Organizations often face a familiar dilemma: It’s not a shortage of good ideas, but a struggle to decide which one to pursue first. During project prioritization meetings, leaders are likely to present a wide range of perspectives. The finance team pushes for hard savings, while operations advocate for quick wins and lower variability. Compliance is concerned with mitigating regulatory risk, and quality teams, of course, look for systemic stability and sustainability.
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These viewpoints, while valid, often create friction when brought together. Resulting discussions often become circular, political, or—worse—end up in limbo. This challenge, known as the Rashomon effect, is aptly named after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film, in which the same event is perceived in vastly different ways by multiple witnesses. The facts remain the same, but the interpretations vary widely.
‘It’s not what we look at that matters, it’s what we see.’
—Henry David Thoreau
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Comments
This is a very good process
Having used AHP for quite a while, I think it's a great tool. You have to be careful how you approach it with management, though; especially in the U. S.. It's like QFD...it looks extremely complex, and many managers will be turned off if you don't approach it as simply and clearly as possible. Once you get past that hurdle (and the time it takes to come to consensus on the pairwise comparisons and scoring the decision matrix), my experience is that they love it going forward. It gives them an easy way to add initiatives or projects and quickly re-prioritize their list. It's a great way to deploy policy, too...once leaders have set the weights, it communicates their thinking, giving everyone down the chain insight into what decisions management would make regarding a proposed new initiative.
It's also a great learning tool...by the time they get through this exercise, they will have much sharper operational definitions for both the criteria and the relationship scores vis a vis those criteria. While it doesn't take the subjectivity out of decision-making, it does lead rationally to the kind of understanding that leads to true consensus.
You make a great point, Rip,…
You make a great point, Rip, about keeping AHP simple when introducing it. I’ve had a similar experience - with an executive placement firm many years ago, we actually used it for selecting candidates during the selection process. We didn’t even call it AHP at first; we just walked through the process of criteria, weights, and comparisons. Once the team saw how clearly it brought structure to a difficult choice, they were sold. Only then did we share the “formal” name behind it. Sometimes it’s less about the tool itself and more about how you introduce it.
Comment on Rashomomn principle
This is an excellent article underscoring important decision making at highest level.
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