How on Earth did this happen?

The question is not infrequent, but more to the point, it’s unnecessary. It arises because in many cases people haven’t thought things through beforehand. Yes, sometimes people can be unlucky, but far from every time that things go awry; bad luck is never so consistent – by definition.

Thinking things through properly beforehand might seem a fairly obvious requirement for making a good decision, but startlingly often, even critical decisions are made without any in depth analysis. Well, there may have been some background data lying around somewhere, but not much is done with it. Though it's easy to blame authoritarian leadership or the like, poor decision making is far more usually due to not really knowing what to do with the available information, whether it's sufficient and what else needs to be known

There’s nothing weird or idiotic about today’s decision makers, but there often is about the tools and methods available to them. It would be more accurate to say that many decision makers have been lead astray regarding their remit and capacity, but fortunately with structured decision processes they can be guided back on track far more easily than had they been as dim- witted as some of their decisions would indicate.

Businesses introduce various BI solutions both timely and untimely, but what most of them don't have is any kind of methodology by which to deal with decisions. With no processes, knowledge, techniques or tools, they soon come to grief. Happily this is fairly easy to remedy.
Decision processes and decision methods can be greatly improved. In this book we simply explain how to go about it.