Decision Making / 1 / 1.14

1.14 SUMMARY

Significant gains accrue from careful attention to knowledge elicitation and problem conceptualisation. There is a critical need for close stakeholder involvement from the very outset, from the earliest stages of conceptualisation, and this involvement should continue throughout model building and strategy development. Stakeholder involvement will enhance both understanding of the problems and commitment to strategy implementation.

There are many occasions when we need to seek out stakeholder views and perspectives, and rely on them. We need to understand when these, and associated ingrained assumptions, might be flawed. Such awareness only comes from an understanding of complexity itself and a working knowledge of human cognition. This means we must be aware of how people use mental shortcuts in both quick and deliberate decision making, and the difference between the two forms of decision making. It also means we need to understand how various forms of cognitive behaviour may affect choices, decisions and the way stakeholders act. We need to know how and when prejudice, bias, and politics might create difficulties for effective decision making. Given that these influences are active from time-to-time, we cannot trivialise problem conceptualisation. Any successful problem-solving methodology we might like to devise cannot be divorced from considerations of the way people think and feel, culture, their prior experiences, and their deeply ingrained assumptions.

Before we can develop effective ways of dealing with complex, dynamic, systemic problems, we need to understand the nature of those problems. In Chapters 2 and 3, detailed case-study analysis reveals much about such problems. Chapter 4 expands our characterisation of these ‘wicked’ complex, dynamic risk-management problems with the aim of setting the scene for developing methods for treating them.