The National Archives educates its employees about decision making for strategic planning



The NA organized a virtual training workshop entitled “Decision Making for Strategic Planning”, which stressed on the importance that decision taking should be based on practical principles and rules to enable the organization to achieve its objectives and that accurate information should be available for decision makers.

The workshop provided examples of its topics drawn from the NA, such as: employees appraisals, operations management system, transfer, disposal and digitization processes, delegation of authorities and committees.

It also tackled a number of important topics, most notably human brain, how does brain make decisions? development in understanding how to make decisions, decision making, who is responsible for decision making? factors affecting decision making, types of decisions and decision-making methods and tools.

The workshop presented learned lessons in various fields including roles of employees, line manager, domain experts, directors and higher management in addition to decision inputs.  

It reviewed the process of decision making and the related influential factors between logic and emotions as well as other factors such as automation and artificial intelligence, machine learning, business intelligence, smart government, and role of leadership, which is the most important factor. Moreover, it illustrated challenges of decision making at individuals’ level and the factors affecting decision making. It also explained decision types, decision making methods, techniques, tools and evaluation. The workshop relied on international reports on how to make decisions.

It also discussed the development in understanding the process of decision making, starting from decision determination, information collection, specification of options, evidence evaluation, selection of best option, taking actions, and decision review and evaluation.

Furthermore, the workshop tackled the definition of decision making. It is defined as the process of selecting one of the available reasonable options after being evaluated and benchmarked, and after considering all alternative options. To make an effective decision, one should be able to predict the results of each option, and based on all these elements, the best option is specified for a particular situation. The workshop has also compared between decision making and decision taking.