Simulation - Indoctrination or Learning

Abstract

" For some time a phenomenon that we may call EMPIRICAL decision making has been of concern to decision scientists. This 18 observed when a person makes a decision in a particular situation that turns out to work very well. The attitude that is represented by this decision then becomes part of that persons managerial style and the same decision is made any time another situation develops that appears to be reasonably similar to the original decision. Eventually the decision making process becomes one of merely looking for the best fit and acting as experience dictates. Some obvious shortcomings of this approach are that the same problem seldom reappears in exactly the same form so that the fit may not be very good; the original good result may have merely been the result of good luck rather than good decision making; and that times change and even if the situations are identical and the decision was a good one at the time it was made the same decision may not be a good one in today’s different environment. Some twenty years ago in the early days of business simulation a colleague had a consulting assignment from a company calling for the development of a simulation of the company that was to be designed so that the decisions that top management felt were the right ones for the company were also the ones that won the game. Presumably the company management felt that a simulation game would be an excellent way of indoctrinating their employees into a particular way of making decisions. In all probability they were correct in this but there were misgivings even at that time about the extent to which this would lead to solving yesterdays problems rather than tomorrows problems. In our decision making courses we stress analysis as the guide to correct decision making, even though empiricism has certainly been a large part of managerial decision making in the past. In recent years though, the shock waves generated by foreign (often Japanese) competition have caused many companies to rethink their way of doing things and doing things the way they have always been done has largely gone out of style. "