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6 - Creating Alternatives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2020

Ralph L. Keeney
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
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Summary

An alternative is a possible course of action that you have the authority to choose for a decision. Creating alternatives is one of the most important things you can do to make better decisions. The reasons are that you can never select an alternative that you have not identified, and your chosen alternative can be no better than the best of those that are identified. Numerous studies indicate that decision-makers have many shortcomings in creating alternatives, mainly because they do not spend any, or enough, time creating alternatives and they are relatively ineffective spending the time that is allocated. Thinking outside the box is useful advice, but it gives no guidance on how to create desirable alternatives. You want to think inside a much larger, right-sized alternatives box. Your values for a decision are the key to creating better alternatives, as alternatives are subsequently evaluated in terms of these values. A systematic process is provided for using values to create innovative and better alternatives. Practical experiments that show the effectiveness of this process are presented. The concept of value-focused brainstorming to create innovative alternatives in groups is presented and its usefulness is demonstrated in a major application.

Type
Chapter
Information
Give Yourself a Nudge
Helping Smart People Make Smarter Personal and Business Decisions
, pp. 80 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Creating Alternatives
  • Ralph L. Keeney, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: Give Yourself a Nudge
  • Online publication: 17 April 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108776707.007
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Creating Alternatives
  • Ralph L. Keeney, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: Give Yourself a Nudge
  • Online publication: 17 April 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108776707.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Creating Alternatives
  • Ralph L. Keeney, Duke University, North Carolina
  • Book: Give Yourself a Nudge
  • Online publication: 17 April 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108776707.007
Available formats
×