Interpretive Ranking Process

Abstract

Ranking of variables in any context is a central concern of the management process and decision-making. For example, the causes leading to defects/quality are to be ranked to identify crucial causes to be controlled on a priority basis; actions planned are to be ranked with respect to their influence/impact on the performance areas (or KRAs — Key Result Areas) for resource allocation and prioritization. The management process at large is concerned with selectivity and prioritization and is treated at the extreme either based on intuitive judgment or rational choice process. There are strengths and limitations of both the extreme approaches and there is a growing trend to synthesize and balance the two extremes in decision-making. However, in either of the approaches the interpretation is not explicit and there might exist some weaknesses on the front of knowledge creation, storage and utilization processes. Some attempts in past have been made to develop interpretive models of decision-making such as sense making, mental models, organizational culture and so on. However, still there is lack of a ranking process that is rooted in interpretive perspective. This paper presents an ‘Interpretive Ranking Process (IRP)’, which uses Interpretive Matrix as a basic tool and pair comparison of interpretations in the matrix. This results into interpretive logic — knowledge base and a dominance matrix. All the dominance relationships and interpretations can be diagrammatically represented in the form of an ‘Interpretive Ranking Model’. The process is illustrated by an example of SAP-LAP (Situation-Actor-Process-Learning-Action-Performance) interactions (Sushil, 2000).