Decision Making Planning: The Meta-decision Approach

Organizational problems that demand decision-making require planning about their own decision-making process: the meta-decisions. We propose that the decisions about the process itself can be organized around three key activities: (1) diagnosis of meta-decision context and evaluation of meta-decision problem, (2) selection / planning of the meta-decision strategies and (3) meta-decision strategies implementation. This paper aims to focus on the content of the first two key activities. We develop guidelines for these two activities intended for generic decision making process and we illustrate these guidelines with examples and graphs. It is hoped that by following them a decision maker can optimize the process of decision making and thus achieve higher-quality decisions with less time and less resources invested. Future studies will need to be developed in order to empirically analyze the meta-decisions taken during a decision-making process and improve the theoretical framework here proposed.