Thank you Ian. Grateful for the thoughtful reply. Good to hear the background on the name and I agree it makes sense to think of scope in a more fuzzy way (eg in scope, on the edge of scope like cfar, useful meta projects like career advice, etc)
Just to clarify my point here was not one of “whether to emphasize institutions or decision-making more” (sorry if I was initial comment was confusing) but kind of the opposite point that: it would make sense to ensure both topics are roughly equally emphasised (and that I’m not sure your post does that).
Depending on which you emphasis and which questions you ask you will likey get different answers, different interventions, etc. At an early scoping stage when you don’t want to rule out much, maintaining a broad scope for what to look into is important.
Also, to flag, I don’t find the “everything is decision making” framing as intuitive or useful as you do.
Totally off topic from my original point, but it is interesting to note that my experience is the polar opposite of yours. Working in gov there was a fair amount of thought and advice and tools for effective decision making, but the institutional incentives where not there. Analysts would do vast amounts of work to assess decisions and options simply to have the final decision made by a leader just looking to enrich themselves / a politician’s friend / a party donor / etc.
I’d still focus on finding answers from both angles for now, but, given my experience and given that governments are likey to be among the most important institutions, if I had to call it one way or the other, I’d expect the focus on the topic of improving decision making to be less fruitful than the focus on improving institutions.
Thank you Ian. Grateful for the thoughtful reply. Good to hear the background on the name and I agree it makes sense to think of scope in a more fuzzy way (eg in scope, on the edge of scope like cfar, useful meta projects like career advice, etc)
Just to clarify my point here was not one of “whether to emphasize institutions or decision-making more” (sorry if I was initial comment was confusing) but kind of the opposite point that: it would make sense to ensure both topics are roughly equally emphasised (and that I’m not sure your post does that).
Depending on which you emphasis and which questions you ask you will likey get different answers, different interventions, etc. At an early scoping stage when you don’t want to rule out much, maintaining a broad scope for what to look into is important.
Also, to flag, I don’t find the “everything is decision making” framing as intuitive or useful as you do.
Totally off topic from my original point, but it is interesting to note that my experience is the polar opposite of yours. Working in gov there was a fair amount of thought and advice and tools for effective decision making, but the institutional incentives where not there. Analysts would do vast amounts of work to assess decisions and options simply to have the final decision made by a leader just looking to enrich themselves / a politician’s friend / a party donor / etc.
I’d still focus on finding answers from both angles for now, but, given my experience and given that governments are likey to be among the most important institutions, if I had to call it one way or the other, I’d expect the focus on the topic of improving decision making to be less fruitful than the focus on improving institutions.
Keep up the great work!