Chapter 4: Conclusions

The most important lessons from the research have been integrated into the project’s final products as core principles. The top three of these principles, outlined below, are the findings and conclusions that have most influenced the research outcomes and that are most integral to making effective use of the project’s guidance.

Good Decisions Must Be Grounded in Understanding How We Actually Make Decisions

Through most of the 20th century, “rational” theories of decision-making reigned in our collective consciousness. These theories outline how people should optimize situations and arrive at the best decision, as defined by a quantifiable algorithm for getting the most of what was desired most of the time. More recent cognitive research suggests that the reality is far more complicated. It turns out people prefer to reduce risk, even when it reduces the quantity of expected outcome. Fast decision-making is often preferable to slow deliberation over every decision that surfaces, yet this can lead people to “errors” of judgment that predictably skew our decisions toward the less “optimal” by simplistic maximization algorithms. And the messy realities of real-life situations rarely reflect the environment that clearly points to one optimal outcome.

How we actually make decisions is more accurately described as a balancing of different competing tendencies and dynamics:

• Making a quick “suboptimal” decision to meet the moment vs. waiting for full information
• Listening to intuition vs. meticulously deliberating all facets of a situation
• Maximizing one desired outcome vs. valuing the wellbeing of those affected by a decision
• Balancing data-driven indicators with very real and relevant political considerations

Accepting, examining, and understanding these tensions are the foundation of this research.

Challenges to Good Decisions Can Arise Anytime and in Any Situation

The fundamental premise of this research is that following a good decision-making process is important but finding and understanding a good process are not what is most difficult about making good decisions. The true difficulty comes from all the complications and challenges that arise while trying to implement your process. This research focused on addressing the most common and pernicious of these challenges by combining rigorously tested insights from cognitive science with real-world lessons from experienced transportation agency leaders.

These challenges have been organized into four broad categories in this research:

• Challenges that deal with managing information.
• Challenges involving people and interpersonal dynamics.
• Challenges that stem from innately “sticky” circumstances.
• Challenges that remain after a decision is made.

The strategies offered for these challenges all seek to bolster the four universal elements of “good” decisions: factual competence, values competence, practicality, and adaptivity. It may seem that managing information connects to factual competence, people inform values, and situations call for practicality, but each set of strategies support each of the universal elements. Reliance on people to provide the right information is crucial to establishing what is a factual representation of reality; interpersonal dynamics have relevant implications for what is practical; and sticky circumstances can create a whirlwind of facts that change within minutes.

Strategies to Address Challenges Must Be Situation-Agnostic

Executive decisions are almost by definition those of great importance that do not fit perfectly into standard processes. If the decision were not important, or if the answer was clear from the processes already in place, it likely would not rise to the level of requiring executive input. Therefore, the guidance needed to be robust across a wide range of possible circumstances.

Because the guidance does not dictate a step-by-step decision process, and because the identified challenges can arise in a range of situations and points in the decision-making process, the strategies are presented in an à la carte reference format. Users are encouraged to find the specific challenge they are facing or are curious about, jump to that section, and see if the strategies offered can help them identify how they can best proceed in whatever situation they currently face. The target audience of busy agency executives is not expected to sit down and read every report given to them cover-to-cover. This guidance is set up to accommodate this practical reality and to offer piecemeal advice that is both targeted at specific challenges yet situation-agnostic and broadly applicable across the range of decision types and circumstances leaders are likely to face.