Integration and Implementation Insights
Research resources for understanding and acting on complex real-world problems
By Bonnie McBain
What makes scenarios useful to decision makers in effectively planning for the future? Here I discuss three aspects of scenarios:
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.
By Edgar Cardenas
How can undergraduate and graduate students be helped to build their interdisciplinary collaboration capacity? In particular, how do they build capacity between the arts and other disciplines?
In 2018, I co-facilitated the annual, 3-day Emerging Creatives Student Summit, an event for approximately 100 undergraduate and graduate students from 26 universities organized by the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities. Students’ majors ranged from the sciences, engineering, music, arts, and design.
The aim of the summit is to give students an opportunity to collaborate on projects that incorporate creativity and the arts.
Read moreUsing the arts and design to build student creative collaboration capacity
By Jan Kwakkel
How can decision making on complex systems come to grips with irreducible, or deep, uncertainty? Such uncertainty has three sources:
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.
Read moreManaging deep uncertainty: Exploratory modeling, adaptive plans and joint sense making
By Laura Schmitt Olabisi
What is deep uncertainty? And how can scenarios help deal with it?
Deep uncertainty refers to ‘unknown unknowns’, which simulation models are fundamentally unsuited to address. Any model is a representation of a system, based on what we know about that system. We can’t model something that nobody knows about—so the capabilities of any model (even a participatory model) are bounded by our collective knowledge.
One of the ways we handle unknown unknowns is by using scenarios. Scenarios are stories about the future, meant to guide our decision-making in the present.
By Antonie Jetter
I frequently struggle to explain how participatory modeling deals with uncertainty. I found useful guidance in the management literature.
After all, participatory modeling projects and strategic business planning have one commonality – a group of stakeholders and decision-makers aims to understand and ultimately influence a complex system. They do so in the face of great uncertainty that frequently cannot be resolved – at least not within the required time frame. Businesses, for example, have precise data on customer behavior when their accountants report on annual sales. However, by this time, the very precise data is irrelevant because the opportunity to influence the system has passed.
Two key lessons from the management literature deal with the nature of uncertainty and responding to four major types of uncertainty.
Read moreUncertainty in participatory modeling – What can we learn from management research?