Spontaneous decision conferencing with top-level politicians

This article describes a real project involving members of the Finnish Parliament. The results of the project demonstrate that there is a useful role for decision analysis techniques in real political decision making. We show how the Decision Conferencing technique can be modified to adapt to the particular needs of top-level politicians. The modified version of the technique, which we call Spontaneous Decision Conferencing (SDC), helps decision makers to structure and clarify complex decision problems and thereby helps them to reason and justify their decisions better.