How to Make Better Decisions. Examples from Exploration

Scientific Essay from the year 2014 in the subject Psychology - Industrial and organizational psychology, grade: A, , language: English, abstract: Good decision-making creates value for a company. The decision to drill in the right place (or not) has strong economic repercussions. Moreover, the human approach to decision-making can be flawed. Many of the common flaws in decision-making are related to heuristic factors; that is, by human ways of thinking and drawing conclusions. These factors can negatively impact the outcomes of an exploration program.

This paper gives examples of cases in which geoscientific reasoning can lead to pitfalls, and explores why this is so. The paper then discusses the merits of the multiple working hypotheses (MWH) concept as an aid to harnessing seemingly contradictory data relating to several, often mutually exclusive, interpretations or scenarios. A simple method using a spreadsheet and decision-tree analysis is proposed to quantify the outcomes of multiple scenarios. The method is illustrated by a subsurface example in which two possible interpretations, reef versus volcano, are considered. An outlook of Bayesian statistics and other methods is included.