Link: How Decision Intelligence Connects Data, Actions, and Outcomes for a Better World

by Lorien Pratt

Why aren't the most powerful new technologies being used to solve the world's most important hunger, poverty, conflict, inequality, employment, disease? What's missing? From a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning comes a thought-provoking book that answers these questions. In How Decision Intelligence Connects Data, Actions, and Outcomes for a Better World, Dr. Lorien Pratt explores the solution that is emerging worldwide to take Artificial Intelligence to the next Decision Intelligence. Decision Intelligence (DI) goes beyond AI as well, connecting human decision makers in multiple areas like economics, optimization, big data, analytics, psychology, simulation, game theory, and more. Yet despite the sophistication of these approaches, Link shows how they can be used by you and connecting us in a way that supercharges our ability to meet the interconnected challenges of our age. Pratt tells the stories of decision intelligence pioneers worldwide, along with examples of their work in areas that include government budgeting, space exploration, emerging democracy conflict resolution, banking, leadership, and much more. Link delivers practical examples of how DI connects people to computers and to each other to help us solve complex interconnected problems. Link explores a variety of scenarios that show readers how to design solutions that change the way problems are considered, data is analyzed, and technologies work together with people. Technology and academics has accelerated beyond our ability to understand or effectively control them. Link brings technology down to earth and connects it to our more natural ways of thinking. It offers a roadmap to the future, empowering us all to make practical steps and take the best actions to solve the hardest problems.

Genres: Business, Technology

232 pages, Hardcover

Published September 16, 2019

Reviews

[Simon Jewell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the Decision Intelligence model. In itself it is not original, as the author notes. But it is powerful and pragmatic because it is a reformulation of often reinvented but nevertheless often ignored systems thinking ideas. Pratt brings together a wide set of related subject areas in her enthusiasm for a modelling approach that uses conceptual causal models in the thinking world to make defensible decisions about interventions in the messy complex real world. How to do this is the systems thinking problem that Checkland and others first addressed with the Soft Systems Method in the 1980s and 90s, though this heritage isn’t recognised here.

I’m not sure about the style. It felt like reading a sales presentation for the author in places, hence only three stars. It could easily have been much better.

But the central assertion, that systems thinking is needed to inform critical decision making, is absolutely spot on, and this interesting book offers a glimpse of a pragmatic application.

[Carl · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ideas are interesting, but the copy-editing, prose and graphics leave much to be desired. I was left wanting much more of an exposition on the details of the process, while the top-level statements are easy to agree with. Still a solid introduction to the ideas of decision intelligence.

[Mike Fowler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provides lots to think about connecting a number of disciplines together. Having learned Software Engineering when it was considered a new discipline, I see the parallels to where Decision Intelligence/Engineering is now. This is a call to arms for anyone who makes decisions, not just us who happen to know the fields of software, data and machine learning engineering.

[Alessandro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aside from the bad editing or formatting of some sections (my hardcover edition was full of them, it felt like a first draft), redundancy of some paragraphs, and some other weird mistakes, parts of this book were quite insightful.