Doing projects is all about making decisions. Decisions are made at each point of the project delivery process, at each gate and many times between the major decision gates. From the time a decision is made to explore an opportunity to the time that a decision is made to commit, the final financial investment decisions are made about what scope should be included, which themes and options should be explored, where to build the facility, how large should it be, to what market should it be tailored and so on and so on.

So since a project is effectively the sum of the decisions made, it stands to reason that the project team as well as all project stakeholders need to become much more familiar with decision making as a process, as a technique and as an outcome, and in particular how decisions are made both at the group level and the individual level. Everyone directly or indirectly involved in projects can be both a decision maker and a decision implementer. As the number of stakeholders increases, group decision-making also increases. Many decisions need 'buy-in' from the affected – the Stakeholders – and it's hard to get this buy-in if people haven't been involved in the decision making process. The days of the autocrat, the all powerful, all knowing ruler making decisions for all of us, at least in our culture, are well behind us. Group decision making is the great goal. However groups are obviously made up of individuals and how decisions are made at both levels greatly depends on not only urgency and complexity but more importantly for first of a kind projects such as CCS on the experience, knowledge base and the decision styles of the decision makers. 

Decision Styles

Victor Vroom and Philip Yetton in their 1973 book titled Leadership and Decision Making¹ and later in 1988 added to by Arthur Jago, distinguished three styles of leadership, and five different processes commonly used in decision making. These are:

An important consideration in choosing between decision styles is that all decisions need to be implemented. Autocratic decisions are usually implemented by individuals or groups not involved in the decision making process who then need to accept the decision. Poor acceptance will lead to poor implementation and in the extreme may be subversive. In justifying autocratic decisions, it is often said that groups simply take too long if they reach a decision at all. In the end the decision maker needs to step in and external stakeholders are unlikely to accept a group decision in any case; so why bother? Whilst it is commonly accepted that group decisions take a lot longer to make compared to autocratic decisions, they require no explanation to the group and are immediately accepted by the group since by definition they were made by the group.  Therefore when taking into account the entire decision making and acceptance process, group decisions may actually be more time efficient than autocratic decisions especially if the group includes all key stakeholders.

Decision Types

There are several basic kinds of decisions. The most common are presented in the table below:

Contingent decisions are often made when it is either too hard (perceived insufficient information) or too risky (perceived insufficient experience) to make a clear 'whether' or 'which' decision.

Decision Process

The classical decision process for a Decision Whether or Which is shown in the diagram below.

Whilst contingent decisions follow a similar process they tend to be driven more by alternatives than the criteria. In both cases the process involves gathering enough information, comparing the options and making a decision. However Gary Klein in his 1998 book titled Sources of Power² postulated from extensive studies that up to perhaps 95 per cent of all our decisions — particularly our day to day decisions — are made on the basis of experience. That is, we assess the situation, formulate a plan that we think may achieve the desired result, and we act upon it. This has become known as the Klein Recognition Primed Decision Making Model and is said to be used extensively by professionals and experts in their field. The basis of the model is that experts recognise elements, trends and conditions in the current situation that are similar to those that they have previously experienced in other similar situations and therefore make their decisions based on the assumption that the current situation will play out in the same manner.

From an efficiency standpoint this makes perfect sense since most of our day to day decisions are simple in nature, i.e. do we eat this or that? Do we cross the road here or there? However Klein has also shown that recognition primed decision making is used extensively in complex situations simply because it is quicker. Klein's research concluded that even if we go through the classical model of evaluating the alternatives, say when we are buying a car, in the end the final decision is recognition primed, i.e. it is based on our experience in similar situations and may in fact ignore or override the earlier evaluation process. This is particularly relevant for projects where many variables and considerable information is involved. However when projects are also first of a kind with a scant experience base such as CCS, our natural propensity to use recognition primed decision making has some profound implications.

Recognition primed decision making virtually guarantees that history is repeated which, for first of a kind projects such as CCS where no history exists, is a real conundrum. Worse still when history emulates less than enviable project performance the combination can be a major set-back for the development of new technology. We are conditioned to seek the opinion of others when our own experience base is thin. That is fine when the opinion is well founded, however when little or no experience exists and the natural response is still to fill the vacuum with purported or perceived expertise, very dangerous situations can develop. History abounds with examples of this. It is therefore crucial that balanced decision making at the group level is implemented for first of a kind projects and that it is not allowed to be hijacked by our natural tendency to be recognition primed. In the absence of experience we need to ensure that our decision making follows the more objective models which scope the problem or opportunity, identify alternatives, develop the alternatives, evaluate the alternatives against the required criteria, objectively select the best alternative and then execute that alternative. The fact that this parallels the stepped (gated) project model is no coincidence since doing projects is entirely about making decisions.

References

1. Vroom, V H & Yetton, P W 1973. Leadership and Decision-Making, Pittsburgh University Press.
2. Klein, G A 1998 Sources of Power – How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass.