Decision making – Page 3 – Integration and Implementation Insights

System redesign toward creating shared value

April 10, 2024July 20, 2021

By Moein Khazaei, Mohammad Ramezani, Amin Padash and Dorien DeTombe

authors_moein-khazaei_mohammad-ramezani_amin-padash_dorien-detombe — 1. Moein Khazaei (biography)
2. Mohammad Ramezani (biography)
3. Amin Padash (biography)
4. Dorien DeTombe (biography)

How can services that are provided to citizens be overhauled so that they will survive, be competitive and be fair (eg., accessible to all)? Is there a systematic way in which shared value can be created? By shared value we mean combining social and environmental interests with corporate interests.

We have developed a methodology that we call “System redesign toward creating shared value” or SYRCS. It comprises 4 stages, shown in the figure below. They are:

emancipation and critical thinking
problem structuring
multi-criteria and quantitative decision-making
creating shared value.

Gradients of agreement for democratic decision-making

January 30, 2024May 25, 2021

By Hannah Love

How does your team make decisions? Do you vote? Does the loudest voice usually win? Does everyone on the team generally feel heard? Does your team have a charter to provide guidance? Or maybe there is often just silence and the team assumes agreement?

The next time your team makes a decision, here is something new you can try! Kaner (2014) proposes using a gradients of agreement scale. The gradients of agreement, also known as the consensus spectrum, provides an alternative to yes/no decision-making by allowing everyone to mark their response along a continuum, as shown in the figure below.

What are the gradients of agreement and the benefits of using them?

This is a tool to support democratic decision-making. The gradients of agreement has a scale with numbers (1-8) and short descriptions.

The art of non-decision-making

November 22, 2023March 9, 2021

By Anthony Judge

author_anthony-judge — Anthony Judge (biography)

Do you get frustrated when decision-makers avoid doing their jobs? Do you wish you could identify the techniques they use to avoid making decisions so that you can better hold them to account?

Here I identify 14 aspects of the art of non-decision-making based on my experience serving in, and observing, a range of international organisations.

1. Definitional games: This is the process of defining categories in one way in one document or organizational unit, and then defining them in another way elsewhere or at some later time. The art is to use this approach to obscure opportunities or to selectively advance particular strategies. At the same time competing definitions may be used to justify apparently incompatible strategies.

2. Neglected or repressed categories: This approach is familiar to those who experience discrimination, whether in terms of race, gender, age, intelligence, class or culture.

Eight grand challenges in socio-environmental systems modeling

August 11, 2023March 31, 2020

By Sondoss Elsawah and Anthony J. Jakeman

authors_sondoss-elsawah_anthony-jakeman — 1. Sondoss Elsawah (biography)
2. Anthony Jakeman (biography)

As we enter a new decade with numerous looming social and environmental issues, what are the challenges and opportunities facing the scientific community to unlock the potential of socio-environmental systems modeling?

What is socio-environmental systems modelling?

Socio-environmental systems modelling:

involves developing and/or applying models to investigate complex problems arising from interactions among human (ie. social, economic) and natural (ie. biophysical, ecological, environmental) systems.
can be used to support multiple goals, such as informing decision making and actionable science, promoting learning, education and communication.
is based on a diverse set of computational modeling approaches, including system dynamics, Bayesian networks, agent-based models, dynamic stochastic equilibrium models, statistical microsimulation models and hybrid approaches.

How can resilience benefit from planning?

August 11, 2023January 28, 2020

By Pedro Ferreira

author - pedro-ferreira — Pedro Ferreira (biography)

Improved resilience can contribute to the ability to deal with unknown unknowns. Dealing with uncertainty is also at the core of every planning activity. The argument put forward here is that planning processes should be considered a cornerstone for any given resilience approach. An outline of planning and resilience is given, before presenting fundamental aspects of planning that should be strengthened within a resilience strategy.

Planning

From attempting to do as much as possible within a day’s work, to launching rockets into space or managing a nation, everything requires planning. The backbone of planning is widely recognised to be a more or less complex and distributed decision-making process that establishes priorities for the allocation of resources and attempts to reduce (down to levels deemed acceptable) uncertainty associated with the pursuit of such priorities.

Detecting non-linear change ‘inside-the-system’ and ‘out-of-the-blue’

August 11, 2023January 14, 2020

Susan van ‘t Klooster and Marjolijn Haasnoot

authors_susan-van-t-Klooster_marjolijn-haasnoot — 1. Susan van ‘t Klooster (biography)
2. Marjolijn Haasnoot (biography)

Change can be expected, envisioned and known, and even created, accelerated or stopped. But change does not always follow a linear and predictable path, nor is it always controllable. Novelty and surprise are inescapable features of life. Non-linear change can involve threats or opportunities.

Although it defines the world we live in, who we are, the outlooks we have and what we do, we often do not relate to non-linear change in a meaningful way. What is holding us back from engaging with it? How do we deal with non-linear change? And what are promising ways forward?

Why is thinking about and anticipating non-linear change difficult?

Generally speaking, non-linearity is difficult to define and conceptualize, because there are multiple interacting forces at the intersection of many domains, manifesting on different spatial and temporal scales and many different actors and (often conflicting) perspectives are involved.

Yin-yang thinking – A solution to dealing with unknown unknowns?

November 17, 2025December 3, 2019

By Christiane Prange and Alicia Hennig

authors_christiane-prange_alicia-hennig — 1. Christiane Prange (biography)
2. Alicia Hennig (biography)

Sometimes, we wonder why decisions in Asia are being made at gargantuan speed. How do Asians deal with uncertainty arising from unknown unknowns? Can yin-yang thinking that is typical for several Asian cultures provide a useful answer?

Let’s look at differences between Asian and Western thinking first. Western people tend to prefer strategic planning with linear extrapolation of things past. The underlying mantra is risk management to buffer the organization and to protect it from harmful consequences for the business. But juxtaposing risk and uncertainty is critical. Under conditions of uncertainty, linearity is at stake and risk management limited.

In several Asian cultures, like China, dealing with high uncertainty and volatility is day-to-day business. The country overall scores comparatively low on the uncertainty avoidance index as illustrated by culture researcher Geert Hofstede (2001).

Blackboxing unknown unknowns through vulnerability analysis

August 11, 2023November 19, 2019

By Joseph Guillaume

Author - Joseph Guillaume — Joseph Guillaume (biography)

What’s a productive way to think about undesirable outcomes and how to avoid them, especially in an unpredictable future full of unknown unknowns? Here I describe the technique of vulnerability analysis, which essentially has three steps:

Step 1: Identify undesirable outcomes, to be avoided
Step 2: Look for conditions that can lead to such outcomes, ie. vulnerabilities
Step 3: Manage the system to mitigate or adapt to vulnerable conditions.

The power of vulnerability analysis is that, by starting from outcomes, it avoids making assumptions about what led to the vulnerabilities. The causes of the vulnerabilities are effectively a ‘black box’, in other words, they do not need to be understood in order to take effective action. The vulnerability itself is either a known known or a known unknown. The causes of the vulnerability, on the other hand, can be unknown unknowns.

Managing innovation dilemmas: Info-gap theory

August 11, 2023October 8, 2019

By Yakov Ben-Haim

Author - Yakov Ben-Haim — Yakov Ben-Haim (biography)

To use or not to use a new and promising but unfamiliar and hence uncertain innovation? That is the dilemma facing policy makers, engineers, social planners, entrepreneurs, physicians, parents, teachers, and just about everybody in their daily lives. There are new drugs, new energy sources, new foods, new manufacturing technologies, new toys, new pedagogical methods, new weapon systems, new home appliances and many other discoveries and inventions.

Furthermore, the innovation dilemma occurs even when a new technology is not actually involved. The dilemma arises from new attitudes, like individual responsibility for the global environment, or new social conceptions, like global allegiance and self-identity transcending all nation-states. Even the enthusiastic belief in innovation itself as the source of all that is good and worthy entails a dilemma of innovation.

An innovation’s newness and the uncertainty of its promise for improvement is the source of the dilemma. Tomorrow we will understand the innovation better, its dangers and its benefits, but today we must decide.

Four patterns of thought for effective group decisions

April 15, 2022July 30, 2019

By George P. Richardson and David F. Andersen

authors_george-richardson_david-andersen — 1. George P. Richardson (biography)
2. David F. Andersen (biography)

What can you do if you are in a group that is trying to deal with problems that are developing over time, where:

root causes of the dynamics aren’t clear;
different stakeholders have different perceptions;
past solutions haven’t worked;
solutions must take into account how the system will respond; and,
implementing change will require aligning powerful stakeholders around policies that they agree have the highest likelihood of long-term success?

The fields of systems thinking and system dynamics modelling bring four important patterns of thought to such a group decision and negotiation:

Designing scenarios to guide robust decisions

April 4, 2023July 2, 2019

By Bonnie McBain

What makes scenarios useful to decision makers in effectively planning for the future? Here I discuss three aspects of scenarios:

goals;
design; and,
use and defensibility.

Goals of scenarios

Since predicting the future is not possible, it’s important to know that scenarios are not predictions. Instead, scenarios stimulate thinking and conversations about possible futures.

Key goals and purposes of scenarios can be any of the following:

Agent-based modelling for knowledge synthesis and decision support

September 11, 2024June 25, 2019

By Jen Badham

The most familiar models are predictive, such as those used to forecast the weather or plan the economy. However, models have many different uses and different modelling techniques are more or less suitable for specific purposes.

Here I present an example of how a game and a computerised agent-based model have been used for knowledge synthesis and decision support.

The game and model were developed by a team from the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD), a French agricultural research organisation with an international development focus. The issue of interest was land use conflict between crop and cattle farming in the Gnith community in Senegal (D’Aquino et al. 2003).