The Structure of “Unstructured” Decision Processes - 1976 Paper

How do organisations go about making “unstructured,” “strategic” decisions? Researchers of administrative processes have paid little attention to such decisions, preferring instead to concentrate on routine operating decisions, those more accessible to precise description and quantitative analysis. As a result, the normative models of management science have had a significant influence on the routine work of the lower and middle levels of organisations and almost no influence on the higher levels. But it is at the top levels of organisations where better decision-making methods are most needed; excessive attention by management scientists to operating decisions may well cause organisations to pursue inappropriate courses of action more efficiently.

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Although there is a body of normative literature on techniques for strategic decision making, for example, strategy-planning, models of the firm, cost-benefit analysis, the evidence from empirical studies of their application indicates that all too often these techniques have made little real difference in the decisional behaviour of organisations (Grinyer and Norburn 1975, Hall 1973, Whitehead 1968). These techniques have been unable to cope with the complexity of the processes found at the strategy level, about which little is known.

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This paper defines a decision as a specific commitment to action (usually a commitment of resources) and a decision process as a set of actions and dynamic factors that begins with the identification of a stimulus for action and ends with the specific commitment to action. Unstructured refers to decision processes that have not been encountered in quite the same form and for which no predetermined and explicit set of ordered responses exists in the organisation. And strategic simply means important, in terms of the actions taken, the resources committed or the precedents set. This paper uses empirical research to suggest a basic framework that describes unstructured, strategic decision processes. The suggested framework embodies the results of our own study of 25 such decision processes, as well as evidence from published empirical studies.