The Risk of Decision Making

I stumbled across an article from 1969 commenting on an engineering lecture by Lord Snow, on the risk of decision making. Even sitting here in 2020, over 50 years later, I think the article does a good job of summarising issues that affect engineers today.  Firstly, there is the conflict that exists between the strictly logical aspects of an engineer's training and the need for decision making when risk is involved. An engineer's training values accuracy and leaves no room for error.  The author explains ‘Because of their rigorous training, engineers are prevented from learning by their mistakes and the mistakes of others. This leads to a tendency to postpone decisions and an inability to take risks.” As Lord Snow said “A decision made without risk is no decision at all”. The author talks about an engineer’s “inability to make any decision except on the basis of all the rigorous facts before him”. He goes on to describe the tendency to weigh carefully all the factors in arriving at a solution - not necessarily a decision . And there is a significant distinction between the two.  In a recent article on communication , I spoke about the failings of common construction tools, where more and more information is added, but no further understanding is gained. The same applies for decision making; additional data can be collected and solutions can be proposed, but it is the ability to filter the information, discarding some aspects and prioritising others, that allows a decision to be made. The author goes on to say (please excuse the sexist language - it was 1969) “An engineer tends to therefore procrastinate on anything but a pure engineering decision. Either he has gathered round him so many relevant or irrelevant facts that he cannot even make a decision on the conflict between them, least of all on the main problems, or he is not prepared to take a risk on the facts at his/her disposal without hedging his/her decision with conditions and phrases which may render the decision useless.“ A great counter example of rational decision making is the example of Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces. In 1983, in the middle of the cold war between Russia and the US, his job was to monitor the early warning system for nuclear attack. The system provided him with conclusive evidence that a US missile had been launched. It was Petrov’s responsibility to notify the chain of command who had instructions for an immediate and compulsory nuclear counter-attack. Petrov disobeyed the protocol saving millions of lives. He was able to take a risk on his decision based on rational thinking - ignoring the information provided to him by the satellite network, he proposed if the US were to send an attack it would include many more missiles and therefore he assumed a technical error. He had less than a minute to make the decision and the future of the world was at stake. It was a huge risk, but with the ability to filter out the conflicting information available he made a rational decision, one that turned out to be correct. The author of the engineering article alludes to this as well. He says, “no one questions that managerial decisions should be based on facts, but which facts, how many facts, whose facts?” The article concludes that the success of a manager will depend on their ability to apply judgement and to take risks in decision making. Today, in 2020, with ever increasing uncertainty, these attributes in an engineer will be more valuable than ever. If you enjoyed this article, you might also like to read my article on Why BIM Doesn’t Work which looks at communication as a key failing in BIM.

1969 Article - The Journal of the NZ Institute of Engineers