Step 2: What do you want to achieve?

Often decision makers move directly to identifying the alternatives, without first exploring and clarifying their values and objectives. This can lead to considering a subset of the possible alternatives and making unbalanced comparisons. A full set of objectives can help us think of new and better alternatives, looking beyond the immediately apparent choices. Setting up the objectives in Decision Manager takes a little effort but it will greatly enhance our confidence in the final chosen alternative, our objectives are the driving force behind our decisions.

Objectives are what we hope to achieve by making a decision. They capture what we really want, we really need, our hopes and our goals. Objectives form the basis for evaluating the alternatives open to us: they are our decision criteria. In order to calculate expected values for each alternative, we need to identify objectives that are measurable using either objective or subjective attribute scales. These measurable objectives may then be combined using weights up through the objective hierarchy to calculate an overall score for each alternative. Without objectives it would not be possible to tell which alternative is the best choice.

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