Value-focused thinking: Identifying decision opportunities and creating alternatives

Conventional approaches to decisionmaking focus on alternatives. However, alternatives are relevant only because they are means to achieve values. Therefore, thinking about decision situations should begin with values. Value-focused thinking describes and illustrates concepts and procedures for creating better alternatives for your decision problems, identifying decision opportunities more appealing than the decision problems that confront you, and articulating and using your fundamental values to guide and integrate your decisionmaking activities. The ideas are relevant to your personal decisions and to the decision situations of organizations. The concepts and procedures are illustrated by an application at British Columbia Hydro and short descriptions of several other applications.