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International Centre for Critical Infrastructure Decision-Making

Decision architecture

Critical infrastructure decisions are hard to reverse, shared across operators, regulators and suppliers, and felt by people who never took them. We are developing decision architecture as a discipline for exactly these conditions.

A single blue-to-pink path stepping through a network of nodes from left to right.

What it is

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Decision architecture is the study of how decisions are made in critical infrastructure: who makes them, what shapes them, and how their consequences move through connected systems. We treat it as a discipline in its own right, applied to critical infrastructure around the world.

Why critical infrastructure

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Four conditions make critical infrastructure the natural home for decision architecture.

  • Irreversible decisions

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    [Wording needed: one or two sentences on this condition.]

  • Consequences borne by people who did not decide

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  • Decisions shared across operators, regulators and suppliers

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  • Obligations flowing through the structure

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How it relates to adjacent fields

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Decision architecture draws on, and differs from, several established fields.

  • Choice architecture

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    [Wording needed: how decision architecture relates to choice architecture. Any description of the field itself needs a Claims Register row.]

  • Decision analysis

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    [Wording needed: how decision architecture relates to decision analysis. Any description of the field itself needs a Claims Register row.]

  • Resilience engineering

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    [Wording needed: how decision architecture relates to resilience engineering. Any description of the field itself needs a Claims Register row.]

  • Socio-technical systems

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    [Wording needed: how decision architecture relates to socio-technical systems. Any description of the field itself needs a Claims Register row.]