My very first tweet, as I walked home having voted in the European elections, in the midst of the MP expenses scandal in May 2009, read, “Nothing beats the power of a new alternative. Unfortunately today there weren’t any.” A year later and I think we now do have a genuinely new alternative.

My friend Kimberley responded to my recent blog about voting with this great question. Is voting one of the small set of decisions that is really beyond (or should be) the scope of decision analysis?

The UK General Election has reached its climax, and it’s on a knife edge. It’s decision time for the nation, and for me. I want to make a high quality decision. How is a decision analyst to decide where to put his cross?

Now that Skilling, Fastow and Lay have been shown by a bunch of greedy bankers to be complete amateurs when it comes to the mass destruction of wealth, it is probably worth reminding ourselves of the sheer brilliance behind the (entirely legal, decent and honest) idea that got Enron started.

Risk is often the most important element to consider in a big decision. It is certainly the area that causes the most anxiety. But a lot of people and organisations have problems dealing with it, and usually this starts with the words they use.

An analysis of 211 biotech companies compared the success rates of NCEs (new chemical entities) and biologicals over six years and concluded that the “results confirm the notion that biologicals have higher success rates from entry into man to approval than NCEs”. With overall success rates of 8.9% and 16.8% for NCEs and biologicals, there is certainly a difference, but is it significant? Could it all be down to chance?

In the search for meaningful and reliable information to support quality decision making, prediction markets have an intuitive appeal. Employ the collective wisdom of a crowd to assess the probability of a future event.

Tony Blair has come in for direct criticism from archbishops and the parents of fallen soldiers, and even Labour Party supporters—the people who elected him—now appear to despise him. But is he being judged unfairly for an unfortunate outcome, rather than on the quality of his decisions?