Elevator

Each stakeholder has their rational expectations and plans for the firm. These need to be brought together to produce a single blueprint for the future.

Concerns

As individuals come together to make decisions about the future, each has their own unique rational view on what and how things should happen; their own personal roadmap.  The views that win out and predominate are examples of political power and persuasion rather than what is best. Even after the decision is made the glue that holds everyone together is fractured to an extent as the others were forced into a perspective that they do not treat as their own.

Guidance

Rational, in this context, is the consistency of decisions that one has when making the same decision given the same internal and external influencers.  This includes having a reasoned approach to why one arrived at that decision.  Logic, in this context, is a reasoned approach that is not dependent on the individual, but on the collective. In one sense logic is a collective rational where each member of the collective has the same reasoning.

To have a rational approach to making decisions implies that there is a set decisions that are ordered by preference.  This is not always a strict ordering, but one that given the same influences, will lead to the exact same decision.  When this is viewed as a function this is referred to as a utility. When individuals are brought together these utilities are not generally ordered when collected together. The goal of an architect is to create this collective ordered utility function that enables better decision making.  Once this is done the boundaries of this collective logic leads to a set of possible engineering projects and solutions.

 

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