Introduction to the Special Issue. Naturalistic Decision Making and Organizational Decision Making: Exploring the Intersections

Abstract

Although naturalistic decision making (NDM) and organizational decision making (ODM) have much in common, they hardly interact. Both NDM and ODM focus on what decision makers actually do in their ‘natural habitats’ and reject the equivalence of decision making with normative economic and statistical reasoning which can be studied in sparse laboratory settings. Linking with ODM would help NDM researchers to include organizational goals, norms, and other aspects of context in their models. Conversely, linking with NDM would provide ODM researchers with detailed descriptions of how individuals and groups perform functions such as decision making, sensemaking, and planning on the basis of pattern matching, story telling and argumentation, and detailed descriptions of the processes through which distributed teams build and maintain shared situation awareness. In the introduction to this special issue we outline the two fields, argue why they should be in closer contact, and summarize the papers contributed to this issue.