I am an Emeritus Professor of Decision Sciences at the London School of Economics and a Director of Facilitations Limited. After completing an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Cornell University, I served for three years in the US Navy where I became interested in the interaction between people and machines. To pursue this, I took up post-graduate study in engineering psychology, human learning and decision making at the University of Michigan, where I studied under Professor Ward Edwards, the founder of the field of behavioural decision making.
When I arrived in 1960, two of Ward's students, Paul Slovic and Sarah Lichtenstein, were working on their PhD research, which intrigued Amos Tversky when he arrived a couple years later. All three subsequently established productive careers studying how people make judgements, form preferences, deal with risk and uncertainty, and take decisions. The literature blossomed, and by 1963 Ward could no longer keep track of every published paper, the year he wrote a review article for the Annual Review of Psychology, naming this growing discipline "behavioural decision theory". Tversky's work, later with Daniel Kahneman, came to the attention of economists, and is now known as "behavioural economics". A heady time to be a post-graduate student at Michigan.
Post-doctoral research on how people in other countries take risks brought me to England, and led to an appointment at Brunel University in the newly created School of Social Sciences. My teaching included field methods (observation and interviewing), statistics, social and personality psychology, and behaviour in organisations (with Dr Elliott Jaques, the Head of the School). To learn more about field methods, I trained in observation and group processes at the Tavistock Clinic and Institute of Human Relations, and at the Bayswater Institute. A year's leave from Brunel in 1976-77 enabled me to work at Decisions and Designs, Inc.(DDI), a consultancy firm studying how decision theory and its applied discipline, decision analysis, could help people make better decisions. I returned to Brunel filled with enthusiasm to seek ways to help decision makers.
Initially, I worked with individuals contributing to a problem-solving process, but I soon discovered substantial differences in framing a problem and using the available data. Digging deeper often revealed differences in the objectives being considered. As I went from one key player to the next, each disagreeing with parts of the emerging model, two parts of my brain that hadn't been communicating with each other made contact: decision analysis met group processes. What not bring all the key players together and work with the group as one supra-decision maker?
Dr Cameron Peterson, a former colleague at the University of Michigan who was one of the founders of DDI, started doing that in 1979. He called the group meeting a 'decision conference': 'decision' because the model helps the accountable decision maker gain clarity and confidence about his or her choices, and 'conference' because the key players attending confer with each other, contributing relevant information and their perspectives on the issues at hand. The process of participating in building a model that encompasses all points of view and learning from it, develops a shared understanding of the issues and alignment in the group. Large and complex problems may require a series of decision conferences interspersed with workshops to attend to parts of the model, a 'decision conferencing' process that I've applied to many large problems, from portfolio analysis for combining evaluations of individual investments across many areas in an organisation to public policy issues to appraise alternative policies that have many, conflicting objectives, requiring expertise from diverse areas of concern.
When I arrived in 1960, two of Ward's students, Paul Slovic and Sarah Lichtenstein, were working on their PhD research, which intrigued Amos Tversky when he arrived a couple years later. All three subsequently established productive careers studying how people make judgements, form preferences, deal with risk and uncertainty, and take decisions. The literature blossomed, and by 1963 Ward could no longer keep track of every published paper, the year he wrote a review article for the Annual Review of Psychology, naming this growing discipline "behavioural decision theory". Tversky's work, later with Daniel Kahneman, came to the attention of economists, and is now known as "behavioural economics". A heady time to be a post-graduate student at Michigan.
Post-doctoral research on how people in other countries take risks brought me to England, and led to an appointment at Brunel University in the newly created School of Social Sciences. My teaching included field methods (observation and interviewing), statistics, social and personality psychology, and behaviour in organisations (with Dr Elliott Jaques, the Head of the School). To learn more about field methods, I trained in observation and group processes at the Tavistock Clinic and Institute of Human Relations, and at the Bayswater Institute. A year's leave from Brunel in 1976-77 enabled me to work at Decisions and Designs, Inc.(DDI), a consultancy firm studying how decision theory and its applied discipline, decision analysis, could help people make better decisions. I returned to Brunel filled with enthusiasm to seek ways to help decision makers.
Initially, I worked with individuals contributing to a problem-solving process, but I soon discovered substantial differences in framing a problem and using the available data. Digging deeper often revealed differences in the objectives being considered. As I went from one key player to the next, each disagreeing with parts of the emerging model, two parts of my brain that hadn't been communicating with each other made contact: decision analysis met group processes. What not bring all the key players together and work with the group as one supra-decision maker?
Dr Cameron Peterson, a former colleague at the University of Michigan who was one of the founders of DDI, started doing that in 1979. He called the group meeting a 'decision conference': 'decision' because the model helps the accountable decision maker gain clarity and confidence about his or her choices, and 'conference' because the key players attending confer with each other, contributing relevant information and their perspectives on the issues at hand. The process of participating in building a model that encompasses all points of view and learning from it, develops a shared understanding of the issues and alignment in the group. Large and complex problems may require a series of decision conferences interspersed with workshops to attend to parts of the model, a 'decision conferencing' process that I've applied to many large problems, from portfolio analysis for combining evaluations of individual investments across many areas in an organisation to public policy issues to appraise alternative policies that have many, conflicting objectives, requiring expertise from diverse areas of concern.