In our tireless commitment to advancing decision quality through superior analytic tools, we at Syncopation are always working at the leading edge of applied decision science, striving to be the first to bring you innovations that will change your practice for the better.
The limits of conventional decision trees
While the taxonomy of a mainstream decision tree has scarcely changed over recent decades, real world practitioners quietly acknowledge that the current basket of decisions, chance nodes and payoffs (get/pays) is often inadequate to the task at hand. Framing rarely produces a clear cut set of these abstract ideals, and when it does, it is more because of the stubbornness of the facilitator than the true state of nature. Truth be told, the decision tree is ripe for disruption.
Building a model with a conventional decision tree inevitably leaves a vast quantity of organizational knowledge on the cutting room floor. These odds and ends, implementational frustrations, social allegiances and even simple anxieties, are often the “secret sauce” that gives the firm its unique position in the marketplace. Now, the technology exists to leverage that epistemologically heterodox information and incorporate it directly into a decision model, in the form of a vexation node.
A vexation node: the answer to a question you couldn’t quite articulate
Details will follow in a future announcement, but for now, you can get an idea of the power of a vexation node from the decision tree fragment above. The vexation node is drawn as an orange parallelogram. Look for the vexation node to appear in a DPL beta release this quarter.
Happy April Fool’s Day from the Syncopation Team