Decision Making

Working in the world of hospitality, especially in restaurants and bars, we are struck with the immediacy of decision making. In my course on safety management, the first thing I emphasize is that everything and nothing is a priority. Priorities change every minute. Decision trees, however, help determine priorities beforehand and help build a tighter decision making process. There are some challenges when those decision points differ—which they almost always do—from expectations. It can be very difficult to build an exhaustive map of critical decision points in this industry. I think it's important to understand the height from which one should analyze a situation and it's potential decision points. Sometimes, as you get more granular in your analysis the law of diminishing comes into effect. You may be going down an infinitude of branchings, at which point the decision tree becomes pointless. 

That said, there are also many instances in event building when this process makes absolute sense. For large events, one must plan for many different changes in the environment, including rain, storms, double booking, food poisoning, et cetera. The challenges arise when you are really out of options and the outcome will remain the same. Or, very often, the choices are highly limited, restricting the "tree" to a straight line chain of consequences. This helps with responses, however, which is beneficial when dealing with irate and unreasonable clients.