Modeling (Punk) Decisions: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
By: Fernando Donati Jorge, Product Manager
In 1982, the British punk rock band The Clash released their fifth album, Combat Rock. This post is about one song in that album and how it relates to something else I’m passionate about — decision modeling. The song is called Should I Stay or Should I Go.
I should say you don’t have to know anything about The Clash, or even like their music, to be interested in this post. This isn’t about Should I Stay or Should I Go as a song, but as a guide to how decisions are made and represented. And although there are many songs that talk about decisions, I’ve chosen Should I Stay or Should I Go as my case study for the simple reason that I like it. Plus, Frank Zappa’s Cocaine Decisions might be too controversial.
Should I Stay or Should I Go is the third song on side A of Combat Rock. The album cover is a picture of the four band members clustered in front of train tracks that disappear into the distance, surrounded by lush vegetation. It’s all very tropical, and not exactly what you would expect from a punk rock band. In fact, were it not for their outfits, it would be hard for anyone to guess this is an album from one of the most popular and influential punk rock bands of all-time.
The Clash was formed in 1976 by Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Nick Headon, in the wake of a revolution in the British music scene. The band’s first gig was opening for The Sex Pistols, arguably the epicenter of this revolution, and after that, they quickly started climbing the UK and US charts. Strummer and Jones shared most of the writing duties, and true to their punk ethos, their lyrics would typically avoid love themes, and rather revolve around political or social issues.
Around the time they were working on their fifth album, Combat Rock, The Clash had started to disintegrate. Headon’s heroin addiction was affecting his drumming and he left the band. His departure intensified the friction between Strummer and Jones, who had grown apart.
At this point, Mick Jones sat down and wrote the lyrics to one of the most famous punk rock songs of all time.
This leads me to discuss FICO’s own resident musician, Dr. Alan Fish. Alan lives on a peaceful island off the coast of Scotland. He’s a slim English gentleman with short white hair, who seems to combine a certain quintessential Englishness with a touch of Latin approachability. An Italian David Niven of sorts: always with a warm smile, and seemingly incapable of raising his voice.
Alan has spent the last 15 years of his life helping companies around the world make better decisions. He’s the author of one of the most influential books on decision-making of the past few years, and he’s also an accomplished musician (his first album Yes Why Not was released in 2017). His ideas about how decisions can be captured and represented have shaped the debate of the past decade, and the core concepts defined in his book are now part of an industry standard for decision modeling, called Decision Model and Notation, or DMN.
When Alan first started working with companies on their decision-making needs, it was common practice to start by gathering business rules — the policies and practices of how these companies made decisions. These business rules were then categorized, grouped, and implemented in decision-making systems. He quickly realized this was very inefficient: it was hard to determine which of these rules were relevant, and nearly impossible to know when you were finished gathering them.
Alan’s key insight was to flip the whole approach on its head. Business rules, he argued, are only truly relevant within a context. First, context needed to be provided, and only then could the relevant rules within that context be harvested.
Following that line of thought, Alan came up with a new way of representing that context for business rules. Instead of starting with the individual business rules, he decided the best way was to start with the actual decisions these companies were trying to make. From there, he could work his way back from that goal by asking what was required to make that particular decision. Data was an obvious option in addition to business rules; or as Alan prefers, “business knowledge” — a more encompassing term.
In a eureka moment, Alan realized there was a third possibility: decisions sometimes required the outcome of other decisions. This meant that decision-making had a structure that could be visually represented in a model. By systematically decomposing all decisions and only stopping when there were no decisions left to be decomposed, all the necessary context required by decisions could be provided in a decision model.
The song Should I Stay or Should I Go is about Mick Jones’s decision as to whether he should stay or leave his Darling. And the lyrics have everything we need to create a decision model.
Originally published at community.fico.com.
