Week 5 – Discussion

This week we covered decision making and problem solving. I have to say that one thing I did take away from this week’s lecture is that there is no such thing as a bad decision. There is on the other hand, an irrational decision. Every decision ever made, even if at the time made absolutely no sense to you, had to have some sort of rational by the decision maker. Even then, it is impossible to make a perfect decision because you never have all the information you need to make the most rational decision. Mind boggling isn’t it?

I did want to make a quick note about the effect Multimedia has on decision making. I’ve been playing the Metallica song over and over on my Xbox (Guitar Heroes III) and never really thought about the lyrics or what the song was really about. Reading the lyrics, hearing the song, and finally watching the video was an excellent way of proving how multimedia can string you along and make you see/think what they want you to. Create Bias.


Action Learning

The six steps of the “problem solving process” are, in my mind anyway, fairly straight forward and can apply to any problem. By following each individual step you are assuring yourself not only that you are finding the proper solution to a problem but that you are focusing on a real problem that needs solving. Each of the six steps: 1. presenting the problem 2. Reframe the problem. 3. Determine causes of the problem 4. Develop alternative solutions 5. Evaluate alternatives and select actions and 6. Implement the solution, play a crucial piece in the solution as a whole. In my opinion though I would have to put a little more weight on step number two, Reframe the problem. The reason being is that by taking this step you are making sure you are dealing with a real problem. You are forcing yourself to look at the issue as a whole and make sure that the problem you think you have is not really just a subset of a much bigger problem. By taking all this into consideration you actually start the process of answering questions to the remaining steps. That being said, this is just a piece of the whole process and relies entirely on the other five steps to come to some resolution to some problem.


Understanding and Supporting Decision Making
An Interview with Gary Klein

This article covers a different perspective on Decision making. Instead of following the more traditional decision making model, Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) basically deals more with real life decision making in a person’s natural environment. I understood NDM to be a framework that will study how a person would do at any given moment, with current surroundings, pressures, etc. NDM also takes into consideration the quality of decision making based on a person’s experience on a particular subject.


What Data Mining Can and Can't Do

According to Professor Peter Fader, more data is in not necessarily a good thing. I have to say that I agree and speaking from experience, I can see where he is coming from. It is always better to go for quality versus quantity when it comes to data. If you start collecting all the data available to you without really doing any filtering you will end up with bad data which will skew your information.