Decided defences

Winston Fletcher's viciously elegant review (Books, THES , May 3) dispatches Helga Drummond's The Art of Decision Making to the wastepaper basket of history. But as he cuts and thrusts, he strikes two targets worthy of defence.

First, there is his derision of decision science as the author's academic discipline. I must declare an interest, as my department runs an MSc with that title. The name does not imply, as Fletcher asserts, a claim that decision-making or the study of it is a science. It describes an approach to providing support to decision-makers that uses information, models and facilitated group processes. In the right circumstances, this can give decision-makers the confidence and clarity to deploy their intuition and craft more effectively.

Second, Fletcher lampoons the idea of focusing on decisions that go wrong. But looking at evident failures is not self-evidently a bad way of learning how to do better. It is not happenstance that both academic and practitioner interest in risk is rising. This growth tracks the prevalence of dangers that result not from "acts of God" but from the interaction of systems of "our" own making.

Jonathan Rosenhead
London School of Economics