No decisions without value/s

I was getting hot under the collar the other day listening to an interview with some religious type who was upset by the decision to prevent a Catholic charity from excluding same-sex couples from using their adoption service. The Charities Commission ruled that they could either change their policy, or stop acting as an adoption agency, and as far as they were concerned the former was not an option so the latter was the only possible outcome. Now, nothing is likely to bring me round to their antediluvian* point of view re parenthood and sexuality, but it did help calm me down to remember that, whilst the discussion may often hover around "facts" (because they're easier for everyone to get a grip on, even when flaky), it's actually not about something that has a right or wrong answer: it's about a decision to support one side or another of the argument, and decisions are fundamentally dependent upon values: these are the only thing that give the "facts" any weight for the decision maker.

"Facts", in principle, are established by gathering objective evidence. Decisions, on the other hand, are the reverse: they always involve value. Value, whilst it can be a purely emotional response (a desire for something, or a positive feeling towards it), can also be transformed into values (not the same thing), which in a sense provide a template for valuing a given phenomenon. In other words, value is the outcome of an assessment, whilst values are a tool that for making that assessment.

Further, values (the tool/template) may be the internal values of an individual, perhaps embedded sub-consciously in a decision or even somatic ("instinctual", if you like, though that's a debate to avoid); or they may the externalised values embodied as a set of rules guiding a decision. This ostensibly makes the decision objective, but only by removing the value judgement into an earlier stage of the decision-making: the framing stage, where the rules for the decision are composed. These rules might even be ossified into an automated process, where rules are coded as machine instructions. They may also have been distorted along the way, so that in fact the rules represent no values held by a person at all. Whichever is the case, the values of a person or a group of people have been injected at some stage in order to make a decision possible.

The push and pull of emotion are a tide that can move our internal values incessantly, and this is one reason why it is often helpful to turn values into a set of explicit rules. Another is to externalise them so that they can be discussed and referred to as law, policy, doctrine or maybe something more informal. Of course, there's a psychological cost if this then results in dissonance between the codified values and the internalised values.

So in making decisions, or trying to influence the decisions made by other people or systems, or merely trying to understand the perspective of someone who argues in a direction that you just don't get, should we focus on the facts or on the values? Should we try to gather more evidence to demonstrate that the facts are as we see them? Should we examine the values held by another party and attempt to present the facts consonantly with them? Should we even try to change the values that are so critical in turning facts into value into decisions? Well, that's a tough one. But the one thing you can't do is address value directly: value is the product of the perceived "facts" of a scenario and the process or template for assessing the value of those facts. You can address the facts, and you can address the process of assessing but it's pointless to simply state that the value is something other than the assessment itself.

Ultimately, values themselves can be shaken by enough well-aimed evidence, but these may be of a quite different category to those facts that are put together with established values in order to reach a decision. For example, the evidence or experience required to make me a Catholic and subscribe to the values of the person I heard interviewed I cannot even imagine, even though ultimately it must be possible (perhaps on the road to Damascus). On the other hand, there are some facts through which I might be persuaded that it was wrong to prevent that particular charity from handling adoptions as it chose - for example, if it were the only agency in the country and the result of this decision was that there would be no adoption agencies at all, I might (might) feel, for purely pragmatic reasons, that it would be better to let them carry on even if that meant living with their discriminatory policy. Thankfully that's not the situation!

I don't know if this framework I've outlined is useful or right. I'm not a psychologist, a philosopher or a logician. Perhaps there are people out there who have very different ways of making decisions and this model of splitting out values from assessments of value doesn't work for them. I myself can see complications in examining the adoption agency question, which is nothing if not a clash of values. For my research into the role of decision making in digital sustainability, though, I think it may be a useful distinction to make, extending the insights given by Lessig's modalities of regulation (PDF) (this is typically looked at as a legal theorem but it's really about the "regulation" of decisions).

*yes, I know

Securing endowment

No, not endowments. Decision-making literature* addresses the "endowment effect". In a nutshell, I mean that phenomenon whereby people value what they have more than what they might have, although they be the same. This is tied to the observation that loss of utility is felt more keenly than a gain of the same utility. If I am given a mug (to follow Beach and Connolly's example) I may well require a larger payment to give it up that I would be prepared to pay for it.

This is probably a useful tool to wield when trying to get support for some resourcing decisions in an organisation, particularly those that can be expressed as relating to assets the organisation already possesses, rather than new ones it might acquire. In a scenario where I am seeking funds to support old digital resources, careful preparation of the ground to develop an endowment effect amongst the executive before taking the proposal to the board may be fruitful (this is obvious to the point of being banal, right?) If I just tell then what we have, what it could do in the future, and how we plan to maintain it, it's like saying "here's a mug that will hold your coffee and make you happy, it will cost you a fiver, gimme!" If instead I encourage a sense of pre-existing ownership - an emotional committment - a feeling that this thing is already part of the museum and its loss reduces us, then the costs I propose that we bear are more like the purchase offer for the mug that is turned down: in other words the board may be more likely to turn down the opportunity to avoid those costs. It's like saying "you've got a mug, you love it, if you want to keep the cash then I'm afraid you'll lose the mug. Bummer, but that's life. So cough up!"

How you actually cultivate within the executive that sense of ownership is another question. You could also argue that this is little different to just identifying and drawing out the value of an asset to the decision-makers, but it's a more emotional proposition than simply making them aware of an assets existence and potential future utility, and it may be worth exploring how one can play the psychological game and encourage emotional engagement and attachment to pre-existing digital resources when fighting for the funds to suppport them. It may actually be as important as the rational explication of value, however much we might like to believe decisions would be rational.

Nina Simon amongst others has talked extensively and profoundly on Museum 2.0 about developing engagement amongst our audiences, and I'm starting to realise how this could be equally important within the organisation: if we want to persuade people of the rightness of what we're arguing for, there can be more to it than pure reason, Kant there? (apologies for the shameless mis-referencing here of something I clearly don't understand. I only understand puns.) It's internal marketing, I suppose, and nothing new.





* OK, let's be honest, all I know about is the book I'm reading right now and blogged about previously

Decision making psychology

My current reading is Beach and Connolly’s “The Psychology of Decision Making: People in Organizations” (Sage, 2005), which I’ve found incredibly stimulating and which is providing a suite of tools that I’m certain will prove invaluable for interpreting the material I’m gathering through my case studies. I’m going to resist the temptation to put up all my notes on the book, but I’ll pull out a couple of the things that I’ve found in there that I think will be useful to me, even though when they’re put as baldly as this they may seem banal: the book is replete with further insights, experimental evidence, and models for particular situations, and if you’re interested in finding a theoretical basis or empirical support for interpreting decision making, I’d recommend you to have a look at it. I may also run through an example or two from my case studies, suitably anonymised. OK, so, some of the ideas I’ll be trying to weave into my work:

Framing. The way the outcomes of a decision (the action to be taken to solve the problem) are framed is vital. With outcomes framed as gains, people will take more risks; framed as losses they’ll be conservative. When considering whether to invest resources in maintaining a digital resource, we could think in terms of the potential loss of value from that resource, or additional value to be gained, or the opportunity cost of using the resources to this end.

The gambling analogy. Whilst the gambling analogy played a key part in early theory, and indeed has a role in current theories for particular kinds of decisions, there are many kinds of decisions where the analogy fails utterly and many analogies that can work better. Lots of decisions in digital resource management could probably be assessed quite well using normative gambling theory, at least in terms of evaluating probable outcomes and weighing them up against gains or losses. But figuring out the last part of that equation – the value of the gains or losses – can’t be achieved with gambling theory alone.

Scenario theory. One of these alternatives revolves around the construction and testing of scenarios (or stories, if interpreting past events). By creating a web of cause-and-effect relationships (some of them interdependent), weighting them for the likelihood of their outcomes, and again for the value of those outcomes, decision-makers can evaluate which has the best chance of success, and which the best pay-off.
Figuring out an application’s dependencies (and their own inter-dependencies), the likelihood of any of these being disrupted, mitigating strategies and their costs, running the scenarios and figuring out the value of the probable outcomes: this is a complex process, but it’s perhaps one worth pursuing (together with a “significant properties” approach) in evaluating sustainability strategies for museum digital resources.

The nature of the unknown. Even where gambling can seem appropriate, in dealing with uncertainty, it’s not all about the likelihood of a given action succeeding as intended: there is the question of how the scenario will unfold, and even uncertainty as to the value of the outcome in the event of success, since this value may change for the “player” over time. This is pretty pertinent for museum digital sustainability problems, since these will often involve planning well in advance when there is a high degree of uncertainty about not just future conditions and problems, but the value of the resource (or aspects of it) in the future. For example, a learning resource may prove to be much less valuable if there are curriculum changes; the likelihood of this happening may be hard to assess, but the risk might make it injudicious to invest significant effort in making the resource “future-proof”, whatever that is.

Decision making in groups. As well as offering the chance to share knowledge and, one would hope, use this to make better decisions, group decision making throws up hazards, not least the possibility that, instead of sharing new knowledge, groups will focus their discussions on common knowledge and reject anything outside this, thus narrowing the evidential base for their deliberations. Procedural, structural and social barriers can also bias decisions towards one faction or another.

The role of social pressure, morals and ethics. Although “normative” theory has no space for these factors, they are clearly inherent in many decisions. Etzioni has distinguished between three classes of factor influencing decisions:

• utilitarian influence – the economic assessment
• social influence - social pressure to conform, risk of approbation etc.
• deontological influence [deontology is effect of moral obligation and commitment upon behaviour]. May include internalised reflections of social factors e.g. guilt, but covers internal drivers of behaviour.

An institution acting as one of my case studies – let’s call it Framley Museum and hope they don’t sue – threw up an example wherein a number of middle managers were found to be unnecessary to the continued operation of the institution, although objectively one might view the obvious staff shortages in some affected areas as indicating that claims of “redundancy” were logically false. The deliberations that led to decision to dismiss staff may have included many factors, but one conceivable influence could have been the fact that a key member of the executive, with whom all the targets had been in conflict, was leaving the museum on the day that the redundancies were announced to Framley's staff. Exiting the social context (and the country) in which that director would have been held accountable may have liberated him, for better or worse, from any social influence upon his decision. Whether this also meant liberation from the responsibility to make sound and profitable decisions for the benefit of Framley Museum is an open question; and one has to ask how wise it can be for any organisation to take advice on such vital decisions from people on the point of departure, who then cannot then be held accountable for them in any way. It should also be said that it’s likely that incomplete information contributed to the staff-shedding decision, wherein the directorate was probably unable to obtain or comprehend the information necessary to assess the role of some managers, in part because they’d need to gather the information from the affected parties. Clearly the question of the influence of ethics is complex; likewise the role of information which I have barely touched on here, but which is a significant component Beach and Connolly's work.

These are poor caricatures of concepts from the book, and I haven’t even finished yet (two chapters to go) but I really wanted to write something about it. Perhaps in future I’ll work through some fuller, more detailed examples. If that’s of interest let me know with the usual sound of one hand clapping ;-)