Drowning in the Sea of Possibilities!

April 30, 2009 5:38 AM

I'm looking for advice on systems of organizing data to support a decision making process (either software, or manually (index cards, etc.))

We get lots of posts here on AskMe from people asking for advice on making a decision, sometimes quite major life decisions. In this case, I'm not asking the internet to make my decision for me, but am interesting in learning what tools/techniques people have found useful for helping to make such decisions themselves.

Let's suppose - just hypothetically :-) that you were approaching one of those times in your life when you will find yourself at a major 'fork in the road'. Maybe it's even a multiple fork ... a number of possible futures.

It's not a simple binary decision; there are just too many things to consider. You want to try and cover a great many 'data points', including such things as the various pros and cons of each of those possible futures (income potentials, location, companionship, communication, satisfaction, climate, etc. etc.), how those all factors mesh with your personal needs (health factors, exercise, diet, etc.), as well as considerations of how these 'futures' will play out as you age ... There are potentially hundreds and hundreds of data points, each with their own 'pros and cons'.

Lay it out with spreadsheets? Seems just too limiting.
Use scribbled 'post notes' stuck up in groups on a (huge) wall? Seems kind of chaotic.

I'm not looking for a system that will make the decisions, just searching for a way to organize my thoughts, really. A few suggestions were tossed out on a thread a couple of years back, but how do you go about organizing data to support complex decision making?

(And as an aside, it seems to me that none of the current AskMe categories fit this question. Maybe there should be a category for 'tools'?)

posted by woodblock100 to Grab Bag (4 answers total)

The two that come to mind are debategraph & Compendium. They're designed to handle collaborative decision making but you don't need to use all their functionality. Also, any mindmapping software could be adapted to the task fairly easily I'd think. There's no shortage of those these days, whatever platform you prefer.
posted by scalefree at 6:04 AM on April 30, 2009

Also also, generically this kind of application is called decision support software, you can search on that & come up with other packages that may suit you better.
posted by scalefree at 6:24 AM on April 30, 2009

I have recently been utitlizing Decision Tables to organize the important factors in my goals for projects and then weighing the various options against each other.

Any of the major writers in the field of Systems Analysis should prove beneficial to your situation.
You might be interested in reading any of the writings of Russell Ackoff, The Mythical Man Month (TMMM is ostensibly about software engineering, but its really about managing large projects and - personally - I consider my life a large project), and even Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline.
posted by cinemafiend at 6:46 AM on April 30, 2009 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: That link to 'Compendium' seems quite promising. I've been struggling with laying out 'notes' on a wide canvas with OmniGraffle, but this adds the dimension of having the notes relate to each other in a logical way. I think I'm going to give this one a try ...

Thanks for all the suggestions!
posted by woodblock100 at 6:27 PM on April 30, 2009