The Decision Intelligence Handbook

Chapter 8. Decision Review

One of the great benefits of DI is that documenting decisions lets you reuse them and improve them over time. This increases efficiency so much and allows for such continuous improvement that this benefit alone justifies the effort of bringing DI into your organization—especially if you’ll be making a decision (or similar ones) repeatedly.

Understanding how your experts make decisions is one of the most critical forms of organizational knowledge, so it’s a little shocking how rarely organizations document decisions in ways that allow for reuse. A senior Pentagon official in charge of conducting a comprehensive review process every four years once told us, “We throw everything out and start again every time.” Another US federal employee told us that their organization doesn’t always capture decisions, but if they do, it’s in PDF documents, which are very hard to reuse. Imagine if every time Pratt & Whitney built a rocket engine, it threw away its design and relied on engineers’ memories to build the next one!

This chapter presents the final DI phase: Phase E, Decision Review. This phase comes after you’ve taken action based on the decision. Its purpose is to ensure that you learn from the decision-making experience and capture any artifacts you could reuse for later decisions.

You learned in Phase C2, Decision Assessment (Chapter 6), how to assess your decision before taking action, such as applying sensitivity and provenance analysis to the decision ...