CHOICE CRAFTING –
CREATIVITY, INNOVATION AND DECISION MAKING
(abstract of Talk given in 2012)
The new world is characterized by extreme pace of change.
This is driven by science and technology. The key pillars of these changes have
emerged as technology, software, innovation and complexity. Making effective
decisions in the new world requires not only selecting an alternative from a
predefined set but also creating new alternatives, simultaneously. The new
alternatives need to be - novel, inventive and useful – the three key
conditions for getting a Patent right. In
fact, inventing and decision making as a continuous interplay of human mind is
now becoming an essential skill. Unfortunately the literature and practice
of invention, innovation and creativity has traditionally been separated from
the body of knowledge developed and available for decision-making. We, however,
believe new world decisions require a new
craft combining invention and
decision making. We call this new framework – Choice Crafting.
Surprisingly, the simultaneous demands of inventing new
choices and selecting appropriate sub-set of choices are making today’s
decision makers, inventors, creators and innovators ineffective as they are trained either
to invent/create OR to decide/choose, but not perform both
these tasks seamlessly, in a synergistic manner and simultaneously. This is having large
impact on our ability to operate in the changing world. On one side we are
faced with machines taking control of large part of monotonous processes and
increasingly large part of repeatable procedures that we have designed and
developed over couple of centuries of industrialization, and on the other hand
world is increasingly becoming complex due to conflict of interests of
disconnected part of humanity. The interplay of these trends shows a failure of
our ability to make decisions using the old ways. We need new ways.
There are many new ways and methods developed and employed in solving these
problems. With the speakers personal experience of applying and developing
various techniques – this talk offers a comprehensive approach to making
decisions or leading to decisions using various known, old and new methods in a
comprehensive framework. The talk details these mechanisms in cases where speaker
has developed and applied for solving decision problems in Software,
Innovation, Technology, and Complexity space.
Decision making traditionally has been about choice. Most of
decision making methodologies have focused on courses of action, choices or
alternatives to achieve desired objectives/purpose. The decision making
methodologies have given predominant focus on selecting a specific choice or
a subset of choices from the available set of choices. Decision making
methodologies have not emphasized much on creation of alternatives, in
fact, it has been relegated to psychological capabilities, creativity methodologies
or more of an “art” form. We emphasize in this talk that – choices are not
available upfront, in clear high resolution demarcation in the new world of
extreme connectedness enabled by technology, high level of complexity, rapid
innovation and revolutionary impact of software. To decide in the new world
characterized by STIX (Software, Technology, Innovation and complexity) we need
to re-look at our traditional decision making methods. The key methodological
construct is to combine the known theories and new methods of creativity,
invention and idea-generation with the known theories and new methods of
decision making primarily characterized by selection or choice from a
rank-ordered list of alternatives based on predefined set of criteria or under
assumed, estimated or data based probability distributions under uncertainty
conditions.
The requirement of creating new or different choices along
with the selection of choices has led the speaker into methodologies such as
Theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ), Scenario Planning, Lateral
thinking, game theory, Scenario planning and Scenario writing, design thinking,
patent creation and patent analysis, systems thinking, simulation and
modelling, computational emergence, computational creativity, network science
and the architecture of human genome. This is besides the techniques of
standard multi-criteria, multi-objective decision making methodologies.
In essence, to operate in the new world – one need to
amalgamate two uniquely distinctive features of human mind. One is to
invent/create and second is to select/choose. In fact, invent/create
select/choose cycles are played out naturally in human mind whenever it has to
operate in the world. In the new world, invent-decide cycle is become
excruciatingly difficult – one who masters this will be the new world
decision maker who will thrive in the world of STIX – Software, Technology,
Innovation and complexity. This talk gives the methodologies in a framework for
new world decisions – we call this new framework Choice Crafting.
