Sense-making – Integration and Implementation Insights

Managing deep uncertainty: Exploratory modeling, adaptive plans and joint sense making

April 15, 2022August 15, 2017

By Jan Kwakkel

How can decision making on complex systems come to grips with irreducible, or deep, uncertainty? Such uncertainty has three sources:

Intrinsic limits to predictability in complex systems.
A variety of stakeholders with different perspectives on what the system is and what problem needs to be solved.
Complex systems are generally subject to dynamic change, and can never be completely understood.

Deep uncertainty means that the various parties to a decision do not know or cannot agree on how the system works, how likely various possible future states of the world are, and how important the various outcomes of interest are.

Making sense of wicked problems

August 24, 2022March 2, 2017

By Bethany Laursen

How do we know when we have good answers to research questions, especially about wicked problems?

Simply and profoundly, we seek answers that make good sense. Every formal method, framework, or theory exists, in the end, to help us gain insight into a mystery. When researching wicked problems, choosing methods, frameworks, and theories should not be guided by tradition or disciplinary standards. Instead, our design choices need to consider more fundamental justifications that cut across disciplinary boundaries. A fundamental criterion for good research is that it makes good sense. By making this criterion our “true North” in wicked problems research, we can more easily find and justify integrating disciplinary (or cultural, or professional) perspectives that apply to a particular problem.

So, how do we make good sense in wicked problems scholarship?