapidly extending DE practice. They include ones related to organizational decision-making: facilitation, change management and leadership. In the technology area, domain expertise that is helping shape a new generation of interactive suites includes multi-media interfaces, visualization tools, architectures for distributed simulations, Web Services, and data integration. Examples of specialist expertise in decision domains are gaming as a form of rehearsing the future, infrastructure policy and planning, business process design and management, and transportation.

All of this innovation adds up to a new field of professional practice, as much organizational as technical. That practice is embodied in DE studios. Its audience is decision stakeholders and its target their decisions that matter. Its vehicles are the tools and processes that make its studios effective and the technology suites that leverage the studios’ value and impact.

The diagram below summarizes Decision Enhancement as a field of practice. It starts from the lens that focuses on stakeholders in decision arenas and their decisions that matter. It continues with its invitations to bring stakeholders, domain experts and suite designers into its studios.

Figure 1: Decision Enhancement – A Field of Practice

DES begins and ends with stakeholders. Its field of practice is a new style of decision process whose sole goal is to make a real and substantial impact for them.

This then is Decision Enhancement for a new generation of just about everything – decision arenas, challenges, change and uncertainty, technology and many additional factors and forces. Our book is an invitation to adopt DE as part of your own and your organization’s practice, whether you design or use Decision Enhancement studios.