Analysis vs. Synthesis or Analysis and Synthesis

There are a multitude of courses at many Universities with the word analysis in the title but relatively few courses with the word synthesis. Many Universities have a course called Decision Analysis but I don’t know of any having a course called Decision Synthesis.

When someone tries to explain how they came to a decision, they often say something like “After a careful analysis, …”

The truth is that while analysis is an important part of decision making, analysis without synthesis is almost worthless. The converse is also true.

Dictionaries define analysis as something like the following: the separating of any material or abstract entity into its constituent elements (opposed to synthesis)

Dictionaries define synthesis as something like the following:
The combining of the constituent elements of separate material or abstract entities into a single or unified entity (opposed to analysis).

So while dictionaries define analysis and synthesis as opposites of one another, when it comes to decision making they are necessary complements of one another.

Most organizations have top level managers, mid level managers, supervisory managers, technicians and other experts, each capable of doing an analysis on one or more facets of a complex decision. However, few organizations know how to perform a synthesis of these analyses. In order for an organization to make a rational decision—that is a decision that best achieves the multitude of their objectives, they must be able to synthesize as well as analyze.

Synthesizing data, information and knowledge in decision-making

Decision-making today is more complex than ever. If you read Barry Schwartz’s excellent book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less you will see why – we are faced with more options than we know what to do with. The overwhelming-ness of the options strains our mental capacity and adds stress to our lives, especially if we do not have a good way of managing the decision challenge at hand.

When I was a child my father would tell me, “You are fortunate, son, you have more options now than I could ever dream of at your age.” While grateful, I realize it is more challenging today to make sense of the options, especially when making organizational decisions with multiple stakeholders, conflicting objectives and lots of facts and figures to consider. We need a way to understand our options and objectives clearly, and a way to synthesize disparate data, information and knowledge in the process.

Understanding the pecking order of knowledge is interesting. While there are many definitions, the following should suffice:

• Data are individual facts, statistics, or pieces of information that in-and-of-themselves are not that useful
• Information is a collection of data that has somehow been organized and has the potential to be useful; information has context and can convey meaning
• Knowledge is information that has been processed, assimilated, tested and/or validated, and has been made actionable

Thus knowledge is information in action, and information is meaningfully organized data.

We typically encounter knowledge through conversation with others, where people share their learning and communicate their expertise. This practice of knowledge sharing is crucial to the process of decision-making. Since none of us is all-knowing, we require collaboration, discussion, and debate to understand the decision at hand from different perspectives.

Traditional decision facilitation techniques seek to bring a group together, have a dialogue, and reach (or force!) an outcome for the entire group, which is then loosely called a “consensus.” While some level of agreement may have been reached, this process fails to clearly consider and document the different stakeholder perspectives and has no way to meaningfully synthesize disparate sources of data and information. This technique may be useful for simple decisions, but would be inadequate for important decisions where significant resources are involved, or the fates of individuals or businesses may be affected.

A better facilitation technique synthesizes and documents each stakeholder’s perspective and expertise, and combines it with relevant quantitative data and other information. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is one of the best ways to accomplish this task as it is expressly designed to manage such complexity. While its title emphasizes analysis, perhaps the AHP’s greatest strength is synthesis. The AHP effectively synthesizes the separate elements of a decision – the data, information and knowledge – into a meaningful whole that makes sense of your decision and provides you and your team with the best outcome.