Knowledge Content Library

The Importance of Clarity around Objectives

Frank Koch. Koch Consulting and Christa Roemkens, Chevron
July 27, 2016 (SDP Webinar Invited Talk)

This webinar features a dialogue with examples regarding the importance of clearly understanding our objectives, what we want to accomplish through the decision. Clear values and objectives are one of the 6 dimensions of decision quality and lack of clarity can result in a poor and incomplete frame, missing compelling alternatives, incomplete information and overly simplistic reasoning. In cases where a decision does not satisfy critical objectives, there may be poor commitment to carry out the decision. In our experience we have often found that objectives are poorly understood and may be unstated or implicit, especially "hard to measure" objectives. In those cases, financial and operational objectives tend to be overemphasized, in part because they are well within the comfort zone of the predominantly analytic individuals involved in many decision processes. Clarity around multiple objectives is especially essential in decisions involving multiple stakeholders. We will illustrate some simple tools and techniques to facilitate decision conversation about developing objectives and making trade-offs among objectives. We will discuss examples of business decisions, social decisions and personal decisions with multiple and often conflicting objectives.

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Keywords: framing framestruc tools framtool, multi-objective multobj, value focused thinking vft, decision quality decqual, objectives hierarachy, societal decisions socdec, facilitation ssfacil