AHP & ANP Theory

Group Decision

The AHP and ANP can help bring together a diverse group of people with different perspectives to make the complex decisions required in our time. They offer a structured framework for discussion and debate, a way to include the important intangibles of every major decision together with the tangibles, and a way to resolve conflicts over turf through discussion and achieve buy-in to implement the decision at the end of the day.

A group may be working together in the same room and discussing each judgment to arrive at a consensus judgment and have a facilitator enter it in the model. Or questionnaires may be sent out for each respondent to give their own opinion for each judgment, and when the questionnaires are sent back the judgments are combined using the geometric mean and then entered as a single judgment into a model. Both methods have their place.