Strategic Decision Making and Knowledge

Organizations undertake action even in the absence of decisions, and make decisions without necessarily following them through with actions. An outcome that may appear to an observer to be the product of a sequence of decisions, may not be so if approached from the perspective of the actor. How is that possible? A Heideggerian perspective enables us to accommodate most currently available theories of decision making into a new ontology. A lot of what ordinarily passes for “decision making” is nothing else but either practical coping or deliberate coping, both occurring in the midst of action, and a great deal of action routinely undertaken in organizations consists of either spontaneous responses to the circumstances at hand, or deliberate choices often made in an analogical manner. These points are illustrated with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that was revealed by the award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in 2004.