>> Home
Arthur J. Drucker is an independent decision analyst helping organizations achieve better results in complex decision-making. Through his consultancy, Arthur enhances people’s ability to
- create viable decision alternatives and improve existing ones;
- construct sound frameworks for the analysis of complex decisions;
- forecast how uncertainty will affect value in each decision alternative;
- compare the value and risk in different decision alternatives;
- choose the best alternative;
- recognize important trends as these emerge, and accordingly adjust courses of action in a timely manner;
- promote decision implementation with transparent and convincing justifications.
(view an expanded version of the above list)
Contact Arthur to discuss how your organization’s decision-making will stand better chances of achieving excellent results.
Enhanced decision-making, more value achieved
A lack of focus on the development of quality in decision-making is responsible for significant losses in organizations of all sorts (see below). Suffered as actual costs and as opportunity costs that often go unnoticed, these losses are to a great extent avoidable with the discipline of decision analysis (DA). DA comprises methodologies and tools that support complex decision-making, in ways that help managers better explore, improve and compare their decision alternatives with respect to costs, benefits and risks.
Many studies have examined the value of DA in practice. As an example, experts at the London School of Economics examined resource allocation methodologies and concluded there was an average 25% gain in efficiency when a decision-analytic approach was employed in place of prevailing approaches (Phillips, L. D. and Bana e Costa, C. A., Transparent prioritization, budgeting and resource allocation with multi-criteria decision analysis and decision conferencing, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007). Another indication of DA’s potential is given by a study of 1048 business decisions, mostly on M&A, organizational change, or expansion into new geographies, products, and services, which revealed that there was an up to 7 % increase in returns when judgmental bias was successfully addressed in decision-making (Lovallo and Sibony, The case for behavioral strategy, McKinsey Quarterly, March 2010).
In a study of 760 organizations of diverse industries and sizes, most headquartered in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, China and Japan, the authors concluded there was a potential for the average organization to more than double its decision effectiveness (Blenko et al, Decide and Deliver, 2010, Harvard Business Review Press).
Further reading: read about the significant loss of value that prevails in managerial decision making, and that is largely avoidable with the use of DA. (Some of these texts became best-sellers in business literature)
View video: Chevron’s vice-chairman testimonial of the importance of DA to manage risk and guide decision-making.
DA methodologies with which these and additional benefits can be obtained are described in the Services section.