How Technology Architects make decisions
The remarkable Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 and the Turing Medal in 1975. Reading about his life gives me a panic attack when I consider how little I have achieved in comparison. He published ‘Administrative Behaviour’ in 1947, and I started reading it in 2021. I started by treating it as a relic of World War II era business, a history book. I was quickly filled with horror as Simon explained business, thinking and decision making in ways which seemed obvious after reading them, but I had never even thought of. I immediately felt weak. I felt like a total imposter. How had I never read Herbert Simon before? Why had nobody told me? It panicked me for days. I managed to drop a reference to the book into every meeting for weeks. That practice soon calmed me down, it turns out almost no-one I know had read it either.
Early in the book, Simon talks about how each department in an organisation has one job. They take in information and turn it into decisions which are executed (either by them or another department). He introduces the concept of Bounded Rationality – how it is impossible to evaluate an almost infinite set of possibilities when making a decision. Instead we must chose a smaller ‘bounded’ set of assumptions to work within.
