MIT Sloan Management Review

Leadership and Organizational Studies

 

Creativity in Decision Making with Value-Focused Thinking

By Ralph L. Keeney

July 15, 1994

CONVENTIONAL APPROACHES TO DECISION MAKING FOCUS ON GENERATING AND EVALUATING ALTERNATIVES. ACCORDING TO THE AUTHOR, HOWEVER, ALTERNAtives are relevant only as means to achieve values. Values, not alternatives, should be the primary focus of decision making. In this article, he describes “value-focused thinking,” which involves clearly defining and structuring your fundamental values in terms of objectives and using these objectives to guide and integrate decision making. He explains techniques for creating better alternatives for your decision problems and for identifying more appealing decision opportunities than those that confront you. These ideas are relevant both to organizational and personal decisions, and they are illustrated by their application at Conflict Management, Inc.

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We tend to view situations that require decision making as problems. Decisions are thrust on us by circumstances (recessions, natural disasters) or the actions of others (competitors, customers, government, stakeholders). Typically, we face these decision problems by identifying alternatives and only then considering objectives or criteria to evaluate them. I call this standard problem-solving approach alternative-focused thinking. It is reactive, not proactive. Furthermore, it is backward; it puts the cart of identifying alternatives before the horse of articulating values.

Values, as I use the term, are principles for evaluating the desirability of any possible alternatives or consequences. They define all that you care about in a specific decision situation. It is these values that are fundamentally important in any decision situation, more fundamental than alternatives, and they should be the driving force for our decision making. Alternatives are relevant only because they are means to achieve values. Thus, although it is useful to iterate between articulating values and creating alternatives, the principle should be “values first.” This manner of thinking, which I refer to as value-focused thinking, is a way to channel a critical resource — hard thinking — in order to make better decisions.

Value-focused thinking is designed to focus the decision maker on the essential activities that must occur prior to “solving a decision problem.” The central role of thinking about values is illustrated... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

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