Relating value-focused thinking and interactive planning

Abstract

Value-focused thinking, using the dialogue decision process (DDP), and interactive planning appear to be two totally unrelated processes for making decisions. As this paper shows, new results on the interpretation of utility functions and new ways of thinking about downstream decisions allows us to reinterpret interactive planning as an ideal-focused decision process which is theoretically equivalent to DDP's value-focused decision process. But Ackoff's ideal-focused decision process may be more natural for certain organizational decision settings.