Decision Support 

Making good decisions has levels of difficulty.  Many decisions can, and indeed should be made in line with qualitative expert judgement and long years of experience where the conditions support this approach.  So under what conditions does one need to employ deeper analysis and innovative methods to either back up their judgement, or improve their outcome?  The probability of making a decision that will lead to a good outcome generally decreases as the number of variables involved increases.  Similarly, when you add internal politics into the mix, pressures and stresses associated with time, cost, complexity, new technologies and try to consider a decisions wider effects on other parts of complex systems, innovative analysis can be a useful tool to support qualitative judgement.   For example, what if an organisation is looking to acquire a major new type of complex capability that will impact its existing capabilities in new ways? The history and experience in your organisation may not be sufficient to predict the detailed impacts. How does one go about making the most informed decision after methodically and quantitatively testing the technical claims of multiple tenderer's about the capabilities they are offering?

For problems where there isn't an immediately obvious solution, most decision makers tend to fall back on informed guesswork and basic analysis, looking at what others are doing, their own experience and gut feel.  But, people are unfortunately prone to falling into a whole host of psychological and sociological traps.  On many occasions, our innate decision making heuristics (rules of thumb) and the way our brains work may not serve us well under conditions of uncertainty and complexity.  This is where a little bit of operations research and analytical simulation can go a very long way.

Decision Logic exists to provide scientifically-based quantitative decision support advice and guidance for clients that own problems that are too complex or are otherwise unsuited to more basic methods or gut feel approaches.  That is not to say your gut feel isn't important.  On the contrary, we know it's critical.  We believe that on many occasions decision making under complexity can benefit from a blend of your intuition and the more advanced techniques of operations research and analytical simulation capabilities that enable the close representation of complicated real word systems.  

Our approach enables the creation of a fit for purpose analytical simulation of a system, then enables stakeholders to interact with that simulation in a structured way to examine potential first and second order effects on their wider operations.  Once validated, such models can make a powerful, evidence-based case for change.  

We are specialists in problem identification, elicitation, dissection and formulation.  We combine with your experts to collect data, map process and logic flows associated with your specific problem/s, and then set about creating advanced quantitative simulations that model your operations in a virtual world.  We can then test a great many ideas and concepts in a positive environment, and quantify/estimate the likely pay-off's.  We offer process-driven decision support under circumstances where standard approaches don't exist, don't work, don't make sense or the stakes are simply too high for them to be appropriate.