Analytic versus Strategic Decision Making

Scholarship on decision making tends to divide into two approaches: analytic and strategic.^[6] Using the analytic approach, a decision maker attempts to maximize the "expected value" of a choice.^[7] He or she must make an exhaustive search for alternatives, identify the consequences of each alternative, and predict the likelihood of each of the consequences of each alternative.^[8] Unfortunately, these requirements are impossibly demanding for any but the most simple of decision problems. They require precisely the conditions that most decision makers are denied: unambiguous information (to define the problem and analyze alternative solutions); time, money, and control over the environment (to enable the search for alternative solutions and the analysis of consequences); powerful causal models (to aid in analyzing consequences); and a complete, consistent way to order preferences (to estimate the relative value of the various consequences).

As an alternative to the analytic model, Simon, Lindblom, and others have proffered a set of decision theories we refer to as the "strategic approach." These include Simon's model of general problem solving, Lindblom's disjointed incrementalism and partisan mutual adjustment, March and Simon's approach to decision making in formal organizations, March's "garbage can" model, Steinbruner's "cybernetic paradigm," Etzioni's "mixed scanning" perspective, Dror's effort to synthesize the disjointed-incremental and rational models, and

other theories.^[9] These approaches to decision making differ in their description and prescription of search procedures, modes and means of analysis, decision rules, and preference structures. But all begin with the premise that decision makers face complex problems with uncertain information, inadequate resources, and ambiguous and sometimes conflicting values. All take as their central thesis that decision makers respond to these unhappy conditions by monitoring feedback from their choices and then adjusting those choices accordingly. All of these approaches are elaborate variations on a trial-and-error strategy.

The type of decision making apparent in our cases does not entirely fit either the analytic or the strategic approach but is clearly much closer to the latter. The decision makers in these cases exhibited a more deliberate and evolved form of the strategic model than the literature predicted. While these decision makers did employ certain elements of the analytic approach, it was typically in support of strategy rather than in its stead.