C-SPAN2 airing of book discussion "Link' by Lorien Pratt"

The night of 4/2/20 was the airing of the discussion of the book Link by Lorien Pratt, who is its author.  The event took place recently at the Institute for the Future, in Palo Alto, California.  Ms. Pratt is a proponent of DI--decision intelligence--and I believe is on the staff of the Institute.  Ms Joy Mountford was the discussion's moderator.

DI attempts to tie together, or link, actions to outcomes; and see the process as a human contrivance to make action purposeful, designed to achieve outcomes human beings are trying to bring about through their actions.  The essential linkage of actions to outcomes stamps the process as deliberately pursued in an effort to make a better world through human thought and effort.

Though one cannot anticipate the full impact of an action in a universe of manifold consequences of some purposeful set of actions toward a desired effect, DI sets forth to explain human action in terms of what the agent or doer is attempting to achieve.  Ms. Pratt observed that the movement arose some years ago as an improvement in the march toward AI in cybernetics to settle upon a plan for actions to effect human want as the causal agent's motivation.  So, in a specific situation, when people cannot not seem to agree on some plan of action, DI structures are brought into play to settle the dispute over how to proceed.  Seemingly, knowing what doers are after can resolve the issue of how to proceed.

DI starts its analysis by knowing what goals are that are intended as outcomes of what the participants, i.e., the people being brought together, are being called to do.  Human effort is to direct both the planning and execution stages, since knowledge of the intended outcomes dominate the entire analysis.  In this way, DI differs from simple decision-making; it is decision making with an end view always in accounting for some proposed course of action--making a decision in a place and time (i.e., the situation) to achieve a particular set of results you and your group want.

My overall comment:  There is obvious merit in making action directed, keeping in mind that much more will become learned about the set of actions pursued in actually attempting to perform them.
DI seems a promising way to analyze the stream of deliberate human action.