Resumo

In pandemic times, decision-making may be the key either to success or failure of a country, a business, or persons. Pressed by difficult situations, people need to decide what to do having fee or none information. This is the type of situation we have been witnessing around the Globe for the last six months. People having to stay in lockdown despite the need to go out to work, to receive medical treatment, and even to have social life.

Our research question is if public administrators have the needed skills to produce the best possible outcomes to dial with pandemic situations. We use the Brazilian pandemic Covid-19 crisis as a case to corroborate the elements proposed in the literature as a follow-up of Herbert Simon’s Bounded Rationality.

Studies of logical positivism and his scientific observations lead Simon to conclude that the rationality of decisions was a central concern of administrative theory (Simon, 1947) and that his procedural rationality should guide government action. The process of satisficing remains demanding. It would certainly be in terms of patience (what Simon calls docility) and requires rigorous fact-finding, development of mental frameworks, communication, and raw theoretical predictions.

The content analysis resulted into five sets of Simon references: human capacity, cognition, expressing boundedness, identifying environmental challenges, and defining results. the COVID-19 pandemic that stroke the World in 2020’ early months, countries’ administrations behave erratically looking for ways to deal with the pandemic sparing lives, at the sometime that tried to keep their economies in running in slow motion.

Despite any weaknesses in this effort, we do not think public administrators should look at decisions in quite the same way again. Practitioners need critical thinking skills because the potential for cognitive bias is always present, and organizations must encourage smart decisions and limit possibilities for errors. Researchers can categorize and clarify the issues and help refine knowledge specific to the public administration setting.

Kahneman, D. (2003). Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics. The American Economic Review, 93(5), 1449-1475. Kahneman, D., Lovallo, D., & Sibony, O. (2011). Before you make that big decision. Harvard Business Review, 89(6), 50-60. Peerbolte, S. L., & Collins, M. L. (2013). Disaster management and the critical thinking skills of local emergency managers: correlations with age, gender, education, and years in occupation. Disasters, 37(1), 48-60. Simon, H. A. (1947). Administrative Behavior (3rd Edition ed.). New York: Macmillan.