Bill Schmarzo lays out a framework to classify decision-making:
In my blog “Making Informed Decisions in Imperfect Situations”, I discussed the importance of properly and objectively framing the decision that we seek to make and how that impacts the data that we gather (and ignore) in an effort to make an informed decision. That is:
Are you trying to gather data to determine the right decisions or are you gathering data to support the decision that you have already made?
In that blog, I introduced two tools that can help us make informed decisions using the best available data, even when that data might be incomplete, conflicting, and/or distorted by others.
Read the whole thing.