Pro Tip: Criteria

“What’s the single most important idea from the field of decision science that most of us aren’t using?”

This is the question I asked Dr. Barbara Fasolo, Director of the Behavioral Lab at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her work lives at the intersection of judgment, behavioral science, and decision analysis, and has been published in journals like Nature and PNAS. At the time, I was in requirements-gathering mode for what would eventually become WASHI.

“The most under-leveraged decision-making tool is the use of multiple, clearly defined criteria.”

This approach is known as Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). It helps teams move from vague, intuition-driven conversations to structured, explainable decisions, by:
- Defining objectives
- Weighing their importance
- Evaluating how each option aligns with those objectives

When you define criteria, everything gets clearer.
Less bias. More alignment. Smarter tradeoffs.
And outcomes that reflect what actually matters, not just who's loudest or what's most convenient.

Of course, we use criteria informally in our personal lives, when choosing a car or a partner, for example.

And there are key times in business when we leverage criteria in a structured way. For instance, Product Managers will look to explicitly balance things like:

- sales impact
- customer value
- development effort

Yet for most of us, MCDA remains the best, most powerful decision making tool we are not using.

WASHI is designed to change that. The platform make is easy to identify and leverage criteria across any decision you and your team are facing right now.

So next time you trying to choose between alternatives, use WASHI to help you define your criteria and create decisions that drive both clarity and alignment.