SHOR Paradigm - An Effective Decision Management Model in Situations of Uncertainty

Whenever you are confronted with a crisis, a conflict, a disaster, or any decision making situation, personal or professional, in situations of uncertainty, you must remember that between Stimulus and Response there lies a space, and in that space lies our freedom to choose a course of action, and in that choice lies our wisdom

SHOR Paradigm

By

VIKRAM KARVE


"The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides" …Frederic Amiel

Decision-making is so pervasive that everyone, professionally or personally, is involved with making a variety of decisions.

In today's fast-moving world, the timing of a decision is of paramount importance in many decision-making situations.

In real life even the "perfect" decision may not be optimal if it is made too late.

Information is a vital resource in decision-making.

One of the most important characteristics of successful managers is the ability to make the correct decision when confronted with imperfect or insufficient information (i.e.) Decision-making under conditions of uncertainty.

In the context of decision-processing, two realms or domains of uncertainty are:

1. Information Input Uncertainty which creates the need for hypothesis generation and evaluation;

2. Consequence-of-Action Uncertainty which creates the need for option generation and evaluation.

THE SHOR PARADIGM

A decision taxonomy: The Stimulus – Hypothesis – Options – Response (SHOR)paradigm, formulated by Wohl, is useful in such decision situations.

The SHOR paradigm represents a qualitative, descriptive, model as distinct from a quantitative, predictive model, and comprises the following primary decision-making task elements:

S: Stimulus Input Data Processing
H: Hypothesis Generation, Hypothesis Evaluation, Information Processing [What is?]
O: Option Generation, Option Evaluation, Decision-Making [What if?]
R: Response Output Action

The SHOR paradigm is basically an extension of the classical Stimulus – Response (SR) Paradigm of behaviourist psychology.

The SHOR paradigm provides explicitly for the necessity to deal with information input uncertainty and consequence-of-action uncertainty, and helps us understand some of the peculiar human factors that affect the quality of the decision-making and answering questions such as:

What makes some decision-makers perform better than others, especially in placing high-value assets at risk, in business?

What are the sources and dimensions of "poor" performance?


HUMAN ERRORS IN DECISION-MAKING

Based on the SHOR Model, human errors in decision-making appear to lie in four domains:

(S) Stimulus: "I didn't know…"
(H) Hypothesis: "I didn't understand…"
(O) Options: "I didn't consider…"
(R) Response: "I didn't act…"

Stimulus based errors of the type "I didn't know…" result from lack or inadequacy of information, the true inability to obtain information.

"I didn't understand…" is the fundamental result of information input uncertainty, while "I didn't consider…" is the product of consequence-of-action uncertainty.

It is possible to have accessed all significant information, to have developed the correct hypothesis and to have selected the best option and yet fail to take appropriate action.

The two possible reasons for the "I didn't act…" type of response error are:

1. Paralysis: This is a complete failure to act, the pathological ‘observation of an inevitable course' without intervention. It is caused by an over-riding emotional struggle in which some internal factor is being placed in conflict with the course of action selected by the decision-maker. The final scene in the evergreen classic film The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) exemplifies such a situation.

2. Misjudgement: The decision-maker correctly decides what to do but errs in either or both of the two dimensions – how [the specifics of the action] or when [the timing of the action].

Prediction of the critical consequences of inaction may be of some help in dealing with paralysis whilst the ability to perform sensitivity analyses may assist in alleviating misjudgement.

Any Decision-Maker [and designers of decision proccesors and aids] must address the four cardinal types of errors epitomized by the SHOR paradigm: "I didn't know…", "I didn't understand…", "I didn't consider…" and "I didn't act…"




DECISION MAKING IN UNCERTAINTY

In the context of decision-making in uncertainty, the conflict theory paradigm developed by Janis and Mann may be apt.

This paradigm postulates five patterns of coping behaviour which tends to occur in such situations:

1. Unconflicted Adherence in which the uncertain, or risk, information is ignored and the decision-maker complacently decides to continue whatever he has been doing.

2. Unconflicted Change to a new course of action, where the decision-maker uncritically adopts whichever new course of action is most salient, obvious or strongly recommended.

3. Defensive Avoidance in which the decision-maker evades conflict by procrastinating, shifting responsibility to someone else, or constructing wishful rationalisations and remaining selectively inattentive to corrective information.

4. Hypervigilance wherein the decision-maker searches frantically for a way out of the dilemma and impulsively seizes upon a hastily contrived solution that seems to promise immediate relief, overlooking the full range of consequences of his choice because of emotional excitement, repetitive thinking and cognitive constriction. In its most extreme form hypervigilance is referred to as "panic".

5. Concerned Vigilance in which the decision-maker optimally processes pertinent information, generates and evaluates hypotheses and options before selecting a response as characterised by the SHOR paradigm.
In many real-life situations a decision-maker cannot always keep waiting until the entire information-input and consequence-of-action conditions are known a priori with certainty.

In most cases there is no such thing as "perfect" certainty.

If a single most important characteristic is crucial to a decision-maker in any field, it is the ability to make optimal decisions in conditions of uncertainty.

Qualitative descriptive models like the SHOR paradigm may prove useful in such situations.


To quote Frederic Amiel once again: "The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides".



VIKRAM KARVE

Copyright © Vikram Karve 2010
Vikram Karve has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/karve

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http://vikramkarve.sulekha.com


vikramkarve@sify.com

COGNITIVE RADIO - a smart communication concept

COGNITIVE RADIO

[Here is an article on Cognitive Radio compiled by my students Shijesh, Sibil, Shyju and John by browsing the internet, books and journals]


The Radio Spectrum – that segment of the electromagnetic continuum comprising the radio-frequency range – accommodates myriad communications devices today.

As the Radio Spectrum gets is gets more and more crowded and available frequencies become scarce the evolution of Cognitive Radio may be able to optimally manage the available spectrum.

The use of radio frequency bands has been regulated in most countries through the process of spectrum allocation in which the use of a particular frequency band is restricted to the license holders of the band. Within this framework, spectrum has often been viewed as a scarce resource in high demand. However, various studies carried out have suggested that most licensed spectrums are often under-utilized with large spectral holes at different places at different times.

Cognitive Radio (CR) systems have been proposed as a possible solution to the spectrum crisis. The idea is to detect times when a specific licensed band is not used at a particular place and use that band for transmission without causing any significant interference to the transmissions of the license holder.

Built on the foundation of the Software Defined Radio (SDR), Cognitive Radios will learn and autonomously perform “cognitive” functions as a form of intelligence that comes from their ability to be defined and upgraded using software.

To examine the concept of cognitive radio consider the example.

Let’s say you walk into an empty café called Spectrum. Since all of the tables are available, you position yourself at the best one and settle down for a meal. [Let’s assume all tables have four seats and you occupy one seat].

A few minutes later, another person comes in and sits on a seat at another vacant table.

Soon, if all the tables are full [but there are a few vacant seats on some tables], a new patron must negotiate with someone already at a table to be allowed to share the table. [Maybe she may request you to let her occupy the vacant chair at your table, and you may agree].

This process of negotiation is the concept behind a technology called Cognitive Radio, a way to share and optimally utilize unused spectrum. Cognitive Radio is sometimes called Smart Radio because it senses its environment and reacts to it.

The present paucity of radio spectrum is primarily due to the cost and performance limits of legacy hardware established during the past century. Traditionally, radios were hardwired to operate at a particular power and frequency, and once a station was assigned a frequency, no other station could use it. Over the years, as engineers built radios in cheaper and smaller packages, it became possible to build intelligence into them, making the idea of sharing frequencies possible.

Engineers are now working to bring flexible operating intelligence to future radios, cell phones and other wireless communications devices. During the coming decade, cognitive radio technology should enable nearly any wireless system to locate and link to any locally available unused radio spectrum to best serve the consumer. Employing adaptive software, these smart devices could reconfigure their communications functions to meet the demands of the transmission network or the user.

Cognitive Radio will intelligently know, by sensing, adapting and learning, what to do based on prior experiential knowledge, by building an internal database that defines how to best operate in different places and at specific times of day.

As Cognitive Radios send and receive signals, they will nimbly leap and bound in and out of free bands as required, avoiding those that are already in use. This lightning-fast channel jumping will permit cognitive radio systems to transmit voice and data streams at reasonable speeds.

This efficient use of existing Radio Frequency resources will alleviate spectrum-availability traffic jams and wireless communications may become far more dependable, convenient and, perhaps, considerably economical than it is today. Indeed, if Cognitive Radio technology progresses as its developers hope the airwaves will never be the same again.