PPT ON identify an organizational challenge facing your own public agency ( 10 SLIDES )
Alexsi
PPt7.ppt*
Chapter 7
Decision Making
*
*
What Chapter 7 Does (1/2)
- Reviews the major decision making models
- Rational
- Incremental
- Aggregative methods
- Garbage can
*
*
What Chapter 7 Does
- Examines 3 elements of decision making within these models
- Search for Alternatives
- Analysis of alternatives
- Choice criteria
*
*
Rational Decision Making Process
Involves framing an issue or problem, identifying alternative courses of action, analyzing plausible alternatives based on subjective and objective criteria, and selecting among those alternatives
*
*
Rational Decision Making
“The task of administration is…to design the environment…as close as practicable to rationality”
Herbert Simon
*
*
Rational Decision Making
- Characterized by use of steps in which end goal is a given
- Result is optimal solution
- Promotes the value of efficiency above all other values
- Instrumental rationality
- Closely associated w/ cost-benefit analysis
*
*
Rational Decision Making
- Assessment of decision
- Pareto criterion: a change should be made if at least one person benefits and no person is made worse off
- Kaldor-Hicks: if decision makes one group better off, then compensate losers
*
*
Policy Making using Incrementalsim
Process of successive approximations to some desired objectives in which what is desired itself continues to change under reconsideration (Lindblom)
*
*
Incrementalism
- Bargaining process and not analytical
- Small changes are made at the margins
- favors the status quo
- Explanation of what actually happens
- Rational: what should happen
*
*
Charles Lindblom
- Noted that there were no clear value preferences
- May prefer one program/proposal over another
- Can be disagreement over the primary values and still agreement on the ends
- Test of a good policy is agreement
*
*
Incrementalism
- Policy is not made once and for all, it is made and remade endlessly
- Lindblom was not suggesting that incrementalism was the way to make decisions;
- it is how decisions are made
*
*
Satisficing
Agree on a goal
Agreement on a goal for “improvement”
Alternative that meets or exceeds the decision-maker’s expectations or demands will be chosen
March and Simon
*
*
Mixed scanning
- Quick review of alternatives
- Detailed analysis of most promising options
*
*
Aggregative methods
- Tools v forms of decision-making
- Level of decision-making affects choice of tools
- Leader
- High level administrator
- Supervisor
*
*
Aggregative methods
- Tools value participation
- NGT
- Delphi
- Strategic Planning
*
*
Decision Support Techniques and Tools
- Decision support mechanisms signal areas to examine more closely
- Examples:
- Policy analysis
- Budget development
- Quality management
- Business process reengineering
- Organizational development
*
*
Garbage Can (March & Olsen)
- Description of what actually happens in decisionmaking
- not an expression of how policies should be made
- Doesn’t mean no decisions are made or decisions are made by happenstance
*
*
Garbage Can (March & Olsen)
- 4 factors have to come together
Opportunity has to be available to solve a problem
Problems have to be recognized
Solutions have to be recognized
Participants have to bring forward a problem w/ a solution
*
*
Nondecisons
- Based on elitist theory
- Participants who control the agenda control what problems are examined and what decisions are made
*
*
Effect of Culture
“Organization is now seen to reside rituals, and beliefs that sustain orgz as socially constructed realities”
Affects the way the individuals operate the decision process
Various methods discussed are acceptable
Gareth Morgan
*
*
Methods of Decision making
- Which method places the most emphasis on
- Search
- Analysis
- Choice
*
*
Search
- The search process refers to staff activities, at all levels of the org.
- Identify ways to improve, policies and operations
- Expect that the search process would be most exhaustive rationalist method
- Incremental method’s search process is limited and unsystematic
*
*
Analysis
- Concerned with examining alternatives
- Feasibility, cost, beneficiaries, alternatives
- Feasibility is both political and technological
- Rational method uses policy analysis techniques
*
*
Choice
- Choice criterion is the basis upon which one alternative is selected over another
- The formal criterion of the rational-policy analysis is the Kaldor-Hicks criterion
- Total social benefits exceed total social costs
- Incremental methods select alternatives based on the number of supporters:
- Large enough to fulfil system’s voting requirements
- Best alternative gains support needed for adoption
- Aggregative methods use majority rule as best solution, and tend to avoid political criteria
*
Choice
- Garbage can model reflects:
- Decisions or non-decisions not necessarily expected by participants
- Not necessarily based on goals
- Ability to theorize and interpret events greater than capacity to make goal oriented decisions
*
Elements of Decision Process
*
*
Action
- Decision-making doesn’t end until the decision has been implemented
*
*
Decision Making
Basic Process
= Search + Analysis + Choice
Expanded Formula
= Culture + Trigger + Search + Analysis + Choice + Action + Evaluation
*
Table top exercise
- What to do with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory?
- If you were the Secretary of Energy, how would you go about making a decision related to this issue? Based on the decision models discussed, which of them appear to be useful in describing what must be done? Which not useful?
*
