The standard way of thinking about decisions is backwards, says Ralph Keeney: people focus first on identifying alternatives rather than on articulating values. A problem arises and people react, placing the emphasis on mechanics and fixed choices instead of on the objectives that give decisionmaking its meaning. In this book, Keeney shows how recognizing and articulating fundamental values can lead to the identification of decision opportunities and the creation of better alternatives. The intent is to be proactive and to select more attractive decisions to ponder before attempting any solutions.Keeney describes specific procedures for articulating values by identifying and structuring objectives qualitatively, and he shows how to apply these procedures in various cases. He then explains how to quantify objectives using simple models of values. Such value analysis, Keeney demonstrates, can yield a full range of alternatives, thus converting decision problems into opportunities. This approach can be used to uncover hidden objectives, to direct the collection of information, to improve communication, to facilitate collective decisionmaking, and to guide strategic thinking. To illustrate these uses, Keeney shows how value-focused thinking works in many business contexts, such as designing an integrated circuit tester and managing a multibillion-dollar utility company; in government contexts, such as planning future NASA space missions and deciding how to transport nuclear waste to storage sites; and in personal contexts, such as choosing career moves and making wise health and safety decisions.An incisive, applicable contribution to the art and science of decisionmaking, Value-Focused Thinking will be extremely useful to anyone from consultants and managers to systems analysts and students.
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Values are what we care about. As such, values should be the driving force for our decisionmaking. They should be the basis for the time and effort we spend thinking about decisions. But this is not the way it is. It is not even close to the way it is.
Instead, decisionmaking usually focuses on the choice among alternatives. Indeed, it is common to characterize a decision problem by the alternatives available. It seems as if the alternatives present themselves and the decision problem begins when at least two alternatives have appeared. Descriptively, I think this represents almost all decision situations. Prescriptively, it should be possible to do much better.
Values are more fundamental to a decision problem than are alternatives. Just ask yourself why you should ever make the effort to choose an alternative rather than simply let whatever happens happen. The answer must be that the consequences of the alternatives may be different enough in terms of your values to warrant attention. Your reason for interest in any decision problem is the desire to avoid undesirable consequences and to achieve desirable ones. The relative desirability of consequences is a concept based on values. Hence, the fundamental notion in decisionmaking should be values, not alternatives. Alternatives are the means to achieve the more fundamental values.
In this book I consider the role of values in decisionmaking. The approach is prescriptive: it concerns how values should be used to improve decisionmaking. The premise is that focusing early and deeply on values when facing difficult problems will lead to more desirable consequences, and even to more appealing problems than the ones we currently face. In short, we should spend more of our decisionmaking time concentrating on what is important: articulating and understanding our values and using these values to select meaningful decisions to ponder, to create better alternatives than those already identified, and to evaluate more carefully the desirability of the alternatives.
1.1 Value-Focused Thinking
Value-focused thinking essentially consists of two activities: first deciding what you want and then figuring out how to get it. In the more usual approach, which I refer to as alternative-focused thinking, you first figure out what alternatives are available and then choose the best of the lot. With value-focused thinking, you should end up much closer to getting all of what you want. Consider an illustration.
Job Choice
John is a senior at the University of Wisconsin. He plans to work for a few years before attending graduate school in business. How should he find “the right” job? The standard approaches would be to interview with firms that recruit graduates on campus and to pursue possibilities back home. Suppose that after reading short descriptions of job placement possibilities John selects six firms to interview, and from these interviews he gets three offers. He also mentions to some people back home that he is graduating and in the job market. From this, two good prospects for offers come up, but these are not yet actual offers.
At this stage, John considers that he has five alternatives, and that seems like plenty. Now he must choose one. Most likely, this selection process will take place entirely in his head. Somehow he will balance the pros and cons. First, he may eliminate alternatives that seem to be noncontenders, reducing the possibilities to three. Here the choice gets difficult. He may rank the remaining alternatives in terms of his personal feelings about them and in terms of their probable effects on his career. He may talk to his friends, teachers, and parents about the options before he decides.
Let us examine John’s decision making process more closely. First, he looks around in the standard places for alternatives. As a result, he ends up with five possible jobs that are entirely defined by others. Next, he cuts off the search for further options, and begins to evaluate the alternatives. His evaluation addresses both professional and personal concerns, but in a rather ad hoc manner. He selects a job. John makes no attempt to reopen the search for alternatives based on his evaluation criteria, which are not clearly articulated, or on his thinking during the evaluative process.
Finding the right job is one of those decisions that are important enough to address in a much more organized and careful manner. Suppose we allow John to start again.
John’s situation is ideal for value-focused thinking. He can begin by clarifying what he wants to achieve by working for the next few years. After hard thinking and perhaps some serious study, he may break his objectives into four categories broadly concerned with (1) learning valuable skills for his career, (2) finding out for sure whether he wants to go to graduate school in business, (3) enhancing his chances of acceptance at the best business schools, and (4) experiencing a different geographical region and lifestyle. Under each of these categories he should get specific. For example, valuable skills to learn may include technical skills like marketing and finance as well as interpersonal skills like how to work on teams, how to cope with office politics, and how to manage subordinates and superiors (yes, managing one’s boss is a skill). Thinking specifically about his wish to experience a different region and lifestyle, John may decide this means to live near the ocean in a major metropolitan area that has a diversity of nationalities and a rich cultural life.
Using his interests to guide his thinking, John should be able to identify jobs that may well satisfy his desires. These jobs should be in places interesting to him, perhaps with firms that did not recruit on campus. The jobs may be of a type that will enable him to meet people who are knowledgeable about business schools and who may be of assistance when he applies. And these jobs may be in fields that are recognized as good career starters but that are not plentifully available back home. Once John has identified particularly desirable jobs in each category, he should rank them using all of his objectives, or at least he should determine which ones rank near the top of the list.
Now begins the process of making one—at least one—of those best jobs into a bona fide offer. This process should be recognized as a decision opportunity: one involving entirely different alternatives from those presented by job offers. There are many ways to turn a specific job or a type of job (such as account executive at a marketing firm in Northern California) into a real offer. It may take work to identify the alternatives and more work to implement them. Part of John’s task is to identify the resources he has available to assist him, including his experiences and skills, his contacts, professional organizations, sources for ideas (such as books), and of course campus recruiting. Follow-through using such resources should produce job offers. Any of these offers should be at least as good and is likely to be much better than the best of the jobs available from alternative-focused thinking.
Value-focused thinking involves starting at the best and working to make it a reality. Alternative-focused thinking is starting with what is readily available and taking the best of the lot.
The Pervasiveness of Alternative-Focused Thinking
The easy way out of a decision problem is to focus narrowly on obvious alternatives and select one. This “solves” the problem, but a price is to be paid later when the consequences accrue. This is alternative-focused thinking. Value-focused thinking is more difficult and meant to be penetrating. There are mental costs and time associated with the exercise, but the benefits should well reward the effort as the consequences unfold.
Is John’s initial approach to decisions unusual? Absolutely not! The same narrowly focused thinking occurs in the offices of physicians and lawyers, in the boardrooms of multinational organizations, in the chambers of regulatory agencies and legislative bodies, and routinely in our homes and schools. Alternative-focused thinking is the “natural” way we all have learned to deal with decisions. It is not that we were taught to make decisions this way, because most of us weren’t taught to make decisions. Rather we picked up this habit by observing others making decisions and by having decisions throughout life posed to us as choices between given alternatives. Would you like to wear your red pajamas or your green ones? You can do your homework either before dinner or after dinner. On the menu today, we have swordfish, cannelloni, and filet mignon. You have three choices: chemotherapy, radiation treatment, or surgery, or there are possible combinations. Basically, there are two options, burial and cremation. So the habit of alternative-focused thinking is deeply engrained—but it can be kicked. The place to begin is with values.
What Are Values?
Values are principles used for evaluation. We use them to evaluate the actual or potential consequences of action and inaction, of proposed alternatives, and of decisions. They range from ethical principles that must be upheld to guidelines for preferences among choices.
We can identify our values by hard thinking. We make them explicit through statements expressing value judgments. To render value judgments useful for decisionmaking, we must be precise about their meaning. We can articulate this meaning qualitatively by stating objectives, and, if desirable, we can embellish it with quantitative value judgments.
Ethics, desired traits, characteristics of consequences that matter, guidelines for action, priorities, value tradeoffs, and attitudes toward risk all indicate values. Consider the following examples:
Ethics: Do not exploit the misfortune of others.
Traits: It is important to be trustworthy, loyal, and dependable.
Characteristics: Any proposed national energy policy should be appraised in terms of national security, economic cost, environmental impacts, and health and safety.
Guidelines: It is better to try and fail than not to try at all.
Priorities: Safety is more important than economy when purchasing an automobile.
Value tradeoffs: If cutbacks are necessary, laying off one person is as bad as limiting ten persons to four days of work per week.
Attitude toward risk: The risks of introducing the new product immediately are outweighed by the possible increase in market share from the introduction.
Statements like these can clearly represent a person’s values. They may also represent the values of an organization or even a society. In these situations, the group’s values should reflect the values of the individuals in it.
Constraint-Free Thinking
Thinking about values is constraint-free thinking. It is thinking about what you wish to achieve or what you wish to have. All of this thinking need not be self-centered; what you want may be for others or for society. Thinking of desirable alternatives is also constraint-free thinking. Selecting among alternatives, however, is constrained thinking. Even though some of the choices may be difficult, constrained thinking is easier than constraint-free thinking, because the former significantly limits the range of concerns. But the payoffs of constraint-free thinking are potentially much greater.
Many methodologies and techniques to aid decisionmaking have been developed over the past forty years. So why bother with yet another approach? Invariably, existing methodologies are applied to decision problems once they are structured, meaning after the alternatives and objectives are specified. Such methodologies are not very helpful for the ill-defined decision problems where one is in a major quandary about what to do or even what can possibly be done. Certainly if the alternatives are not known, one cannot characterize the decision problem by the alternatives.
In addition, most decision methodologies try to find the best alternatives from a prespecified list. But where does this list come from? In contrast, value-focused thinking does not simply accept prespecified problems or prespecified lists of alternatives. It either creates them or changes them. Value-focused thinking should lead both to more appealing decision problems and to choices among better alternatives than those generated by happenstance or conventional approaches.
Decision Problems Aren’t Problems
There is something odd about referring to a situation in which a decision has to be made as a “decision problem.” Is it really a problem? If you were looking for a job, would the prospect of having only one alternative thrill you? You might have to accept the job whether or not it was particularly desirable, but there would definitely be no decision problem. There would be no required choices. But this “no decision problem” might be a big problem. On the other hand, suppose you were faced with several job alternatives, some of which were quite appealing. This presumably would not be a bad situation to be in, but it is what is referred to as a decision problem.
It is useful to recognize that before any decision there is an opportunity—an opportunity to create alternatives. By beginning with values, we can think of situations not as decision problems but rather as decision opportunities. Periodically, we may examine our achievement in terms of our values and ask if we can do better. The thinking process may suggest further creative alternatives. This is a better allocation of time than spending most of it choosing among readily apparent alternatives. What is missing in mo...
