Decisions are Fractal

Posted March 5, 2009

$Decisions are fractal: Decisions within decisions within decisions$

When we talk about influencing decisions, it’s important to recognize that many decisions hinge on a whole bunch of other smaller decisions.

Decisions are often fractal - we see decisions within decisions within decisions. And that helps us sort out what kind of decisions we need to focus on for influencing outcomes. Matching the level of decisions to the level of outcomes helps us be more effective. If we want to shift company strategy, but we’re focused on decisions about color or layout, then we’ve got a disconnect between our objectives and our actions.

At the same time, choosing the right small decisions can add up to shifting a big decision - we may not be able to simply shift one big decision about company strategy, so we find smaller decisions that contribute to strategy and work on affecting those. That’s matching decisions to our ability to affect them.

Finally, and I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow, is that we need to pick the decisions that have the most bang for our influence buck. Some decisions just don’t matter as much to the outcomes that we’re pursuing. Wasting effort trying to affect decisions that don’t matter is far too common in corporate life. Don’t fall into that trap - instead of developing iterative influence, you’ll just be running around in circles.

4 Comments so far

Eric Baird on March 5th, 2009

Very true. Life is fractal. I think I might put that on a teeshirt.
niti bhan on March 5th, 2009

Now lets pick up the thought from your related post which refers to the importance of framing. Taking that as the starting point - framing the challenge or problem correctly - allows us to see the path that the cascading decision making must flow towards. It allows for a clarity in identifying broad objectives or direction in which the strategy must flow in order to reach the destination.
Jubal on March 6th, 2009

@eric Baird how bout;
LIFE is Fractal Entropy

I think I’ll get that on a t-shirt
Marc Rettig on March 8th, 2009

I agree, and would argue you’re on the doorstep of a larger point: that our work benefits when we shift from a mechanistic view of systems and challenges to an organic model. There’s lots to read about this, but if you haven’t already checked it out you might enjoy the second volume in Christopher Alexander’s new series, The Nature of Order. He has nice examples from architecture of applying an “unfolding” process in a progression, a stepwise decomposition down through increasingly detailed levels of hierarchy. Er, that last sentence is kind of a mouthful — I’m trying to pack big ideas into short sentences. There are *many* implications of thinking this way. One which Alexander points out is that design must continue hand-in-hand with the construction process — you can’t really see what decisions to make until you’re down in the details at the appropriate level of the fractal/nested hierarchy of relationships.

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