Zotgeist

Musings of the mind in the strawberry fields of law, economics, and berries

Reverse Ranking for Decision Making

Published on 22/10/07
by zot

Often when making a decision we focus on ranking our options and then choosing the best one as in pareto analysis. We start at the top and proceed to the next best option and so on.

Sometimes it is better to start at the bottom.

Why is this helpful?

We tend to consider options in two stages. In the first we eliminate options that are deal-breakers. These are options with factors that disqualify them even if their positive aspects are great. It might be a great job located in a city you hate, or a great car with an automatic transmission when you only drive manual.

In the second stage we look at the remaining options and roughly weigh their positive and negative aspects, but tending to focus more strongly on the positives.

It works well if there are only one or two options that are easily discernible as the best choice, but if several options could be great or are roughly equal, we can have a really hard time with this second stage.

By ranking options from worst to best, we are forced to explicitly consider the negative factors, which can help bring to light issues with some of the options which we previously thought were all equal.

Support The Decision Strategist.

Popularity: 11%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.