Guiding Involvement in Professional Activities There are numerous professional activities in which I can participate. Such activities range from local seminars requiring roughly half a day to national scientific panels requiring ten days per year to writing a book that may require a person-year of my time. Other examples are teaching, attending conferences, doing editorial work for journals, consulting, conducting intensive courses for professionals, writing articles for journals, doing theoretical research, developing applications of theory to contemporary problems, and reading. Some of the opportunities for activities come from others, such as an invitation to be a member of a national scientific panel. Other activities grow out of my own creation of decision opportunities, such as those resulting in publications. Some activities are done alone and others are done jointly. In fact, some decision opportunities to pursue are opportunities to work with interesting people from whom I could learn and with whom I could enjoy myself. There are many more activities than I could ever hope to participate in. Thus, by choosing some activities I de facto reject others. As a result, it is desirable to make my decisions about professional activities in a consistent manner. Clearly I do not wish to participate in an activity if doing so will prevent my participating in something better. The common framework for all my professional activities is my set of fundamental objectives for such activities. Let me briefly discuss these objectives and then indicate how I use them. Fundamental Professional Objectives My professional objectives are listed in Table 13.2. I use this set of objectives both to appraise any single professional activity and to appraise the collection of activities that I'm involved in. The overall objective of my professional activity is to contribute to my quality of life as defined by my strategic objectives listed in Table 13.1. Thus, each of my professional objectives is either a part of a strategic objective or a means to one or more strategic objectives. The first three objectives in Table 13.2 are parts of different strategic objectives. Enjoyment of professional activities is naturally part of the enjoyment of life, my first strategic objective. This enjoyment typically derives from three aspects of professional activities: who else is participating, where the activity is, and the nature of the activity. I will get more enjoyment from meeting with knowledgeable policymakers in Aspen, Colorado, to develop plans to reduce u.S. dependence on foreign oil than from working alone on a well-defined problem that nobody really cares about while sitting in hotel room 1047 in Nowheresville. Learning from professional activities is a part of my second strategic objective concerning intellectual fulfillment. The amount of learning is also influenced by whom I'm working with and the substance of the activity. With individual consulting on a problem similar to many I have addressed before, I am basically using my existing expertise and learning only a little. On group activities addressing unique problems such as global warming, I learn a lot from the problem and from the other participants. My third fundamental professional objective, to provide service, is a part of my strategic objective to contribute to society. This service may be for students if the activity is a course, for professionals in my field if the activity is editorial service, for clients if the activity is consulting, and for society if the work is on public issues such as selecting a site for a nuclear waste repository. My other four professional objectives are means to the achievement of my strategic objectives. Enhancing my career is a means to future professional activities. This enhancement can come from what I learn from an activity, whom I meet during the activity, or the quality of the resulting work. Work of high quality has both direct and indirect rewards. Doing good work will create decision opportunities for me. Objective number five concerns the financial remuneration associated with professional activity. Many activities, such as writing journal articles, giving seminars in universities, and performing editorial service bring no remuneration. Others have honoraria or consulting fees. Building good professional relationships, the sixth objective, is one means to increase both the number of professional decision opportunities in the future and the likely desirability of such opportunities. The first six professional objectives concern the potential positive consequences of professional activities. Objective seven concerns a negative consequence, namely the amount of time an activity requires. Time I spend on one activity is time I cannot use for any other activities, whether personal or professional. I have divided this objective into time required for the activity where I live and time required away from home. All other things equal, being away from home is less desirable than being at home. Coordinating Decisions about Professional Activity The professional objectives in Table 13.2 are the common basis on which I evaluate professional activities. This list alone, however, does not tell me which activities I should choose to participate in. If all of my potential activities were known at the same time, I could evaluate them all and select those with the highest evaluation until my time available for professional activity was all allocated. I might pick, say, the best 16 of 45 potential activities for a given year. Collectively, these activities would form a portfolio, and I would want to ensure that the 16 did not all contribute to the same professional objectives and leave others poorly achieved. My experience in thinking about professional activities with the objectives in Table 13.2 indicates that the portfolio effects seem to take care of themselves. My real situation has two complicating features that need to be considered. First, I do not know all possible activities at the same time. Decision opportunities occur over time, and part of my time is always committed into the future. Second, there are major uncertainties about the decision opportunities that will occur. Thus, it is important to keep some time available to participate in the very interesting activities that come up on short notice. This suggests that I need a decision rule to help me decide which activities to select and which to reject as they appear. There are other good reasons to have a decision rule. When I look at my calendar six months to a year in the future, it appears to be wide open. Hence, if asked to participate in some activity in that period, I find it too easy to say yes. This not only commits some of my time but begins to break up the period into smaller parts. When the beginning of that period is three to six months in the future, it is already quite fragmented. The longest open period may be eight days. By the time then is now, I am overcommitted and have to turn down more interesting opportunities for both professional and personal activity. Since I do not want to be a time-constrained person, I have established levels of the desirability of professional activities in which I agree to participate. To do this, I roughly evaluated many activities in which I have participated in terms of the objectives in Table 13.2. It was clear that some of those activities should have never been agreed to, whereas others were desirable if they didn't eliminate other useful professional activities. Still other past activities were terrific, and I should jump at the opportunity to participate in similar activities. This evaluation yielded three responses to possible professional activities: no, maybe, and yes. These three responses are no surprise, but the way I use them is helpful to me. At any given time, there are a no-level and a yes-level. The no-level indicates the maximum overall desirability of an activity in which I will definitely not participate. It is partially defined by personal activities that I could pursue in the time that otherwise might be used for professional activities. The yes-level indicates the minimum overall desirability of an activity necessary for me to definitely participate. In between the no-level and the yes-level are activities in which I may participate. The two levels change over time. In general they fall as the time for a proposed activity approaches, as the levels are intentionally set high to avoid overcommitment. However, if some great potential projects pop up and I agree to them, the levels may rise as less time is available for other projects. This could turn a maybe into a no as the no-level rises. To help me coordinate my professional life, I routinely think about decision opportunities for professional activities. If I am not pursuing some potentially worthwhile professional activity, I formulate a decision opportunity to figure out a way to pursue it. If some of my professional objectives are being inadequately met, I formulate a decision opportunity to decide how to rectify the situation. And sometimes when all seems well professionally, I think about decision opportunities that might make things even better. What better is there to do when I cannot fall asleep in hotel room 1047? 13.3 Decisions about Health and Safety I make, although perhaps not explicitly, many decisions every day that affect my health and safety. You do also. Everything I do involves risks to my health or safety. Common activities such as eating, drinking, and driving present risks. Natural disasters from earthquakes to floods to hurricanes pose potential dangers. Accidents can result from human error, including my own error. The point is that almost all decisions have some health and safety implications. There is a class of decisions that explicitly address health and safety concerns. Such decisions include, for example, whether to purchase an air bag for a car, what type of diet to follow, and what kinds of medical treatment to seek. Some activities also carry large enough risks that I consider the risks explicitly in contemplating the activity. One of many reasons that I have never smoked cigarettes is that I wish to live a long time so I may practice other "bad habits." Skydiving and serious mountain climbing are two activities with many attractions but with risks, at least to an amateur like me, serious enough to be explicitly considered. For decisions with major implications for health and safety, I want to consider the consequences explicitly. Furthermore, I want to make those decisions consistently. This means I do not want to reduce my risk slightly through a great deal of effort and forgo simple ways to reduce it more in other contexts. The Framework for Evaluating Health and Safety Decisions My framework for evaluating health and safety decisions is illustrated as a part of my strategic objectives network in Figure 13.1. The activities that affect my health and safety also affect my financial well-being and time available. In other words, decisions about these activities can be evaluated in terms of the degree to which they affect the three constraints on my freedom of choice in Figure 13.1. It is worthwhile to recognize that these three objectives are means. It was obvious to me that money and time aren't worth much if I do not use them productively. But I had to think harder about my health. Health is very important, but was it one of my strategic objectives? It occurred to me that if I had perfect health and yet did not contribute to my four strategic objectives, I would be exactly the same as a healthy tree. This clarified my thinking and I realized that health is a means to me. So how should I think about decisions such as whether to have an expensive diagnostic test that is part of a preventive health procedure or whether to buy an air bag for my car? Basically, I wish to ask whether the time and cost are worth the health benefit. The next subsection considers the values involved in more detail. There may be other situations in which the overall health and safety consequences are much more severe and immediate. If tomorrow I learned I had a particular form of cancer, I would want to consider my options carefully and explicitly. It would be important for me to understand how much my physical well-being might be impaired, for example by amputation, and how this would affect my freedom of choice. Available time in this context might be my time until death rather than simply time involved in a health-related activity such as a preventive procedure. In short, for decision situations of the magnitude of cancer, I would want to trace the possible implications of various alternatives through the entire objectives network in Figure 13.1 to get a better understanding of how the alternatives might influence my quality of life (see Keeney and von Winterfeldt, 1991). I am certain that carefully thinking through such difficult life-and-death decisions would provide me with insights well worth the effort. Values for Health and Safety Decisions One value very clear in my mind is that, for me, death from one cause is exactly as bad as death from another cause. The timing of my death and my pain and any suffering that I cause others are also important. Many people seem to act as if dying in an airplane crash is much worse than dying in a car. For me, dying in an airplane crash 15 years from now is much preferred to dying in a car crash in 14 years if both deaths are essentially instantaneous (that is, without pain or suffering). Also, for me, dying in 28 years after 5 years in a stroke-induced, relatively incapacitated state is worse than dying "healthy" in 25 years from an unexpected heart attack. One implication of these values is that I should invest my time and funds in my safety where I can reduce the risks most effectively. Reducing my risk of dying in a car by 10 percent is worth much more than eliminating my risk of dying from eating apples treated with alar or eliminating my risk of dying in an earthquake as a resident of San Francisco. And the good news is that I usually can do much more to reduce my driving risks. A more general implication for me is that I should avoid being overweight or in poor physical condition, which could contribute significantly to my health risks. With just a little self-control and almost no onerous effort, it is possible to eat reasonably and exercise regularly. Fortunately, both the eating and the exercising can be a part of activities and relationships with other positive consequences. It has also been useful for me to quantify my value tradeoffs over attributes characterizing the three objectives concerning health, financial well-being, and time. Specifically, the question I addressed was how much money it would be worth to reduce my probability of dying now by one chance in a million (that is, a probability of 10-6). Ron Howard of Stanford University has a computer program with actuarial statistics and a model to examine this question. The health attribute is what Ron has defined as the micromort, which is a 10-6 probability of dying. The financial attribute is the funds used for consumption each year. The time attribute is the time until death. My value tradeoffs between consumption and lifetime included indifference between, for example, 30 additional years of life at a consumption level of $40,000 annually and 25 additional years at $75,000. Using Ron's model, it follows from these tradeoffs that I should be willing to pay a maximum of about $12 to reduce my immediate risk by one micromort if all other consequences are equal. His model also suggests that I should be willing to give up about 0.4 hours now to reduce my risk by a micromort. These two derived value tradeoffs can be used to calculate quickly whether some activities are worth pursuing. As an example, my former physician suggested that I should get a colon check for cancer in conjunction with a routine physical. I naturally asked why and what were the chances I had colon cancer and what were the chances that this test would detect it. His basic answer was that I was now over 40 years old so I should have the test. This did not answer my questions; I knew my age. I wanted to know what the test might do for me and to me. Through protracted effort, and then through asking a more enlightened physician, I learned that my chances of colon cancer were about one in a million. It would probably be detected by the test if I had it. Preparing, going to and from the doctor's office, and having the test would require about four hours and cost about $100. There was no way this effort and cost were worth it to eliminate one micromort. Indeed, a separate factor was that the driving would add almost a micromort of risk. And I used the four hours to play squash, which probably contributed as much to my health and was infinitely more enjoyable than a colon check. 13.4 Professional Decisions The previous three sections have concentrated on how I think about decision situations. The themes are always the same. One theme is to structure and understand my objectives and values first and then use these to guide my decisionmaking activities. A second theme is to search for decision opportunities and create alternatives to better achieve my objectives. And a third theme is that the objectives and values expressed provide a framework to guide consistent decisionmaking for large classes of decisions. This and the following section provide examples of decisions in which I have used value-focused thinking. This section discusses specific professional decisions ranging from career decisions to daily interaction with colleagues. Since I always and automatically focus on values when thinking about decision situations, these examples represent only a few of the many cases that could be described. They are discussed in chronologicalorder. Collaborating on a Book In the spring of 1969 I had just finished my doctoral studies in Operations Research and joined the faculty of the Department of Civil Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). My dissertation concerned the theory, assessment, and application of multiattribute utility functions, and I had had the pleasure of having Howard Raiffa of Harvard University as my dissertation advisor. It was apparent to me that many of my personal and professional objectives would be well achieved if I could write a book on decisionmaking with multiple objectives with Howard. Regarding professional objectives, such a book would enhance my career, help build a professional relationship with Howard, and even earn a few cents. It was obvious that the collaboration would be great for me, but to become a reality it had to be desirable to Howard also. The general situation where approval is needed from someone else to render an alternative feasible is discussed in Section 9.6. I structured what objectives Howard might have for writing such a book with me. Perhaps because of my myopia, I felt his professional objectives would be quite similar to mine listed in Table 13.2. His alternatives for achieving them were much broader than mine, though, especially at the respective stages of our careers in 1969. An additional professional objective of Howard's was to educate young people with even an inkling of promise. I was young then and he gave me the benefit of the doubt that I had an inkling of promise. I gave considerable thought to what material we might include in a joint book on multiple-objective decisions and how we might accomplish the task together. Whenever I had the freedom to design the alternative for writing the book to be better for Howard, I did so, as it was obvious that any jointly acceptable alternative would be great for me. In June 1969 we had a meeting and I proposed the collaboration. I acknowledged the obvious advantages to me, and talked about what advantages and disadvantages there might be for Howard. The main advantage was that a potentially significant book would be produced discussing Howard's (and my) ideas on a topic he considered important. My contribution would be to ensure that the project would definitely be completed, as I had more available time and essentially no "more important" distractions. Such a book would be a useful addition to the literature and a step toward getting the ideas of quantified values into practice for some important problems. Howard would no doubt learn some things from writing the book, and even small economic gains would be a positive consequence. The disadvantages of such a project for Howard were clear to -me. It would occupy a lot of time, and it might force him to forgo other opportunities, or he might have to renege on writing the book after we had made some progress. I could not alleviate the need for a time commitment, but I could significantly lower the negative implications of that commitment. I proposed that we should write the book on whatever time frame suited Howard, and should let the schedule evolve over time. We could have necessary meetings anywhere, anytime, and he could cancel meetings with essentially no notice if need be. Howard agreed to write our book and I was overjoyed. The flexibility of timing turned out to be critical, as Howard was heavily involved in creating the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna through 1972 and served as its first director from 1972 to 1975. During that period we accumulated much more material, especially about applications of multiattribute utility, to include in the book. Decisions with Multiple Objectives was published in 1976. In the end, writing this book together provided a model, at least for us, of whatjoint authorship should be. Contributions of ideas and work time were balanced, and the product is something neither of us would have produced alone. Teaching Responsibilities A week after joining the M.I.T. faculty I went to have a talk with my department head, Charles Miller. This was three months before the beginning of the fall 1969 term, and many teaching responsibilities had not yet been assigned. It was generally understood that newer faculty members typically ended up teaching the courses that the more senior faculty did not want to teach. Naturally, I did not want to get stuck teaching unappealing material. By talking with colleagues, I came to understand that one objective of the Civil Engineering Department was to become more of a systems department. They offered a few introductory courses on probability and systems analysis, but wished to offer a few more advanced courses. Many of the established faculty members had been trained in traditional civil engineering topics, such as soils and structures, and were not particularly interested in systems. I was. The opportunity was clearly there. So I proposed to develop and teach a new graduate course titled "Analysis of Public Systems" and suggested that this teaching load would be adequate for a first semester. Professor Miller accepted my proposal and I carried out those responsibilities. By the time the last courses requiring teachers were assigned, I was in the middle of designing the new course and not available for additional fall teaching. I tried to make a bigger positive contribution to the department with the new course than I could have made as the teacher of least resort for some required course. By broadening the decision context beyond which standard course to teach, I was able to create a win-win situation for the department and me.
RAW Paste Data
 Value-focused thinking can be very helpful for both the big and the little decisions you make in your life. The intent of this chapter is to convince you of this fact. To do this, I will explain and illustrate how I use value-focused thinking in my own life. Why focus on me, you may ask. For one thing, applying value-focused thinking to a person's life requires understanding that person's objectives. Also, as I so strongly advocate value-focused thinking, it would be inappropriate, as well as embarrassing, if I did not use it myself. Therefore, using myself as an example seems the best way to demonstrate the breadth and depth of insights offered by value-focused thinking. Some of the decisions discussed in this chapter are extremely significant, such as whether to have a child, and others are relatively frivolous, such as whether to rent or buy a car for a summer in Europe. The point is simple: value-focused thinking can help you with any decision worth thinking about. 13.1 Strategic Objectives for Life Over the years, I have spent considerable effort thinking about and writing down my strategic objectives for my life. This effort has been worthwhile because I have repeatedly invoked these objectives in my decisionmaking. By their nature, these objectives have not changed much over time. They define both who I am, in that they have guided my past, and who I want to be, in that they indicate where I want to go. Let me first list and discuss my strategic objectives and then place them in the larger context of a strategic objectives network. I'll then show how both sets of objectives suggest worthwhile decision opportunities for me. Strategic Objectives Hierarchy It is probably not surprising that my overall strategic objective is to maximize my quality of life. This same overall objective is shared by most, if not all, individuals. What differs from one individual to another is the definition of quality of life . For me, the strategic objectives listed in Table 13.1 define quality of life. There are four major objectives: to enjoy life, to be intellectually fulfilled, to enhance the lives of family and friends, and to contribute to society. The order in which they are listed implies no prioritization. However, note that the first two concern what I get out of life and the last two concern what I offer to the lives of others. Enjoyment of life includes fun, excitement, emotion, and experience. Collectively, these objectives capture my feelings, whereas thinking is addressed by the next objective. To be intellectually fulfilled includes learning, knowing, understanding, and reasoning. There are many natural relationships among these component objectives: learning provides knowledge which leads to understanding, all of which can be used in reasoning, which is one way that I learn. Still, in addition to being a means to others, each of the four objectives is fundamental in itself. Enhancing the lives of family and friends is very important to me, as to most other people. In my case, the lives of my wife, Janet, and our son, Gregory, are singularly special. Because Gregory did not choose to have a relationship with us, the desire to enhance his life is of a unique nature. I clearly have a responsibility to enrich his life as much as possible, and this responsibility may contribute to my desire to do so. But for me, the desire to enhance Gregory's life is clearly fundamental, and the responsibility is a means. Sometimes, friends or family members get rather sick of my attempting to enhance their lives when they have not requested such divine guidance. It is hard to remain silent, though, when I think I recognize great decision opportunities for people I care about. If I care about them, I probably know something about their objectives, and if I do know something about their objectives, decision opportunities sometimes just pop into my ,mind. I do at least try to couch suggestions of decision opportunities as "Here is something that may be worth thinking about" rather than "Here is what you should do." As for society, I think the idea is not to offer everyone all things on silver platters, but to have all things on silver platters that people can reach by making and taking advantage of opportunities. I do not feel that society owed me a life or owes me a living, nor do I feel that it owes those to anyone. But I believe society should provide opportunities for individuals to have a good quality of life, and I would like to contribute to society to maintain and improve its opportunities. Strategic Objectives Network Everything I do both contributes to and detracts from the achievement of my strategic objectives. Why? Because everything comes with both advantages and disadvantages. My inte'nt is naturally to select those things with the greatest advantages and the smallest disadvantages. My decisionmaking is guided by the pursuit of such ends. Figure 13.1 presents my strategic objectives network, which illustrates key means objectives of the framework in which my decisions are made. Defining these means objectives should make the framework become clear. In the figure, an arrow from one objective to another indicates that better achieving the former contributes positively toward achieving the latter. The achievement of my strategic objectives, which are listed at the right of the figure, is directly influenced by the activities and the relationships I pursue. Thus, two means objectives are to pursue worthwhile activities and to pursue worthwhile relationships. The word "worthwhile" here is essentially defined by how well the activities and relationships help me achieve my strategic objectives: the more achievement, the more worthwhile. In order to pursue anything, worthwhile or not, I must have both the opportunity and the freedom to pursue it. For instance, having the opportunity to spend a year living and working in New Zealand would not be useful if I were not free to choose this opportunity. Two further means objectives, then, are to maximize freedom of choice and to maximize opportunities for choice. The way to maximize both of these is to minimize constraints. Consequently, two additional means objectives are to minimize constraints on freedom of choice and to minimize constraints on opportunities for choice. The main constraints related to freedom of choice concern health, finances, and available time. Other constraints not listed in the figure concern political, emotional, or spiritual factors. The health constraints, which include both physical and mental health, have a natural influence on the achievement of the objective to minimize constraints on opportunities for choice. Opportunities for choice are constrained mainly by limitations on my creative thought to identify decision opportunities and by others' perceptions. For example, others may feel that I am not the right person for a particular job. The pursuit of worthwhile activities and the pursuit of worthwhile relationships are synergistic: achievement of one enhances achievement of the other. A skiing trip may lead to a very worthwhile relationship. And good relationships can lead to new or more worthwhile activities. Activities and relationships both affect the achievement of other means objectives. Relationships may directly lead to opportunities for choice, as when a friend says, "I have an idea about something that you may find rewarding." Activities that I pursue directly affect constraints on me. For example, activities that preserve and improve my health affect health and financial constraints. Activities that help me think about decision opportunities, such as value-focused thinking, both create opportunities and take time that otherwise could be devoted to other pursuits. The achievement of my strategic objectives lessens any constraints on creative thought. If I am enjoying life and am intellectually fulfilled, I am likely to be more creative. If I enhance others' lives, they are likely to enhance mine. They essentially create opportunities for me as well as help me create alternatives for myself. If I contribute even a little to society, people may recognize it, and this may also create opportunities for me or stimulate my thoughts to create opportunities. As an example, if I do work of high quality, someone may offer me the opportunity to do other work that I may find interesting
 Searching for Decision Opportunities As shown in the objectives network of Figure 13.1, one of my objectives is to minimize the constraints on creative thought. The way to do this is by thinking about decision opportunities, as discussed in Chapter 9. There are two simple notions that help in this regard. One is to understand that there are many decision opportunities always out there to be discovered, and the second is to realize that effort expended on searching for decision opportunities is likely to be rewarding. My advice, based on years of personal experience, is "Try it, you'll like it." The list of strategic objectives and the objectives network are helpful in the search for decision opportunities. It is useful to ask yourself often whether you could do better in terms of one of your objectives or another. For example, I felt there was a distinct opportunity to communicate the ideas in this book. I thought the project would be enjoyable and intellectually fulfilling. As of the moment I'm writing this sentence, it has been. My hope is also that it will make a small contribution to others: family, friends, and readers. On the other hand, this same effort has had negative impacts by taking up time that otherwise I could have devoted to other activities or relationships. Once I had decided to write a book on the subject matter described here, I recognized another decision opportunity pertaining to how the book would be written. It seemed as if it would be best to have some time in which to do concentrated work on it. For this purpose, I wanted to arrange a six-month sabbatical at the Harvard Business School. To do this required the support of my family, my department at the University of Southern California, and my colleagues David Bell and Howard Raiffa at Harvard. I thought about what each of them might be able to get out of my sabbatical and tried to design a winning situation for each, using ideas discussed in Section 9.6. I did get the sabbatical, and I believe that my thinking about the individual values of others involved in the decision enabled me to create a situation that contributed to their interests as well
 13.2 Guiding Involvement in Professional Activities There are numerous professional activities in which I can participate. Such activities range from local seminars requiring roughly half a day to national scientific panels requiring ten days per year to writing a book that may require a person-year of my time. Other examples are teaching, attending conferences, doing editorial work for journals, consulting, conducting intensive courses for professionals, writing articles for journals, doing theoretical research, developing applications of theory to contemporary problems, and reading. Some of the opportunities for activities come from others, such as an invitation to be a member of a national scientific panel. Other activities grow out of my own creation of decision opportunities, such as those resulting in publications. Some activities are done alone and others are done jointly. In fact, some decision opportunities to pursue are opportunities to work with interesting people from whom I could learn and with whom I could enjoy myself. There are many more activities than I could ever hope to participate in. Thus, by choosing some activities I de facto reject others. As a result, it is desirable to make my decisions about professional activities in a consistent manner. Clearly I do not wish to participate in an activity if doing so will prevent my participating in something better. The common framework for all my professional activities is my set of fundamental objectives for such activities. Let me briefly discuss these objectives and then indicate how I use them. Fundamental Professional Objectives My professional objectives are listed in Table 13.2. I use this set of objectives both to appraise any single professional activity and to appraise the collection of activities that I'm involved in. The overall objective of my professional activity is to contribute to my quality of life as defined by my strategic objectives listed in Table 13.1. Thus, each of my professional objectives is either a part of a strategic objective or a means to one or more strategic objectives. The first three objectives in Table 13.2 are parts of different strategic objectives. Enjoyment of professional activities is naturally part of the enjoyment of life, my first strategic objective. This enjoyment typically derives from three aspects of professional activities: who else is participating, where the activity is, and the nature of the activity. I will get more enjoyment from meeting with knowledgeable policymakers in Aspen, Colorado, to develop plans to reduce u.S. dependence on foreign oil than from working alone on a well-defined problem that nobody really cares about while sitting in hotel room 1047 in Nowheresville. Learning from professional activities is a part of my second strategic objective concerning intellectual fulfillment. The amount of learning is also influenced by whom I'm working with and the substance of the activity. With individual consulting on a problem similar to many I have addressed before, I am basically using my existing expertise and learning only a little. On group activities addressing unique problems such as global warming, I learn a lot from the problem and from the other participants. My third fundamental professional objective, to provide service, is a part of my strategic objective to contribute to society. This service may be for students if the activity is a course, for professionals in my field if the activity is editorial service, for clients if the activity is consulting, and for society if the work is on public issues such as selecting a site for a nuclear waste repository. My other four professional objectives are means to the achievement of my strategic objectives. Enhancing my career is a means to future professional activities. This enhancement can come from what I learn from an activity, whom I meet during the activity, or the quality of the resulting work. Work of high quality has both direct and indirect rewards. Doing good work will create decision opportunities for me. Objective number five concerns the financial remuneration associated with professional activity. Many activities, such as writing journal articles, giving seminars in universities, and performing editorial service bring no remuneration. Others have honoraria or consulting fees. Building good professional relationships, the sixth objective, is one means to increase both the number of professional decision opportunities in the future and the likely desirability of such opportunities. The first six professional objectives concern the potential positive consequences of professional activities. Objective seven concerns a negative consequence, namely the amount of time an activity requires. Time I spend on one activity is time I cannot use for any other activities, whether personal or professional. I have divided this objective into time required for the activity where I live and time required away from home. All other things equal, being away from home is less desirable than being at home. Coordinating Decisions about Professional Activity The professional objectives in Table 13.2 are the common basis on which I evaluate professional activities. This list alone, however, does not tell me which activities I should choose to participate in. If all of my potential activities were known at the same time, I could evaluate them all and select those with the highest evaluation until my time available for professional activity was all allocated. I might pick, say, the best 16 of 45 potential activities for a given year. Collectively, these activities would form a portfolio, and I would want to ensure that the 16 did not all contribute to the same professional objectives and leave others poorly achieved. My experience in thinking about professional activities with the objectives in Table 13.2 indicates that the portfolio effects seem to take care of themselves. My real situation has two complicating features that need to be considered. First, I do not know all possible activities at the same time. Decision opportunities occur over time, and part of my time is always committed into the future. Second, there are major uncertainties about the decision opportunities that will occur. Thus, it is important to keep some time available to participate in the very interesting activities that come up on short notice. This suggests that I need a decision rule to help me decide which activities to select and which to reject as they appear. There are other good reasons to have a decision rule. When I look at my calendar six months to a year in the future, it appears to be wide open. Hence, if asked to participate in some activity in that period, I find it too easy to say yes. This not only commits some of my time but begins to break up the period into smaller parts. When the beginning of that period is three to six months in the future, it is already quite fragmented. The longest open period may be eight days. By the time then is now, I am overcommitted and have to turn down more interesting opportunities for both professional and personal activity. Since I do not want to be a time-constrained person, I have established levels of the desirability of professional activities in which I agree to participate. To do this, I roughly evaluated many activities in which I have participated in terms of the objectives in Table 13.2. It was clear that some of those activities should have never been agreed to, whereas others were desirable if they didn't eliminate other useful professional activities. Still other past activities were terrific, and I should jump at the opportunity to participate in similar activities. This evaluation yielded three responses to possible professional activities: no, maybe, and yes. These three responses are no surprise, but the way I use them is helpful to me. At any given time, there are a no-level and a yes-level. The no-level indicates the maximum overall desirability of an activity in which I will definitely not participate. It is partially defined by personal activities that I could pursue in the time that otherwise might be used for professional activities. The yes-level indicates the minimum overall desirability of an activity necessary for me to definitely participate. In between the no-level and the yes-level are activities in which I may participate. The two levels change over time. In general they fall as the time for a proposed activity approaches, as the levels are intentionally set high to avoid overcommitment. However, if some great potential projects pop up and I agree to them, the levels may rise as less time is available for other projects. This could turn a maybe into a no as the no-level rises. To help me coordinate my professional life, I routinely think about decision opportunities for professional activities. If I am not pursuing some potentially worthwhile professional activity, I formulate a decision opportunity to figure out a way to pursue it. If some of my professional objectives are being inadequately met, I formulate a decision opportunity to decide how to rectify the situation. And sometimes when all seems well professionally, I think about decision opportunities that might make things even better. What better is there to do when I cannot fall asleep in hotel room 1047? 13.3 Decisions about Health and Safety I make, although perhaps not explicitly, many decisions every day that affect my health and safety. You do also. Everything I do involves risks to my health or safety. Common activities such as eating, drinking, and driving present risks. Natural disasters from earthquakes to floods to hurricanes pose potential dangers. Accidents can result from human error, including my own error. The point is that almost all decisions have some health and safety implications. There is a class of decisions that explicitly address health and safety concerns. Such decisions include, for example, whether to purchase an air bag for a car, what type of diet to follow, and what kinds of medical treatment to seek. Some activities also carry large enough risks that I consider the risks explicitly in contemplating the activity. One of many reasons that I have never smoked cigarettes is that I wish to live a long time so I may practice other "bad habits." Skydiving and serious mountain climbing are two activities with many attractions but with risks, at least to an amateur like me, serious enough to be explicitly considered. For decisions with major implications for health and safety, I want to consider the consequences explicitly. Furthermore, I want to make those decisions consistently. This means I do not want to reduce my risk slightly through a great deal of effort and forgo simple ways to reduce it more in other contexts. The Framework for Evaluating Health and Safety Decisions My framework for evaluating health and safety decisions is illustrated as a part of my strategic objectives network in Figure 13.1. The activities that affect my health and safety also affect my financial well-being and time available. In other words, decisions about these activities can be evaluated in terms of the degree to which they affect the three constraints on my freedom of choice in Figure 13.1. It is worthwhile to recognize that these three objectives are means. It was obvious to me that money and time aren't worth much if I do not use them productively. But I had to think harder about my health. Health is very important, but was it one of my strategic objectives? It occurred to me that if I had perfect health and yet did not contribute to my four strategic objectives, I would be exactly the same as a healthy tree. This clarified my thinking and I realized that health is a means to me. So how should I think about decisions such as whether to have an expensive diagnostic test that is part of a preventive health procedure or whether to buy an air bag for my car? Basically, I wish to ask whether the time and cost are worth the health benefit. The next subsection considers the values involved in more detail. There may be other situations in which the overall health and safety consequences are much more severe and immediate. If tomorrow I learned I had a particular form of cancer, I would want to consider my options carefully and explicitly. It would be important for me to understand how much my physical well-being might be impaired, for example by amputation, and how this would affect my freedom of choice. Available time in this context might be my time until death rather than simply time involved in a health-related activity such as a preventive procedure. In short, for decision situations of the magnitude of cancer, I would want to trace the possible implications of various alternatives through the entire objectives network in Figure 13.1 to get a better understanding of how the alternatives might influence my quality of life (see Keeney and von Winterfeldt, 1991). I am certain that carefully thinking through such difficult life-and-death decisions would provide me with insights well worth the effort. Values for Health and Safety Decisions One value very clear in my mind is that, for me, death from one cause is exactly as bad as death from another cause. The timing of my death and my pain and any suffering that I cause others are also important. Many people seem to act as if dying in an airplane crash is much worse than dying in a car. For me, dying in an airplane crash 15 years from now is much preferred to dying in a car crash in 14 years if both deaths are essentially instantaneous (that is, without pain or suffering). Also, for me, dying in 28 years after 5 years in a stroke-induced, relatively incapacitated state is worse than dying "healthy" in 25 years from an unexpected heart attack. One implication of these values is that I should invest my time and funds in my safety where I can reduce the risks most effectively. Reducing my risk of dying in a car by 10 percent is worth much more than eliminating my risk of dying from eating apples treated with alar or eliminating my risk of dying in an earthquake as a resident of San Francisco. And the good news is that I usually can do much more to reduce my driving risks. A more general implication for me is that I should avoid being overweight or in poor physical condition, which could contribute significantly to my health risks. With just a little self-control and almost no onerous effort, it is possible to eat reasonably and exercise regularly. Fortunately, both the eating and the exercising can be a part of activities and relationships with other positive consequences. It has also been useful for me to quantify my value tradeoffs over attributes characterizing the three objectives concerning health, financial well-being, and time. Specifically, the question I addressed was how much money it would be worth to reduce my probability of dying now by one chance in a million (that is, a probability of 10-6). Ron Howard of Stanford University has a computer program with actuarial statistics and a model to examine this question. The health attribute is what Ron has defined as the micromort, which is a 10-6 probability of dying. The financial attribute is the funds used for consumption each year. The time attribute is the time until death. My value tradeoffs between consumption and lifetime included indifference between, for example, 30 additional years of life at a consumption level of $40,000 annually and 25 additional years at $75,000. Using Ron's model, it follows from these tradeoffs that I should be willing to pay a maximum of about $12 to reduce my immediate risk by one micromort if all other consequences are equal. His model also suggests that I should be willing to give up about 0.4 hours now to reduce my risk by a micromort. These two derived value tradeoffs can be used to calculate quickly whether some activities are worth pursuing. As an example, my former physician suggested that I should get a colon check for cancer in conjunction with a routine physical. I naturally asked why and what were the chances I had colon cancer and what were the chances that this test would detect it. His basic answer was that I was now over 40 years old so I should have the test. This did not answer my questions; I knew my age. I wanted to know what the test might do for me and to me. Through protracted effort, and then through asking a more enlightened physician, I learned that my chances of colon cancer were about one in a million. It would probably be detected by the test if I had it. Preparing, going to and from the doctor's office, and having the test would require about four hours and cost about $100. There was no way this effort and cost were worth it to eliminate one micromort. Indeed, a separate factor was that the driving would add almost a micromort of risk. And I used the four hours to play squash, which probably contributed as much to my health and was infinitely more enjoyable than a colon check. 13.4 Professional Decisions The previous three sections have concentrated on how I think about decision situations. The themes are always the same. One theme is to structure and understand my objectives and values first and then use these to guide my decisionmaking activities. A second theme is to search for decision opportunities and create alternatives to better achieve my objectives. And a third theme is that the objectives and values expressed provide a framework to guide consistent decisionmaking for large classes of decisions. This and the following section provide examples of decisions in which I have used value-focused thinking. This section discusses specific professional decisions ranging from career decisions to daily interaction with colleagues. Since I always and automatically focus on values when thinking about decision situations, these examples represent only a few of the many cases that could be described. They are discussed in chronologicalorder. Collaborating on a Book In the spring of 1969 I had just finished my doctoral studies in Operations Research and joined the faculty of the Department of Civil Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). My dissertation concerned the theory, assessment, and application of multiattribute utility functions, and I had had the pleasure of having Howard Raiffa of Harvard University as my dissertation advisor. It was apparent to me that many of my personal and professional objectives would be well achieved if I could write a book on decisionmaking with multiple objectives with Howard. Regarding professional objectives, such a book would enhance my career, help build a professional relationship with Howard, and even earn a few cents. It was obvious that the collaboration would be great for me, but to become a reality it had to be desirable to Howard also. The general situation where approval is needed from someone else to render an alternative feasible is discussed in Section 9.6. I structured what objectives Howard might have for writing such a book with me. Perhaps because of my myopia, I felt his professional objectives would be quite similar to mine listed in Table 13.2. His alternatives for achieving them were much broader than mine, though, especially at the respective stages of our careers in 1969. An additional professional objective of Howard's was to educate young people with even an inkling of promise. I was young then and he gave me the benefit of the doubt that I had an inkling of promise. I gave considerable thought to what material we might include in a joint book on multiple-objective decisions and how we might accomplish the task together. Whenever I had the freedom to design the alternative for writing the book to be better for Howard, I did so, as it was obvious that any jointly acceptable alternative would be great for me. In June 1969 we had a meeting and I proposed the collaboration. I acknowledged the obvious advantages to me, and talked about what advantages and disadvantages there might be for Howard. The main advantage was that a potentially significant book would be produced discussing Howard's (and my) ideas on a topic he considered important. My contribution would be to ensure that the project would definitely be completed, as I had more available time and essentially no "more important" distractions. Such a book would be a useful addition to the literature and a step toward getting the ideas of quantified values into practice for some important problems. Howard would no doubt learn some things from writing the book, and even small economic gains would be a positive consequence. The disadvantages of such a project for Howard were clear to -me. It would occupy a lot of time, and it might force him to forgo other opportunities, or he might have to renege on writing the book after we had made some progress. I could not alleviate the need for a time commitment, but I could significantly lower the negative implications of that commitment. I proposed that we should write the book on whatever time frame suited Howard, and should let the schedule evolve over time. We could have necessary meetings anywhere, anytime, and he could cancel meetings with essentially no notice if need be. Howard agreed to write our book and I was overjoyed. The flexibility of timing turned out to be critical, as Howard was heavily involved in creating the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna through 1972 and served as its first director from 1972 to 1975. During that period we accumulated much more material, especially about applications of multiattribute utility, to include in the book. Decisions with Multiple Objectives was published in 1976. In the end, writing this book together provided a model, at least for us, of whatjoint authorship should be. Contributions of ideas and work time were balanced, and the product is something neither of us would have produced alone. Teaching Responsibilities A week after joining the M.I.T. faculty I went to have a talk with my department head, Charles Miller. This was three months before the beginning of the fall 1969 term, and many teaching responsibilities had not yet been assigned. It was generally understood that newer faculty members typically ended up teaching the courses that the more senior faculty did not want to teach. Naturally, I did not want to get stuck teaching unappealing material. By talking with colleagues, I came to understand that one objective of the Civil Engineering Department was to become more of a systems department. They offered a few introductory courses on probability and systems analysis, but wished to offer a few more advanced courses. Many of the established faculty members had been trained in traditional civil engineering topics, such as soils and structures, and were not particularly interested in systems. I was. The opportunity was clearly there. So I proposed to develop and teach a new graduate course titled "Analysis of Public Systems" and suggested that this teaching load would be adequate for a first semester. Professor Miller accepted my proposal and I carried out those responsibilities. By the time the last courses requiring teachers were assigned, I was in the middle of designing the new course and not available for additional fall teaching. I tried to make a bigger positive contribution to the department with the new course than I could have made as the teacher of least resort for some required course. By broadening the decision context beyond which standard course to teach, I was able to create a win-win situation for the department and me.