Human Decision Making in Business : Implications and Application Operations of Neuroscience for Business Decisions

Today, projects become increasingly complex. Project managers have to cope with multiple sets of cultures, social systems and behaviour. Prospective humans will be one of the most crucial success factors of all. Therefore it will be even more important to get people motivated to act in accordance with project objectives and enterprise needs. Project planning is future oriented; the decision making process in projects therefore characterized by incomplete information, risk and uncertainty. This “certainty gap” could become a big problem, especially in projects where the innovation has to show the highest conformity with the customer demands and expectations. To meet the undertaken targets three perspectives have to be considered, harmonized and aligned: the customer perspective, the perspective of project team members, and the perspective of the enterprise. Humans act, react and decide in all three perspectives. Therefore enterprises are requested to understand and to analyse the pattern, processes and mechanism of actions behind. During the last years neuroscience has provided new results regarding (1) how humans decide, (2) how the human reward system (HRS) works and (3) how individually it acts when evaluating decisions options – considered as incentives. These findings should be smartly transferred into enterprises' Reward and Management systems (ERS) and project management know how. In the first part, this paper will present an overview of the findings and the consequences for the work with rewards and/or with penalties. Part 2 deals with the transfer into the business and project world from three perspectives. It will also present the need of a human resource configuration management (HRCM), beside the classical technical configuration management (TCM)