Decision Tree Technique

The Purpose

Decision tree diagramming is a powerful tool that can help you in making better business decisions. It follows different paths of a potential future and returns the outcomes for each of them so that you can choose the best one for you.

Occam's Razor: Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. (=Avoid complexity when other options are at hand)
William of Ockham (1285–1349)

In many business environments it can be helpful for you to document the decision making process: Even the best prepared and considered decision might prove wrong and it might be valuable to prove that you have done your best.

Most people use decision trees manually, see the example (right) for decisions on a major software project. It shows different options for decision making (squares) and outcomes of chance (circles).

A manual decision tree is first drawn from left to right and then calculated from right to left.

Decision Trees have been used for many years and different ways have been developed regarding the style of the presentation and the information used and derived from it.

All these methods have in common that this great medium of support for decision making is not easy to produce manually. The example on the photograph shows that some branches collide and that the drawing is likely to "jam" at the borders of the flipchart paper sheet.

This was the starting point for the development of an easy-to-use and well-working software solution called Occam's Tree.

© 2006, www.visionarytools.com Daniel & Oliver Lehmann, Munich, Germany