Civics: California Public Health is building a “decision support” system

Dr. Tomas Aragón

Decision-making is our most important activity.1“A decision is a choice between two or more alternatives that involves an irrevocable allocation of resources.” Decisions drive vision, strategy, policy, and transformational change. Every decision has causal assumptions, predictions, trade-offs, and an opportunity cost—the lost benefit of the better option(s) not chosen or not considered. Some decisions have extreme time constraints under deep uncertainty.

Decision intelligence is using ethics, science, and technology to improve individual and team decisions for finding and solving problems, and achieving objectives and key results in challenging, including VUCA,2 environments (Figure 1).