From skyhooks to walking sticks: on the road to nonrational decision making

The amount of information that should be processed to reach a rational solution is so vast that it overwhelms our limited memory and analytic capacity. To grapple at all with real problems, we must shrink them to mind size. As Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon has suggested, we must learn to "satisfice." Using examples and a case history of managerial succession, Agnew and Brown demonstrate the importance of nonrational factors in decision making. "Skyhooks," their first major concept, are composed of an individual's strong beliefs and biases that appear almost as acts of faith without any obvious foundation. They help the exceptional executive operate on a limited set of alternatives. But while skyhooks give direction, they do not provide the means to reach a destination. Simpler conceptual models, or "walking sticks," are necessary to cover the rocky trails. Agnew and Brown offer four walking sticks that can be applied to managerial succession problems. The first walking stick considers executive decision making in three parts--nonrational, semirational, and rational--and covers the conditions in which each component comes into play. The second helps examine human resources as fixed or fluid and as assets or liabilities to develop a schema for manpower accounting in executive succession. Playing vs. talking a good executive game is the topic for walking stick three. The concern here is to distinguish the real players--who can manage systems--from the mere talkers, who can manage only fragments of systems. The fourth walking stick draws on the law of resource gravitation and crystallization, a law with implications for trainers: You can't fashion management training to fit all comers; instead, you must tailor it to what the trainees already are and know.