Towards the development of a decision-making framework: a contribution inform of a decision support aid for complex technical organization

Technical organizations with complex engineering activities possess strong methods for conceptualizing, designing and managing complex engineered systems. This type of organization could involve critical resources, and the project could be time critical. Technical managers often rely on their intuitions to make critical decisions in this domain. If this intuition is not mindfully managed, it can result in a single-point failure of the project. To address this, the author proposes the use of an organizational decision-making framework (D’MHAS model) which conceptualizes decision-making as a perceived human activity system. The framework adopts a systems perspective in combination with the concept of requisite variety to guide intuition-led decisions in technical organizations. D’MHAS is made up of concrete systems (processes, behaviours, structures and meaning) and conceptual systems (concepts and ideas) which are in continuous flux through time; it incorporates the idea of requisite variety to allow for effective management of the system. The framework allows for thinking, reflection and learning while taking action. In this paper, Vickers’s idea of appreciation and an appreciative system is revisited as the theoretical basis for the development of D’MHAS model. The discussion of the operational factors of the model and how it was validated are presented. The domain of the Nigerian Space Agency (NASRDA) was used as an example to validate the model.