The World’s Most Underutilized Sustainable Resource: Human Decisions

We make thousands of decisions every day, and modern organizations are considered “Decision Factories”.  Multiply by billions of people, and it’s not hard to imagine that even a small change in how decisions are made could have a monumental impact on everything we do, with the potential for breakthrough results in the environment, conflict, the distribution of wealth, and much more.  Even a tiny percentage shift in the quality of our decisions has the potential to effect gigantic global change: humans, well-coordinated, represent a massive untapped resource. 

Reasons for hope 

I’m optimistic about the untapped resource of improved human decision making for three reasons. First, my work and others over the past half-century has demonstrated that, in many situations, we’re often atrocious collaborative decision makers – just witness the collective intelligence of a typical large organization or government – so there’s lots of room for improvement. Second, we’ve developed a number of tools that are easy to learn – I recently taught the basic approach to some colleagues in a few minutes over lunch, and I travel the world teaching advanced DI to organizations large and small. These often provide breakthrough insights into complex decisions. Third, AI can supercharge our ability to understand the context and consequences of decisions.

As Ted Danson explains in this episode of The Good Place, things have changed in recent years.  The simple act of buying a dozen roses for your grandmother on her birthday – explains Danson to his AI assistant Janet – might have had a net positive impact a hundred years ago.  In contrast, in today’s globally connected world, the unintended negative consequences can be enormous. And ignoring them can be disastrous.

A new situation requires new ways of thinking 

In short, we have yet to update our decision-making methods for a world that has radically changed. 

Here’s one way to think of it.  Imagine an isolated ecosystem – a pond, for example.  It’s a healthy closed system, with a good balance between predators and prey, and between oxygen and CO2.  Then, one day, a heavy rainstorm opens a new river between our pond and the ocean.  Salmon and briny water flow upstream, and everything is different.  It’s going to take a while for things to re-equilibrate.  And if we want certain species to survive, we’re going to have to manage the pond in ways that include a much greater understanding of the ecological system than we had before.  

This is the situation in which we find ourselves today. But our “pond” is what were once local economic, climate, and social systems.  Now they’re hyper-interconnected, and it’s going to take a new way of thinking to thrive. 

Local decisions with massive ripple effects 

Which gets us back to those decisions.  Our brains are better at “single-link” than the “multi-link” thinking that’s required to reason about local actions that have global effects in time and space.  And yet multi-link thinking is essential, as choices about climate impact poverty, which impacts jobs, which impacts the status of women, which impacts food, and global impacts local in a continuous chain of events. 

Yet our current thinking is limited in time and space. This is the role of Decision Intelligence: to expand our decision-making horizon in both time and space.   Without this understanding, we’re experiencing geometric growth in unintended consequences. 

Simply put, DI is the science and technology of understanding how actions lead to outcomes.  For this reason, DI could have just as easily been called “Action Intelligence”.   

Source: google ngram viewer

Pictures of decisions 

An important part of decision intelligence is to make explicit the flows of cause-and-effect that are set in motion by actions.  Simply moving from text-based to visual depictions (and, ultimately, to interactive gaming environments) provides a massive improvement in our ability to make good decisions. 

Take, by way of example, the situation shown below (this is the “tragedy of the commons” problem).   Multi-link, long-term thinking is required to recognize that what might appear a cost at first – a decrease in my own savings – has tremendous upside potential if there are multiple contributors to a commons resource. 

The “tragedy of the commons” problem, illustrated through a causal decision diagram (CDD) with a “lobster claw” pattern showing how short-term actions that lead to a negative can have long-term positive consequences.

By drawing Causal Decision Diagrams (CDDs) like this, we can overcome an essential limitation of this kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma-like problem: where understanding the actions of others helps to find a better solution for many.  They also explicitly connect our actions to outcomes – whether they are for our business or other situations.  And each link can be analyzed through technology, plus the diagram can be run through an optimization engine to let a computer help to find the best set of actions to take.

More generally, a host of problems suffer from the “lobster claw effect”, shown below.  Decision Intelligence, simply put, seeks to shift the visibility horizon to the right so we can better understand the tradeoff between short- and long-term consequences.

An aside: much of DI is grounded in the original vision of movements like Cybernetics and the thinking of Buckminster Fuller started in the middle of the 20^th century: the idea that complex systems understanding should inform how we interact with technology to solve the hardest problems; these concepts are seeing a 21^st-century revival as part of DI. 

Decisions so interconnected, that they become one 

Part of the reason that these problems have not been solved yet is that they resist the primary approach used by science until recently: to “cut up” problems into smaller and smaller pieces, with the belief that simply assembling the solutions together after such specialization will create a solution.  With interconnected problems like these, this approach fails, because, as Nora Bateson points out in her work on Warm Data, the intelligence is in the interconnections.  Wise organizational leaders know this already: they are seeing the limitations of silo-based thinking (whether the silos are data sets or departments) and looking to new approaches to avoid the “whack-a-mole” effect that comes from solving problems in one part of the organization, only to find that they create new problems in others. 

We might even go so far as to say that the problems shown in the first graphic above must be solved as a single problem, not separately, perhaps we might call it the Complex Holoptic Unified Multilink Problem (CHUMP). 

Which brings us back to decisions. Imagine if we all understood the ripple effect of the decisions we make, especially the big ones such as those about policy, purchases, and products, and made them just a few percentage points better for this reason.  What if we used AI and data to help us as assistants? 

Decision Intelligence (DI) today 

This is where DI comes in.  With roots in many fields, including Systems Dynamics, Complex Systems, Behavioral Economics, and more, DI is recognized by Gartner and Forbes and is now a projected $68B market recognized on a dedicated Gartner Magic Quadrant for DI.  Please see my first DI book, Link: How Decision Intelligence Connects Data, Actions, and Outcomes for a Better World which is a readable introduction, and The Decision Intelligence Handbook for a deeper-dive textbook. 

Emerging, unusually, not from academic departments but from commercial companies like Google (which has trained over 17,000 engineers in DI) and my company, Quantellia, DI boasts dozens of vendors today and a growing list of success stories.   And, in an important sign of the times, Alibaba—the world’s largest retailer—also runs a Decision Intelligence research lab – a step that is, so far, unparalleled by Western-based companies. 

Want to learn more? Check out the Introduction to DI course.

An older version of this article was originally published by Ethical Corporation magazine.