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About this lesson

Kick your decision-making up a notch by scaling your scores to set the minimum score to something other than zero. This may help you view the scores more realistically and change your view on what the best alternatives really are.

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Quick reference

Scaling Scores

Transforming your scores so that the minimum score is something other than zero (either positive or negative).

When to use

When there's no such thing as a completely worthless alternative, in which case the minimum score would be above zero; or when the worst possible alternative would cause more harm than good, in which case the minimum score would be below zero.

Instructions

  1. Go to the alternative selection page
  2. Click on the "options" tab in the menu on the right
  3. Scroll down and click the big blue "learn more" button at the bottom underneath "scaling"
  4. Click "enable score scaling"
  5. Answer whether the presented alternatives should receive a score above zero, equal to zero, or below zero.
  6. After completion, click "back" to return to the alternative selection page with your new scaled scores, or click "rescale" if you do not think the results are accurate and would like to redo the score scaling.
  7. Your y-axis is now updated to show scaled scores. You may have to select the "Axes start at 0" box in the options menu on the right to better view the new score differences visually.

Hints & tips

  • Don't overlook the power of scaling scores! If your lowest-ranked possible alternative should have a score other than zero, scaling your scores can help you avoid costly mistakes in your decision-making.
  • Got any questions about scaling scores? After completing step 3 above, the help menu on the right will give you a detailed explanation about what scaling scores does and how to use the feature.
  • It may be helpful to rescale your scores a few times to get a better feel for what you think the scores should represent.
  • You can always undo score scaling and revert to your original alternative scores at any time, by clicking on "review scaling" at the bottom of the options menu, and clicking "remove scaling"
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  • 00:04 Ready to bring your decision making up a notch?
  • 00:08 You might be interested in learning how to scale your scores.
  • 00:12 By default, 1000minds sets the lowest possible score for
  • 00:16 a hypothetical alternative to 0.
  • 00:19 But sometimes a situation might arise where we might want to change this.
  • 00:24 For example, when comparing cars to buy,
  • 00:27 we might say that it's impossible to have a completely worthless car.
  • 00:32 And therefore,
  • 00:33 we might want to set the minimum score to something higher than zero.
  • 00:38 On the other hand, if we're looking at project proposals like we are in this
  • 00:43 example, we might lose money by funding a low scoring project.
  • 00:48 In this case, we might think that a negative score is more
  • 00:51 appropriate than a score of zero, because the project would do more harm than good.
  • 00:57 Scaling our scores could increase or
  • 00:59 decrease the differences in the scores of our alternatives.
  • 01:03 Which could help us find the true value for money of our alternatives.
  • 01:08 For example, here we might be debating between proposal E and proposal S for
  • 01:13 our best alternative.
  • 01:16 Both look like they would give us the best value for money, but
  • 01:20 proposal E has a significantly higher score.
  • 01:24 While proposal S has a quarter of the cost and a much more secure cost estimate.
  • 01:29 And proposal S also has a higher y over x ratio,
  • 01:33 which means that it gives us more benefit for the cost.
  • 01:38 But if we scale the scores to have a proposal with a neutral impact have
  • 01:42 a score of zero, then suddenly the difference in scores becomes much greater.
  • 01:47 And we see that in reality, proposal S offers us very little benefit.
  • 01:53 Good thing we scaled our scores before we made our decision.
  • 01:58 So let's look at how to do this.
  • 02:01 In the menu on the right,
  • 02:02 we'll go to Options and scroll down to where we see Scaling.
  • 02:08 Here, we click on Learn More.
  • 02:12 This brings us to a brief introduction to scaling and
  • 02:15 some information about what situations it might be useful for.
  • 02:20 To begin scaling, we click on Enable Score Scaling.
  • 02:25 Here we're given a series of questions where we have to decide whether
  • 02:30 the hypothetical alternatives defined by the given criteria
  • 02:34 would receive a score above zero, equal to zero, or below zero.
  • 02:39 Based on our responses, 1000minds will find a new zero point and
  • 02:43 adjust scores accordingly.
  • 02:46 In this case, we want our zero score to represent an alternative with a completely
  • 02:51 neutral impact.
  • 02:52 So we'll keep that in mind as we go through these questions.
  • 03:06 Once we are finished, we see what our new zero score is.
  • 03:11 And we're shown a chart that displays the original scores and
  • 03:14 their equivalent score on the new scale that we just created.
  • 03:18 If we think this isn't accurate or we want to redo it for any reason,
  • 03:23 we can click on Rescale.
  • 03:25 Or if we decide that we want to undo the scaling and
  • 03:29 go back to using the original scores, we can click on Remove Scaling.
  • 03:35 The scaled scores are automatically accepted, so we can just go back to
  • 03:39 our value-for-money chart and the scores are updated to scaled scores.
  • 03:46 Visually, the graph still looks the same, and
  • 03:49 the only thing that changed are the y-axis labels.
  • 03:53 So to make the difference between the positive scores more visually apparent,
  • 03:59 let's change the settings to set the y-axis to start at 0.
  • 04:04 And now we see a much bigger difference between our alternative scores.
  • 04:09 Our alternatives that had a negative score are no longer displayed, but
  • 04:14 that's okay, because we wouldn't consider those in our decision anyway.
  • 04:20 We can undo the scaling at any time by going to Options and
  • 04:25 clicking on Review Scaling.
  • 04:32 This brings us back to this page of our scaling results,
  • 04:36 where we can click on Remove Scaling to revert to the original scores with
  • 04:40 zero as the lowest possible score.

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