A Tribute to Professor Raanan Lipshitz

One of the founders of the Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) movement died on July 26, 2024 — Raanan Lipshitz.

Raanan had been a Professor in the Psychology Department at Haifa University. He was interested in decision making, especially decision making under uncertainty. 

I met Raanan in 1987. The Army Research Institute (ARI) had just initiated a new program to study decision making in messy, real-world settings as opposed to well-controlled laboratory environments. Judith Orasanu had designed the program, with help from Ken Hammond. This was the start of the NDM movement, although we didn’t know it at the time.

ARI hosted a kickoff meeting for Judith’s new program, featuring the researchers who had been working in this space — working independently, and now brought together.  On the first day, Raanan spoke in the morning, describing his previous research, and his approach for the new ARI effort. I was to speak in the afternoon.

During the lunch break, I was standing behind Raanan in the buffet line. I took the opportunity to tell him how unhappy I was with his talk. He later told me that my remarks put him on guard, and he assumed I was a laboratory researcher offended by his work.

Then I continued, “Yes, I was very unhappy with your talk. You said all the things I was going to say this afternoon.” And in that instant, Raanan knew that he and I were going to be friends for a long time. He was a wonderful friend and colleague.

Raanan later attended the first NDM meeting in Ohio in 1989, and all of the meetings until his health declined. Raanan contributed several chapters to the first NDM book, Decision Making in Action: Models and Methods, including one of the most important chapters describing nine different theoretical approaches to NDM. Download a free copy of the book here.

Raanan’s own work influenced the direction of the NDM movement. His approach was Argument-Driven Action. He later developed a model of decision making under uncertainty — the RAWFS heuristic (Reduction, Assumption-Based Reasoning, Weighing Pros and Cons, Suppression and Hedging) — Lipshitz and Strauss (1997).

Raanan had an advantage that I and many others lacked — he was a practitioner as well as a researcher. He had served in the military, and then in the reserves. So, when he studied the decision making of Army officers, he brought his own expertise to bear. He was an insider with an experiential perspective on the challenging decisions he observed.

Raanan took great pleasure in seeing how the NDM movement progressed and expanded, beyond what we ever had expected. He certainly influenced the direction that NDM took, and the foundations upon which it is built.

References

Lipshitz, R. and Strauss, O., (1997), Coping with uncertainty: A naturalistic decision-making analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Making, 69, 149-163.