Administrators need to decide where they will be tightly coupled and where they need to be loosely coupled. This is particularly difficult for department chairs and deans, who have to decided to be either tightly coupled to the faculty or to their supervisors in the administrative hierarchy. However, the general reaction of most administrators to uncertainty is to micro-manage institutions. In the ideal world, college administrators would have all the information they would need to make any decision, have the time to consider all the alternatives, evaluate and compare all the sets of consequences, and then select the best alternative. Most administrators do not have all the information, do not have the time to consider all the alternatives and consequences, and, at best, they make the best decision they can based on the information and time that they have.
Successful administrators learn to make satisficing decisions .
Administrators should have established critieria for deciding what an outcome of a decision should have be to be considered satisfactory, and then search for alternatives that meet these criteria. Faculty members by nature and their training do not like satisficing decision making. Faculty committees are not committees that make quick decisions as a result. What Birnbaum is suggesting is for us to develop values or principles that we use to guide our decision making. No decision can optimize all values, but a decision that emphasizes one value can be acceptable if its outcomes fall with the acceptable range for all values.