Executives were then urged to throw the full power of their leadership behind the chosen path. Rationalists argued that decision makers should and could explore every route that might lead to their goal, collect information about the costs and utility of each, systematically compare these various alternatives, and choose the most effective course. In a simpler age, the principle governing business decisions was held to be rationalism. I call this model “humble decision making.” This new approach-in fact a very old approach in modern dress-understands that executives must often proceed with only partial information, which, moreover, they have had no time to fully process or analyze. Yet from this swelling confusion, a new decision-making model is evolving, one more attuned to a world that resembles not so much an open book as an entire library of encyclopedias under perpetual revision. Little wonder that some beleaguered decision makers-even outside the White House-turn to astrologers and mediums. The flow of information has swollen to such a flood that managers are in danger of drowning extracting relevant data from the torrent is increasingly a daunting task. If executives once imagined they could gather enough information to read the business environment like an open book, they have had to dim their hopes. Not only is the world growing more complex and uncertain at a faster and faster pace, but the old decision-making models are failing, and we can expect their failure to accelerate as well. Decision making in the 1990s will be even more of an art and less of a science than it is today.
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