Decision making is popularly put in two broad categories: open-ended decision making and close-ended decision making. Open-ended decision making recognizes the possibilities of more than one possible correct answer. Closed-ended decision making believes that to the type of problem which has to be solved there is only one correct answer. Illustratively, if the question is what are the elements which go into making of ‘water’, the answer is H2O, i.e. ratio of hydrogen and oxygen which will produce liquid, in this case termed the water. There cannot be any debate on this because there is only one correct answer. However, if there is a problem such as, where a plant needs to be located, there can be more than one location which will approximate the ‘correct’ answer. Clearly, the location of the plant is an open ended problem.
As it happens, practice and teachings of management follows the method of ‘classification’ and ‘culmination’ which is amenable to normal iterative...
