Introduction

Abstract

Hard decisions for a management team are those decisions which will have significant economic, financial, political and/or emotional consequences for the team and the company they serve. Hard decisions are normally difficult to make and this is made even harder if the decision situation is complex (i.e. there are many interdependent elements), the information about the decision alternatives and their consequences is imprecise and/or uncertain and the environment (or the context) unstable, dynamic and not well known. If a team or a group should make the decisions the group members may have different opinions about the alternatives and the risks or outcomes of the consequences. In the modern business world, which is dominated by real-time information readily available in abundance through the World Wide Web and by the notion that decisions need to be made quickly as otherwise the competition (or opposition, or whatever antagonistic force) will prevail, there is a growing tendency to make fast and bad decisions. Following Carlsson [92] in this Chapter we will take another route - we will try to show that groups can make fast and good decisions with the help of some recent and fairly exciting analytical tools that are imbedded in good and easy to use software [299].