Too much time is wasted shifting through useless data and information, and the increasing volume makes it difficult to separate the noise from the signal of what is important to know in order to make good decisions. Ubiquitous computing will increase the number of decisions per day, constantly changing schedules and priorities. Accelerating rates of change make many people unsure about the future and the basis for decisionmaking. The sheer number and intricacy of choices seem to be growing beyond our abilities to analyze and make decisions. Democratization and interactive media are adding to the number of people involved in decisionmaking, which increases complexity—making continuous modifications of decisions more likely than decision closure. As decisionmaking to address global challenges becomes too complex, it may appear chaotic until new systems emerge.
The amount of data will explode—with sensors imbedded in products, in buildings, and in living bodies and with more data from transactions, communications, physical inspections, and diagnostics. Future forms of analysis and simulations are planned to use these data to provide insight into correlations in fields as diverse as social behavior and nanobiology. More user-friendly, powerful, and flexible simulation and modeling software will eventually find its way into decisionmaking, as have spreadsheet software and search engines.
Coupled with ubiquitous sensors and other monitoring systems, decisionmaking will be technologically augmented on a continuous basis and integrated into institutional and personal intelligence software. Such future capacities might help identify attractors of responsible decisionmaking and network them for improved efficiencies. In the meantime, we have to learn how to improve and deploy Internet-based management tools and concepts fast enough to catch up with all the change. One new example is the “real time” Delphi that provides decisionmakers with rapid access to an ongoing synthesis of experts’ judgments in real time. Self-selection and self-organization of volunteers around the world via Web sites is a new strategy to increase transparency of public issues and to participate in decision processes.
E-government systems are growing rapidly to help automate administrivia, make decisionmaking more transparent, and facilitate public participation, but they also create new vulnerabilities to manipulation by organized crime and to cyber-terrorism. To counter the annual $1 trillion in bribes affecting political decisionmaking, the UN Convention against Corruption has entered into force; it sets out guidelines on how to prevent and criminalize corruption as well as measures for international cooperation and asset recovery. The World Bank now requires national governance assessments and approved $2.6 billion for improved governance. UN organizations are the only trusted decisionmaking system for many people around the world. Yet they were designed for decisionmaking among governments. Today’s challenges cannot be addressed by governments, corporations, NGOs, universities, and intergovernmental bodies acting alone; hence, transinstitutional decisionmaking has to be developed and common platforms created for transinstitutional strategic decisionmaking and implementation.
Challenge 9 will be addressed seriously when the State of the Future Index or similar systems are used regularly in decisionmaking, when national corporate law is modified to recognize transinstitutional organizations, and when at least 50 countries require elected officials to be trained in decision-making. Such training should bring together research on why irrational decisions are made, lessons of history, futures research methods, forecasting of intended and unintended consequences, insights from cognitive science, data reliability, utilization of statistics, conventional decision support methods (e.g., cost/benefit, PERT, utility and multi-attribute analysis, econometric modeling), ethical considerations, goal seeking, risk, the role of leadership, transparency, accountability, and participatory decisionmaking. It should also include the current state of e-government, ways to identify and better an organization’s improvement system, and decision-support software, including knowledge visualization, prioritization processes, and collaborative decisionmaking with different institutions. Just as efficiency is a key criterion in decisionmaking for industrial economies, wisdom based on global ethics will be a criterion in decision-making for successful knowledge economies, along with an emphasis on partnership and participation between decisionmakers and stakeholders.