Steps of Structured Decision Making:
- Problem Definition. What specific decision has to be made? What is the spatial and temporal scope of the decision? Will the decision be iterated over time? Cardno ENTRIX staff, with strong resource management agency experience, in combination with teaming partners that have legal expertise, provides strategic guidance for this component.
- Establishing Objectives. What are the management objectives? Ideally, these are stated in quantitative terms that relate to metrics that can be measured. Setting objectives falls in the realm of policy, and should be informed by legal and regulatory mandates, as well as stakeholder viewpoints. A number of methods for stakeholder elicitation and conflict resolution are appropriate for clarifying objectives. Cardno ENTRIX staff, with strong resource management agency experience, in combination with teaming partners that have legal expertise, provides strategic guidance for this component.
- Defining/Understanding Alternatives.What are the different management actions from which we can choose? This element requires explicit articulation of the alternatives available to the decision maker. The range of permissible options is often constrained by legal or political considerations, but structured assessment may lead to creative new alternatives.
- Uncertainty. Because we rarely know precisely how management actions will affect natural systems, decisions are frequently made in the face of uncertainty. Uncertainty makes choosing among alternatives far more difficult. A good decision-making process will confront uncertainty explicitly, and evaluate the likelihood of different outcomes and their possible consequences.
- Risk Tolerance. Identifying the uncertainty that impedes decision-making, then analyzing the risk that uncertainty presents to management is an important step in making a sound decision. Understanding the level of risk a decision-maker is willing to accept, or the risk response determined by law or policy, will make the decision-making process more objectives-driven, transparent, and defensible.
- Linked decisions. Many important decisions are linked over time. The key to effectively addressing issues associated linked decisions is to isolate and resolve the near-term issues while sequencing the collection of information needed for future decisions.
- Quantifying Consequences.What are the consequences of different management actions? To what degree would each alternative lead to successfully reaching a given objective? In structured decision-making, we predict the consequences of the alternative actions with an appropriately-chosen model. Depending on the information available or the quantification desired for a structured decision process, consequences may be modeled with highly scientific computer applications, or with personal judgment elicited carefully and transparently. Ideally, models are quantitative, but they need not be; what is most important is that they link actions to consequences. Cardno ENTRIX staff specializes in the development and application of resource modeling tools (quantifying benefits and effects) for this purpose.
- Understanding Tradeoffs.If there are multiple objectives, how do they trade off with each other? In most complex decisions, the best we can do is to choose intelligently between less-than-perfect alternatives. Numerous tools are available to help determine the relative importance or weights among conflicting objectives; this information is used to compare alternatives across multiple attributes to find the ‘best’ compromise solutions. Cardno ENTRIX staff specializes in the application of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and other appropriate tools for this purpose.
- Decide and take action.For those decisions that are iterated over time, actions taken early on may provide a learning opportunity that improves management later, provided that an appropriate monitoring program is in place to provide the feedback. Adaptive management is a special case of structured decision making for decisions that are iterated or linked over time. Cardno ENTRIX staff specializes in NEPA compliance and restoration engineering needs associated with implementing corrective actions as well as development of monitoring/adaptive management programs to evaluate the potential outcomes of actions.
