** today / non-standard time of 2p ** TITLE: Attention Allocation in Organizational Decision-Making
SPEAKER: Douglas A. Samuelson AFFILIATION: Homeland Security Institute LOCATION: 624 Agua Fria Conference Room TIME: Wed August 9, ** 2:00p ** (non-standard time) ABSTRACT: Consider how to improve organizational decision-making by streamlining the process of seeking and allocating the attention of top decision-makers. These decision-makers try to optimize the value they receive by allocating their attention, taking uncertainty into account. In fact, optimizing the benefits of attention results, for the organization's original problem, in the well-known "satisficing" behavior described by Herbert Simon. In practice, the behavior is often similar to the greedy heuristic for the knapsack problem: a few of the largest topics and many small topics get addressed, while most middle-sized topics are neglected until they become major problems. As in the knapsack problem, more clearly identifying sizes (time and attention required) and values, and considering better ways to allocate space (attention available), produces better results. By encouraging persons familiar with particular issues to "bid" for decision-makers' attention, giving short, clear estimates of importance and complexity of the issue, and by then rewarding helpful initiative while penalizing overbids, senior decision-makers can substantially decrease the likelihood of overlooking major problems until they become crises. Now consider agent-based models of teams of workers, each with a supervisor, with problems arriving at random by a Poisson process. A problem requires certain skills and a certain number of units of effort for each needed skill. Workers have skills and various numbers of units of work they can accomplish, per skill area, per time period. In alternative versions of the model, problems may arrive at a central point where they are sent to team supervisors, or they may drift through the organization's space until they encounter a team, or there may be some group decision-making among team supervisors and an overall manager. The simplest model is one team and problems arriving directly to that team's leader; future work can expand in modular fashion. The version of the model in which problems arrive and drift through the organization's space randomly until they encounter a team that can solve them appears to approximate - and explain - the behavior of the Cohen, March and Olsen Garbage Can Model. Other, more hierarchical versions are likely to deadlock, overwhelming the managers and unnecessarily idling many of the workers, in a manner that fit intuition for certain large, tightly controlled bureaucracies. Explicitly modeling the attention required by managers and supervisors to assign problems and monitor progress would add another level of complexity and realism. This approach appears to promise a rich variety of interesting results. Presenter: Douglas A. Samuelson is a senior analyst for the Homeland Security Institute, Arlington, Virginia, and President of WINFORMS, the Washington, DC chapter of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS.) He has also been a Federal policy analyst, inventor, high-tech entrepreneur and executive, and university faculty member. He is perhaps best known for his popular and long-running "The ORacle" column in OR/MS Today. He has a D.Sc. in operations research from George Washington University. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
