Decisions

Decisions are **commitments to action**. Decision making is made up of four kinds of activities: intelligence, design, choice, and review (Simon, 1977).


 * 1) The //intelligence// phase involves recognizing occasions that call for a decision. The term intelligence is used in the military sense of monitoring and gathering information that can be analyzed for its meaningfulness. In organizations, occasions calling for decision might be routine and predictable or dramatic and unpredictable. Routine occasions for decisions might involve selecting a supplier, while unpredictable occasions for decisions might involve a sudden, dramatic shift in the quality of a product in a production process.
 * 2) //Design// involves creating, developing, and assessing possible courses of action. Design activities provide alternative courses of action for consideration. In some cases the design phase may be short because there may be limited alternatives, such as “go” or “no-go.” Other situations may be extensive, such as when designing alternatives to unfamiliar problems.
 * 3) //Choice// activities are the process of selecting one course of action from those specified in the design phase. Most people usually think of decision making as involving only this step, while others argue that there are multiple descriptions of and prescriptions for making choices (Einhorn & Hogarth, 1981; Svenson, 1979).
 * 4) //Review// involves monitoring past choices to see if chosen courses of action are properly implemented and to determine if new decisions need to be made. Reviewing activities closes the cycle of phases in decision making. Reviewing past choices helps to reinitiate the intelligence activities that are a part of all decision-making episodes in organizations.