The Future of Decision Making

For a generation, improving decisions meant improving analysis: better data, better models, better dashboards. That project has largely succeeded, and it has revealed its own limit. Organizations now have excellent analysis and still make disconnected, forgetful decisions, because analysis addresses a single decision in isolation.

The next advance treats decisions as a connected, cumulative system. Each decision records its reasoning and evidence; each outcome feeds back to revise the judgment that produced it; each new decision starts from the accumulated reasoning of the ones before. Decision making becomes less like a series of isolated analyses and more like a discipline that learns. ¹

Analysis addresses one decision. A cognitive enterprise addresses the connections between all of them.

This is the future the project works toward: not an oracle that decides for the organization, but an architecture in which the organization’s own decisions compound into ever-better judgment.