Task 1 - Decision Making Typologies

For this task I decided to use a recent decision I had to make in relation to new builds around the house. I live on a 1 acre property that has post and rail fencing only which offers no privacy. I had decided to build a retaining wall out the back of the house which is not actually required to retain but would be for aesthetics only. This decision was made purely on the spur of the moment in that something will need to be done out there. No real consideration was given to what to do or what we want to achieve from a living perspective.

After buying some materials my wife and I took a step back and considered a side fence that also needs to be built in order to gain some privacy from the neighbors. At this point I decided to attempt to utilize some decision making techniques as covered in the decision making course.

To that end I utilized Simon’s Normative model of decision making which consists of:

·       Intelligence

·       Design

·       Choice

·       Implementation

First we needed some information of the choices and discussed the pros and cons of both builds and talked about what benefits we would gain from them as illustrated in the table below with a point value of 1 for yes and 0 for no.

Then we moved onto design of the builds. This incorporated items such as the bill of materials, size and shape, future maintenance and overall aesthetics. For the retaining we decided to incorporate higher posts that would allow us to include a banister to prevent falls over the edge of the retaining. Alternatively for the fence we looked at size of palings, height and length of the fence. I used an excel sheet as attached to run scenarios of design to help with this.

We then made the decision to go with the fence build as all the indicators pointed that it was the most appropriate. We started the build this weekend looking at completing the implementation over the next 3 weekends.

Task 1 - Julia
Task 1 - Gunjan