Developing and Validating the Multidimensional Proactive Decision-Making Scale
The crucial research questions are how their proactivity in decision situations can characterize individuals, the eventual consequences of proactivity in decision situations, and how the degree of proactivity affects satisfaction with one’s decisions. The scale on Proactive Decision Making (PDM) that has been theoretically developed from literature and empirically validated in cooperation with Prof. Reinhard Kunz (University of Cologne) allows for describing the degree of proactivity of individuals with six dimensions. Two dimensions cover proactive personality traits: ‘striving for improvement’ and ‘showing initiative’. The four dimensions ‘systematical identification of objectives’, ‘systematical identification of information’, ‘systematical identification of alternatives’, and “using a ‘decision radar’ concern proactive cognitive skills and integrate the ideas and concepts of value-focused thinking and decision quality into the PDM-scale. This scale provides the basis for analyzing many research questions. For instance, proactive individuals are significantly more satisfied with their decisions, and the scale can explain up to…
Improving decision making competence of adolescents
The first decision many young people make is “what do I do after school?” For the most part, different options are presented at best. Often, young people then choose one of the obvious alternatives or alternatives suggested by others without thinking more deeply about what they personally actually want and what their objectives are. For example, you often hear young people say, “My mother is a doctor, so I’m studying medicine,” or “My father is an entrepreneur. I’m studying business,” or even “My parents didn’t study. I should definitely not make the same mistake.” In principle, these decisions may seem “reasonable” from an objective point of view; in individual cases, however, it is urgently necessary to consider each individual’s interests, wishes, and prerequisites. Before choosing a field of study, everyone should ask themselves the central question of whether training or studying is a better fit for a young person’s objectives…
Minimizing the impact of fake news on the real world by debiasing the belief perseverance bias
Fake news is false news stories packaged and published as if they were genuine with the intention to mislead the reader to damage an agency, an entity, or a person or to increase an internet click revenue. During the 2016 US presidential election campaign, fake news became a global phenomenon, in particular, due to the growing use of social media as a source for news. The proliferation of fake news online has been of increased concern to the European Parliament since. However, no agreement on how to tackle this issue has been reached. Debiasing refers to attempts to eliminate or at least reduce biases. Only a few debiasing methods have been introduced for the belief-perseverance and confirmation biases so far. Although it was suggested already in early publications that effective debiasing methods should include a combination of various debiasing techniques, scholars have instead focused on isolated debiasing techniques. Moreover, the…
Developing methods for identifying, structuring and comparing objectives
Identifying the objectives of a hostile organization whose decision-makers are not interested in cooperation or even contact with them might be dangerous. In such a case, the methods to identify objectives in a cooperative organizations cannot be applied. We developed a method to identify the objectives of a hostile organization using expert interviews and published speeches of their leaders. The method can also be applied in more moderate cases and could find widespread application, for example, to identify a competitor’s objectives. Furthermore, we developed a method to compare the objectives hierarchies of two or more organizations of one organization over time. The identification of such differences is crucial if they have a substantial impact. For example, to ensure the protection of the civilian population in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States concerning attacks by the terrorist group Islamic State it is necessary to identify similarities and differences of the objectives of Al Qaeda and Islamic State. The results can be used to analyze which measures that had been successful and effective against Al Qaeda could be transferred against Islamic State which not.
Developing the decision support system “Entscheidungsnavi”
My objective improving individual and organizational decision-making. Therefore, my colleague von Nitzsch (RWTH Aachen) and I develop a web-based decision support system for decisions with multiple objectives (www.entscheidungsnavi.de, more information the project: www.proaktiv-entscheiden.de). The special about the entscheidungsnavi is sophisticated support which allows decision-makers to structure their decision problem appropriately. Furthermore, the latest research results on decision-making biases and behavior, in general, are considered to ensure high-quality results
Developing more and better alternatives (individually as well as in groups)
Many individuals and organizations spend most of their effort evaluating alternatives without ensuring that the best possible alternative is to be chosen. Therefore, we analyzed how individuals and organizations can systematically create more and better alternatives to improve the outcome of their decision-making. The main idea is to use objectives as a stimulus in alternative creation (Keeney 1992). In cooperation with Ralph Keeney (Duke University, USA), I conducted five experiments. The participants created alternatives for essential decisions they were highly involved with. In summary, these experiments provided extensive evidence that using objectives for creating alternatives impacts the number and quality of alternatives created significantly. The results were used to derive a guideline for creating alternatives in critical decision situations.
Designing a Media-Specific Balanced Scorecard by Applying Value-Focused Thinking
The Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan and Norton 1992) is one of the five management tools used most often and has been implemented by nearly 40 percent of the companies (Rigby and Bilodeau 2013). Yet, there is no theoretically sound approach for developing a balanced scorecard. Value-focused thinking is a decision-making philosophy that fits perfectly to Balanced Scorecard creation. It provides methods and techniques for the identification and structuring of objectives that are suitable to systematically derive a scorecard from a means-ends network. However, such a means-ends network is often too complex for enduring use in strategic management. By adapting the network’s structure to the Balanced Scorecard’s layout, the profound and clear set of derived objectives and their measures provide a reasonable basis for applying methods of multi-criteria decision-making in an organization. In a case study, we develop a media-specific Balanced Scorecard to provide media decision-makers with a model that takes characteristics of media management into account and that helps to manage their company successfully.