Decision Quality: six links

What it is

A chain breaks at its weakest link, however strong the other links are. A decision is the same.

In Decision Quality, you check a recommendation as a chain of six links. They are the right frame (what exactly is being decided), clear values and trade-offs, creative alternatives, reliable information, sound reasoning and commitment to action. The decision is only as good as the weakest of the six. So you do not fill in the six links like a form. You find the weakest one and spend the rest of your effort there, instead of polishing what you have already done well.

Where it comes from

The method grew out of decision analysis, a step-by-step way to think through hard choices. Ronald A. Howard of Stanford named the field in the 1960s. He set it out in his 1966 paper "Decision Analysis: Applied Decision Theory".

No single person invented the six-link chain. Consultants worked it out at Strategic Decisions Group (SDG), the firm Carl Spetzler and Howard founded in 1981. Today SDG says the method comes from more than 35 years of use inside large organisations. Carl Spetzler, Hannah Winter and Jennifer Meyer give the fullest written account. Their 2016 book from Wiley is Decision Quality: Value Creation from Better Business Decisions. The Decision Education Foundation teaches the same six elements to school pupils as "the decision chain". The wording differs a little from source to source. You will see "framing" for frame, and "useful information" for reliable information. The six links are the same.

What it corrects

Imagine you are reviewing good work. An analyst brings you a financial model, a market estimate with ranges and a clear favourite option. You judge the work by how deep it goes. You check the model, test the estimate against the worst cases and tighten the writing.

Even a careful reviewer checks only the links that are on the page. That is the mistake. The two links that fail most often are alternatives and values. When they fail, there is nothing on the page to check. When an alternative is missing, you see a confident comparison of one plan with doing nothing. When nobody names the goal, you just see the word "best". The analyst quietly assumes that everyone wants the same thing. Working harder does not fix this, because you only work on the links you can see. Reading the model twice makes the strongest link stronger. You still never see the option nobody wrote down.

How it works

1. Set out the frame: who decides, what choice is open, what is off the table, and over what period.
2. Write the goal and the trade-off as "more of X while protecting Y", not just the word "best".
3. List alternatives that are really different, not three versions of one plan.
4. Separate what you know from what you assume. Give a range for each assumption that matters.
5. Link the facts to the recommendation with reasoning that someone could argue against.
6. Name the action, who owns it, the first money or people you commit, and the date you will review it.
7. Score the six links quickly, then improve the weakest. Stop when more work on it would cost more than the decision could gain.

Worked example

On the evening of 27 January 1986, engineers at Morton Thiokol advised against launching the Space Shuttle Challenger. Their company made the shuttle's rocket boosters. Their worry was the cold. The seals in the booster joints had never flown below 53°F (about 12°C). The next morning at Kennedy Space Center was forecast to be near freezing. George Hardy of NASA said he was "appalled" by their advice. Thiokol's managers talked privately for about thirty minutes, then overruled their own engineers. Challenger was launched on 28 January and broke apart 73 seconds later.

Now read it as a chain. The information link held. Thiokol had flight data on how the seals behaved in the cold, and its engineers showed it. The link that broke was the frame: the question the meeting was answering. Weeks later one of the engineers, Roger Boisjoly, told the Presidential Commission on the accident: "This was a meeting where the determination was to launch, and it was up to us to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was not safe to do so. This is in total reverse to what the position usually is." Normally, before a flight, someone must prove the shuttle is ready. That night the engineers had to prove it would fail, and nobody could. However good the information, the decision could be no better than the link that broke.

In a Business Case Weekly case

In the Booking.com case, it is mid-2002 and the founder, Geert-Jan Bruinsma, has three options. He can sell most of his shares to a Dutch investor group. Or he can keep them, and either hire a chief executive or run the company himself. The growth data is the easy link here, but it is not the weakest. Going through the six links, you must first say whose decision this is, because the founder's goal and the company's are not the same. Then you write down the trade-off. On one side is money that would make his family secure. On the other are his shares, a bet on European travel that might not pay off. Only then can you see whether the list of alternatives is complete.

In your answer

• "The decision belongs to …, who must choose … before …; it does not cover …"
• "The goal is … while protecting …, and I will give up … to get it."
• "The weakest link here is … because …, so the next work goes there, not into the forecast."
• "I commit to …, paid for by …, and I will reverse it if … by …"

Common misuse

The common mistake is to turn the six links into six headings. You write a paragraph under each, call every link good enough, and the recommendation ends where it started. That way you get nothing from the method. The point is to rank the links, not to cover them all. Here is a quick test. Does your answer name one link as the weakest? Did that change anything in the recommendation? If not, you have written a table of contents, not checked the decision.

References

• Carl Spetzler, Hannah Winter and Jennifer Meyer, Decision Quality: Value Creation from Better Business Decisions, Wiley, 2016. ISBN 978-1-119-14467-0.
• Strategic Decisions Group, "Decision Quality" — the consultants' own account of the six links and the weakest-link rule.
• Decision Education Foundation, "The Decision Chain" — the same six elements in plain words, with worked decisions from school and everyday life.
• Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Volume I, Chapter 5 (1986) — the launch teleconference in testimony, readable in an evening.