Analysis of Organizational Decision-Making: The Iran Hostage Rescue Attempt andATF Raid at Waco as Case Studies

摘要

Every day organizations make decisions, triggering a chain of events, initiatingcertain activities, resulting in certain outcomes. Some organizations must manage incidents involving extreme levels of risk, under high levels of stress. Government agencies, law enforcement agencies, and military organizations are often presented with such scenarios. When outcomes are favorable, credit is given to the leadership, who presumably made the right decisions, and to those who carried out the decisions, presumably for their great skill in executing what needed to be done. When outcomes are not favorable, days, months, even years are spent analyzing what went wrong, and why. Often, failure is said to result from 'bad luck' or failure to execute one portion of a plan, which inevitably led to overall failure. By analyzing failed operations in high stress, high risk environments, one can argue that blaming the failure of large scale operations on one step in a chain of events is to neglect real underlying symptoms of poor organizational decision making, poor strategic planning, and poor contingency planning.