Most of us are familiar with the important distinction between necessary and sufficient. For example, air is necessary to human life: without it, you’ll quickly die. However, air is not sufficient to sustain human life: if all you have is air, you’ll also die (though much more slowly than if you didn’t have air). 

Let’s think about this principle as it applies to organizational decision-making. In this context, we could talk about the difference between essential questions (those that address necessity) and dispositive questions (those that address sufficiency).

An essential question is one that can eliminate options, but does not provide sufficient information to make a decision between the options that remain. For example: if I have four applicants for a position, and one of them does not meet the basic qualifications for the job, I can eliminate that candidate. (Because meeting the basic qualifications is essential.) However, meeting the basic qualifications is not dispositive: there are multiple candidates who meet those qualifications, so I have to apply other criteria in order to choose one of them.

A dispositive question is one that leads to a decision between available options. For example: among the three candidates for the job who meet the basic qualifications, I have to ask myself “Which of these is the best possible choice?”. That’s a dispositive question, because it leads me to opt for one candidate and eliminate the others.

One of the most fundamental examples of an essential question would be “Is X a good thing to do?” (This is an essential question because the answer must be “yes” in order for the question to advance to the next stage of analysis. If we decide that X is not a good thing to do, then we don’t need to keep talking about X. However, deciding that X would be a good thing to do isn’t enough to tell us whether we should do it, because our resource limitations mean we can’t do all the good things.)

Once the goodness of X has been established by the essential question, then it leads to a dispositive one. For example: “Does this good thing represent the best possible use of our limited resources in light of other demands?” (This question is dispositive because if – and only if – the answer to the question is “yes,” the resource steward will proceed with the allocation of resources. If the steward decides “no,” that doesn’t mean that X wasn’t good, nor does it mean that the steward doesn’t understand that X is good, nor does it mean that the steward wouldn’t have made the allocation if there had been more resources available. It means that we had no choice but to select a single option from among multiple good ones.)

This might sound like a stultifyingly complicated way of thinking, but in fact the process I’ve described is how all organizations make resource allocation decisions when they’re behaving in a more or less rational way. They don’t necessarily use the terminology I’ve described (“Phil, let’s move on from the essential question to the dispositive question about which venue we should select for our company retreat”), but their decision-making process follows the logic I’ve outlined, first determining which courses of action are desirable and then trying to choose the best (most cost-effective, most mission-aligned, etc.) of the remaining options. 

When organizations are not making resource allocation choices rationally, they make them in any number of other ways. For example:

• First come, first served: They allocate resources based on essential questions (like “Is this a good project?”) as they arise, until they run out of resources. This approach makes life easier for leaders, because they don’t have to make tough decisions based on relative merits; they only have to make the much easier decision about “goodness” – and then, when you run out of resources, they don’t have to make any tough decisions at all and can blame the lack of resources when worthy ideas are rejected. Unfortunately, this approach also means that projects are funded not according to their place in the institution’s strategic priorities, but according to the timing of their emergence, which is not a rational or mission-centered criterion.
• Personality: They allocate resources to the projects that are advocated for by people with the strongest personalities. Strength: this approach makes life easier for the decision-maker – at least, until it disadvantages another person with a strong personality. Weakness: it puts the decision-maker’s social comfort ahead of institutional priorities.
• Ideology of sub-institutional decision-makers: They allocate resources based on the ideological beliefs of people in stewardship positions. Now, one might say that ideology is just one way of determining priority, which is true, and in that sense it may just be another word for “priorities” – but what matters is whether the determinant ideology is that of the institution (and therefore expressed in its institutional priorities) or that of an individual with direct control over allocation decisions (and therefore may or may not represent institutional priorities). So, for example: if a manager makes assignments within his department based not on the library’s stated mission and priorities, but rather based on his own opinions about what the library should be doing, that would be problematic.

Takeaways and Action Items

• In all decision-making situations, it’s vital to keep in mind the difference between necessary/essential and sufficient/dispositive questions.
• Most proposals and options that meet the “essential” criteria will fail to meet the “sufficient” criteria.
• Analyze the decision-making processes in your library. What criteria do you apply when deciding how to allocate scarce resources such as budget, space, and staff time? Are those allocation decisions made in a rational way that reflects institutional mission and priorities?