Are ‘right decisions’ optimum or adequate?

Organizational decision-making processes are teleological understanding and instrumental problem-solving processes. They cannot be reduced to some computational optimizing processes. The right use of reason in human affairs needs intelligent cunning (the ‘Metis’) and inventive design (the ‘Ingenium’) processes as much as deductive logics. The authors propose here to think more about and to develop the concept of ‘satisficing’ decision-making process introduced by H.A. Simon in 1958 and to discuss it on its two aspects: the ‘adequate result’ of the process, the multicriteria decision; and the method, the cognitive and communicational process involved in the ‘adequate design’ of the decision. The formulation of the Paradigm of Adequate Decision-Making (extensive translation of ‘satisficing’) helps to understand the contribution of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Sciences to the tools of decision-support-system, in a much more satisfactory way (both epistemological and practical) than it was possible to do in the classical Paradigm of Optimization.