The reason for making any decision is that you care about making something better. Identifying your values specifies what you care about regarding that decision. Articulating all of the values for a decision is difficult; numerous experiments indicate that half the values for an important decision are not recognized by the decision-maker. This chapter provides a process to stimulate the thoughts of the decision-maker to create a more complete set of values. Each identified value should be stated as an objective, which clarifies what you want to achieve by making that decision. The format for an objective is a noun–verb combination, such as “minimize cost&”or “enhance safety.&”Objectives should then be organized using means–ends relationships, where achievement in terms of a means objective influences the achievement of an ends relationship. This process results in identification of the fundamental objectives, which indicate ultimately what you want to achieve by making the decision, and provides a logically sound basis for evaluating alternatives. Numerous applications indicating the concepts and uses are presented.

A large collection of practical studies and research has identified numerous shortcomings in both the intuitive and conscious thought processes that we use to make decisions. It is now also well understood that the alternatives that individuals choose are greatly influenced by the presentation of those alternatives. Led by Professor Richard Thaler, the field of behavioral economics has developed numerous ways to present decision alternatives to individuals that influence them to choose better alternatives in terms of their interests. That influence is referred to as a nudge. When facing decisions, individuals routinely make two serious errors in their intuitive decision processes. First, our natural way of making decisions is backwards. We think about alternatives to solve decisions before we know what we want to achieve by solving them. Second, most of the decisions that we end up facing are decision problems that occur beyond our control. This book shows that, by better framing and understanding their decisions, decision-makers can nudge themselves to create and select better alternatives for the decisions they face. It describes the specific decision-making skills that it is important to develop and presents concepts and procedures to do this.

The only way that you can purposefully influence anything in your life is by your decisions. Your decisions empower you to enhance the quality of your life and the lives of your family and friends and to make contributions at work in businesses, organizations, and government. We all develop decision-making habits early in life, and most of us continue to use these habits. Very few individuals learn to make decisions and then practice what they learned to become proficient, which is how most of us learn most other skills. The critical first step to learning to make better decisions is identifying all of your values for a decision. These values identify what you want to achieve by making the decision and should guide all of your effort to solve it. Additional key skills to develop concern how to create better alternatives and how to identify decision opportunities that you want to address to improve your life.

Before acting to solve some recognized decision problem, it is important to think about which immediate decision you should face. Once you recognize a decision, you want to develop a clear and concise statement of this decision. You have an important choice—in fact, a decision itself–about the decision statement that you choose to describe the decision that you want to face. Your decision statement is the starting point for nudging your thinking about sets of appropriate values and alternatives to create the decision frame for your decision. Begin any decision statement with the word “decide,” typically followed by “which,” “what,” “when,” “whether,” “how,” or “if.” Decision statements are often narrow and end up addressing only part of the real decision. You want any mention of values in your decision statement to be broad. Before accepting any decision statement posed for you by someone else, you should carefully consider whether you want to address that decision.

To routinely use value-focused decision-making to nudge yourself to make better decisions, you need to develop skills to address its four critical concepts. These skills are the following: identifying values, creating alternatives, generating decision opportunities, and designing alternatives that satisfy others. For each of the four skills, several basic decisions similar to those you have previously faced are presented to practice using each concept. You can personalize these basic decisions to represent a decision that you do or will likely face. The exercises will help you understand the information that you create by applying the concepts. This should help you develop the initial skill to productively apply relevant value-focused decision-making concepts to any of your decisions. Mastering these skills requires using them on your decisions. This both helps you make better decisions and provides more practice at using the techniques to apply the concepts. With more practice, you will naturally become more proficient at the desired skills.

You have the power to enhance the quality of your life and maintain it at a high level. The way you do this—the only way you can do this—is through the decisions that you face and the alternatives that you decide to implement for those decisions. Your all-encompassing life objective is to maximize your quality of life. To pursue a high quality of life, you must define what the concept of “quality of life&”means for you. This is done by specifying your life objectives. Like a vehicle navigation system that guides your travels on roads, your life objectives are your life navigation system for guiding your decisions through life, so that you live the life that you want. Creating your life objectives is conceptually the same as defining and clarifying your objectives for an important decision. In practice, the process is both more difficult and more important. Thus, specific procedures to identify and organize your life objectives are presented. Once you know and understand your life objectives, they nudge your decision-making to be more creative, more consistent, and better, as well as reducing anxiety and the time required to make good decisions.

The distinction between decision problems and decision opportunities is very important, but it is not recognized by most decision-makers. Decision problems are decisions that you must face as a result of others’ decisions and/or circumstances beyond your control. Decision opportunities, as I define them, are decisions that you create for yourself. You must reactively solve decision problems, but you can proactively pursue decision opportunities. When a decision problem occurs, it degrades one aspect of your quality of life. Therefore, the purpose of solving a decision problem is to get your quality of life back to where it was before the decision problem occurred. A thought about something that would make your quality of life today better is what stimulates the recognition of the decision opportunity. Pursuing it directly enhances the quality of your life. In addition, it often lowers the chances of certain unwanted decision problems occurring in the future and reduces the extent of the downgrading of your quality of life if they do occur. Guidelines for creating desirable decision opportunities are provided and illustrated with examples.

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.

There are important decisions for which you do not have the authority to implement some alternatives that have great appeal to you. Someone else, who I refer to as the authorized decision-maker, controls whether the alternative that you prefer can be implemented. There is an effective way to remove such restrictions. You need to create a specific alternative that includes both the general features of your desired alternative and additional features to make that specific alternative attractive to the authorized decision-maker. You design it to be sufficiently attractive for it to be an alternative that cannot be refused by the authorized decision-maker. Knowing some values of the authorized decision-maker with respect to the decision at hand is a key to create desirable alternatives for him or her. Various procedures to do this are discussed. Value-focused negotiations indicate how knowing your negotiating partner’s values allows you to create win-win alternatives that better achieve their and your objectives. The procedure to generate post-agreement improvements to negotiations is also discussed.

A good decision-making process includes a series of steps based on logic and common sense that helps you understand and address the complexities of your decision. The intended product of this process is to provide insight to make better-informed, and therefore better, decisions. A value-focused decision-making process to make high-quality decisions consists of six components. The three front-end components state the decision problem or decision opportunity that you face, identify your values for that decision to clarify what you want to achieve, and create alternatives that contribute to achieving your values. A high-quality front end has a much greater influence on making a better decision than the back end, which describes the consequences of the competing alternatives and evaluates the desirability of those alternatives. This book concentrates on the three front-end components. Several procedures for identifying values and creating alternatives are described in detail and illustrated in several case studies and examples. Your objectives and the set of alternatives for your decision statement provide the basis for a precise description of your decision, referred to as a decision frame.