Systems of Complexity

Every day people make decisions, from trivial to critical, just as organizations. Groups making decisions commonly have some rules guiding their approach—bylaws, constitutions, or just custom. Each approach can be vague and subject to different interpretation and also manipulation. This chapter starts off our discussion about how to make better choices, individually but primarily in groups where the preferences of multiple individuals must somehow be combined to create a collective choice. Decision making on consequential matters often come down to making tradeoffs. Becoming better off on one dimension might mean becoming worse off on another. These decisions are innately matters of sacrifices and compromises. Both systems analysis and social choice analysis focus on how to make these types of tradeoffs. These issues form our goals for this book—how to help organizations make better decisions, by focusing on all three of the key issues: who gets to decide, how do they decide, and what should they decide.