ABSTRACT

Decision-making in organizations is a popular subject for discussion and research. Recognizing that the wrong decision may cost thousands, sometimes even millions, of pounds top management is searching for ways of improving its score of bull's-eyes. Nor need it look for people who are keen to help by such varied methods as modelling decisions, using techniques to aid creativity and by the use of business games as a means of training in decision-taking. Decision-making has attracted a crowd of research workers from different disciplines. These look at the problems of making decisions from their own points of view and make their own contributions to our still limited knowledge of the subject. It would take too long to try to summarize here all these different and sometimes highly theoretical approaches to theories of decision-making.1 Instead we shall discuss some of the simpler things that are now known about the process of decisionmaking in practice.2