Book description
The economic crisis of 2008-2009 was a
transformational event: it demonstrated that smart people aren't as
smart as they and the public think. The crisis arose because a lot of
highly educated people in high-impact positions- political power
brokers, business leaders, and large segments of the general
public-made a lot of bad decisions despite unprecedented access to
data, highly sophisticated decision support systems, methodological
advances in the decision sciences, and guidance from highly
experienced experts. How could we get things so wrong? The answer,
says J. Davidson Frame in Framing Decisions: Decision Making That
Accounts for Irrationality, People, and Constraints, is that
traditional processes do not account for the three critical
immeasurable elements highlighted in the book's subtitle-
irrationality, people, and constraints.
Frame argues that decision-makers need to move beyond their
single-minded focus on rational and optimal solutions as preached by
the traditional paradigm. They must accommodate a decision's social
space and address the realities of dissimulation, incompetence,
legacy, greed, peer pressure, and conflict. In the final analysis,
when making decisions of consequence, they should focus on people -
both as individuals and in groups.
Framing Decisions offers a new approach to decision making that
gets decision-makers to put people and social context at the heart of
the decision process. It offers guidance on how to make decisions in a
real world filled with real people seeking real solutions to their problems.
J. DAVIDSON FRAME is academic dean and cofounder of the
University of Management and Technology (UMT) in Arlington, Virginia,
one of the first fully online degree-conferring universities in the
United States. Prior to joining the UMT faculty, he served as chairman
of the Department of Management Science at George Washington
University. Frame is the author of four prior books with Jossey-Bass,
including the business bestseller Managing Projects in
Organizations, Third Edition. He is a fellow of the Project
Management Institute (PMI), where he received PMI's Outstanding
Contribution Award and was named PMI's Person of the Year.
