Non-negotiable values: what a score cannot settle
A committee can share the same information yet reject the same project ranking. The management question is precise: how should decisions be made when some participants see a criterion as a non-negotiable boundary rather than a preference that can be weighted?
What the literature establishes
Jonathan Baron and Mark Spranca (1997, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) study “protected values”, which people refuse to trade off against other values, particularly economic ones. Their work describes resistance to trade-offs and a stated insensitivity to the quantity at stake. For managers, this challenges an assumption behind weighted matrices: people do not necessarily regard every criterion as something that other benefits can offset.
When the trade-off itself becomes a transgression
Philip E. Tetlock, Orie V. Kristel, S. Beth Elson, Melanie C. Green and Jennifer S. Lerner (2000, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) examine reactions to trade-offs that pit sacred values against secular considerations, including money. In their experiments, these trade-offs can elicit moral outrage and responses intended to reaffirm threatened values. The disagreement therefore also concerns the legitimacy of the comparison, not just its outcome.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that every contested criterion should be removed from discussion. Yet this research does not give every refusal to make a trade-off the status of a legal obligation or a safety requirement. The useful distinction is between applicable constraints, commitments the organisation chooses to uphold and preferences on which compromise remains possible. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What a matrix cannot resolve
These studies draw in part on experimental scenarios and stated judgements; they do not demonstrate that a particular procedure improves investment decisions in Sion. By design, a weighted sum allows a good result on one criterion to offset a poor result on another. If a boundary must genuinely rule out an option, treating it as just another weight may therefore conceal the disagreement rather than resolve it.
A practical check in Sion
As part of SHR’s “Decision-making” programme, a proposed exercise in Sion separates eligibility conditions from preference criteria before options are scored. For a hydropower, healthcare, viticulture or alpine tourism project, each condition would be accompanied by its legal, technical or organisational basis and evidence enabling compliance to be checked. The team would then measure the proportion of options submitted for approval for which every eligibility condition is documented as satisfied. This indicator checks procedural consistency without claiming to prove that every chosen boundary is justified or that the best option was selected. To go further: explore the Decision-making training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Decision-making in Sion
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