Matthew D. Wood

Cognitive Mapping Tools: Review and Risk Management Needs

Risk managers are increasingly interested in incorporating stakeholder beliefs and other human factors into the planning process. Effective risk assessment and management requires understanding perceptions and beliefs of involved stakeholders, and how these beliefs give rise to actions that influence risk management decisions. Formal analyses of risk manager and stakeholder cognitions represent an important first step. Techniques for diagramming stakeholder mental models provide one tool for risk managers to better understand stakeholder beliefs and perceptions concerning risk, and to leverage this new understanding in developing risk management strategies. This article reviews three methodologies for assessing and diagramming stakeholder mental models--decision-analysis-based mental modeling, concept mapping, and semantic web analysis--and assesses them with regard to their ability to address risk manager needs.

Flood Risk Management: US Army Corps of Engineers and Layperson Perceptions

Recent severe storm experiences in the U.S. Gulf Coast illustrate the importance of an integrated approach to flood preparedness planning that harmonizes stakeholder and agency efforts. Risk management decisions that are informed by and address decision maker and stakeholder risk perceptions and behavior are essential for effective risk management policy. A literature review and two expert models/mental models studies were undertaken to identify areas of importance in the flood risk management process for layperson, non-USACE-expert, and two USACE-expert groups. In characterizing and mapping stakeholder beliefs about risks in the literature onto current risk management practice, recommendations for accommodating and changing stakeholder perceptions of flood risks and their management are identified. Needs of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) flood preparedness and response program are discussed in the context of flood risk mental models.

Stakeholder engagement in dredged material management decisions

Dredging and disposal issues often become controversial with local stakeholders because of their competing interests. These interests tend to manifest themselves in stakeholders holding onto entrenched positions, and deadlock can result without a methodology to move the stakeholder group past the status quo. However, these situations can be represented as multi-stakeholder, multi-criteria decision problems. In this paper, we describe a case study in which multi-criteria decision analysis was implemented in a multi-stakeholder setting in order to generate recommendations on dredged material placement for Long Island Sounds Dredged Material Management Plan. A working-group of representatives from various stakeholder organizations was formed and consulted to help prioritize sediment placement sites for each dredging center in the region by collaboratively building a multi-criteria decision model. The resulting model framed the problem as several alternatives, criteria, sub-criteria, and metrics relevant to stakeholder interests in the Long Island Sound region. An elicitation of values, represented as criteria weights, was then conducted. Results show that in general, stakeholders tended to agree that all criteria were at least somewhat important, and on average there was strong agreement on the order of preferences among the diverse groups of stakeholders. By developing the decision model iteratively with stakeholders as a group and soliciting their preferences, the process sought to increase stakeholder involvement at the front-end of the prioritization process and lead to increased knowledge and consensus regarding the importance of site-specific criteria.

Cognitive barriers in floods risk perception and management: A mental modeling framework and illustrative example

Recent severe storm experiences in the U.S. Gulf Coast illustrate the importance of an integrated approach to natural disaster preparedness planning, one that harmonizes stakeholder and implementing agency efforts. Risk management decisions that are informed by and address decision maker and stakeholder risk perceptions and behavior are essential for effective risk management policy. Formal (versus ad hoc) analyses of risk manager and stakeholder cognition represent an important first step. Mental modeling has been successfully used to reveal, characterize and map stakeholder beliefs about risks in order to develop more effective cross-stakeholder communication strategies. This paper summarizes diagram-based representation of mental models, and presents an example specific to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) flood preparedness and response program needs. Understanding flood risk mental models will enable USACE to bridge differences across and within stakeholder groups, cultures and disciplines internally and externally involved in natural disaster response in order to develop approaches for handling floods and other emerging challenges.

Community‐Driven Hypothesis Testing: A Solution for the Tragedy of the Anticommons

Shared ownership of property and resources is a longstanding challenge throughout history that has been amplifying with the increasing development of industrial and postindustrial societies. Where governments, project planners, and commercial developers seek to develop new infrastructure, industrial projects, and various other land-and resource-intensive tasks, veto power shared by various local stakeholders can complicate or halt progress. Risk communication has been used as an attempt to address stakeholder concerns in these contexts, but has demonstrated shortcomings. These coordination failures between project planners and stakeholders can be described as a specific kind of social dilemma that we describe as the tragedy of the anticommons. To overcome such dilemmas, we demonstrate how a two-step process can directly address public mistrust of project planners and public perceptions of limited decision-making authority. This approach is examined via two separate empirical field experiments in Portugal and Tunisia, where public resistance and anticommons problems threatened to derail emerging industrial projects. In both applications, an intervention is undertaken to address initial public resistance to such projects, where specific public stakeholders and project sponsors collectively engaged in a hypothesis-testing process to identify and assess human and environmental health risks associated with proposed industrial facilities. These field experiments indicate that a rigorous attempt to address public mistrust and perceptions of power imbalances and change the pay-off structure of the given dilemma may help overcome such anticommons problems in specific cases, and may potentially generate enthusiasm and support for such projects by local publics moving forward.

The Role of Design Team Interaction Structure on Individual and Shared Mental Models

The interaction structure of problem solving teams in design and other domains, and its effects on ideation outcomes is a well-explored topic in the study of team cognition in problem solving and design. Much less is known on how changes in team interaction structure influence the development of mental models over the course of work on a problem. This study aims to understand the relationship between team interaction structure and mental model development by measuring the similarity of individual mental models across time with respect to the individual and other group members. Three-member design teams from upper-level engineering design courses worked either independently or interactively on a mechanical design task for either the 1st half or the 2nd half of the design process. Participants were periodically interrupted for a written description of their mental models of the design process. Descriptions were analyzed with Latent Semantic Analysis to assess mental model convergence. Results show working together has a substantive impact on shared mental models of the design process, and team interaction was associated with more self-consistent mental models of individual team members across time. Working independently was also associated with mental models that were more similar to final design outcomes. Implications for team interaction structure, mental model development, and design fixation are discussed.

Climate change risk management: a Mental Modeling application

The potential impacts of climate change are varied and highly uncertain, and pose a significant challenge to agencies charged with managing environmental risks. This paper presents a comprehensive and structured Mental Modeling approach to elicit, organize and present relevant information from experts and stakeholders about the factors influencing environmental risk management in the face of climate change. We present and review an initiative undertaken by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to characterize climate change challenges to USACE environmental risk management activities, and to identify gaps with respect to science, engineering, and organizational processes for addressing these challenges. By employing Mental Modeling, the research has characterized the influences of climate change on USACE environmental risk management, and aggregating recommendations from 28 experts. In addition, the study identifies the most important opportunities to improve organizational response to climate change, ranging from focused research and development of technical capabilities to broad paradigm shifts and systemic organizational improvements within the USACE environmental risk management programs. This study demonstrates that Mental Modeling is a useful tool for understanding complex problems, identifying gaps, and formulating strategies, and can be used by a multitude of organizations and agencies.

A Moment of Mental Model Clarity: Response to Jones et al. 2011

Jones et al. (2011) review a variety of elicitation methods for identifying and describing stakeholders’ mental models that have been successfully deployed in a variety of natural resource management (NRM) contexts. These methods are broadly categorized into two classes. The first is direct elicitation, where stakeholders work in conjunction with an analyst to describe and produce a graphical representation of the model in an iterative and interactive fashion. This is distinguished from indirect elicitation, where a research team utilizes textual information from interviews, websites, and other documents to extract a graphical model via content analysis and/or the help of specially-designed computer programs. The authors provide an explanation of the theoretical underpinnings of the methods and challenges in applying the construct to natural resource management.

Leveraging stakeholder knowledge in the innovation decision making process

Organisations must make decisions regarding how to best bridge existing societal challenges or market gaps with innovative technologies and business practices. However, many organisations turn to ad hoc decision-making. Within the contemporary environment of accelerating technological change, this is particularly problematic due to the inability of stakeholders to consider the full breadth of information that must be taken into account during the innovation process, and fosters the potential for inefficient outcomes. We propose an integrated mental modelling and multi-criteria decision analysis framework to provide a structured approach to innovation decision-making. Using formal and transparent decision rules to systematically extract the relevant knowledge from experts, one can efficiently map emergent challenges and assess value tradeoffs associated with competing objectives and investments. This process can assist in the identification of emerging societal, technical, and economic risks, and point to how different types of innovations may resolve such concerns.

Relating Mandates in the United States for Managing the Ocean to Ecosystem Goods and Services Demonstrates Broad but Varied Coverage

There are numerous ecosystem goods and services (EGS) provided by the ocean. There are also multiple mandates to address this suite of EGS. Which facets of the ocean EGS does this portfolio of mandates collectively address? How are these mandates interrelated? Are there gaps in their coverage of EGS? Are there areas of reinforcement? To elucidate this set of issues, we characterize the portfolio of mandates that a leading U.S. governmental ocean agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the subset of those that one of its Line Offices, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA-Fisheries), is responsible for implementing. We link these mandates to a suite of EGS, evaluating the relative degree that each mandate addresses each EGS. The weighted overlap across mandates with respect to EGS was also estimated. Of the nearly 100 NOAA mandates, and the subset of 50 NOAA-Fisheries mandates, there was broad coverage of ocean EGS; every EGS has at a minimum of 9 NOAA mandates that addressed that topic. Food production, habitat provision, genetic resources, recreation, tourism, historical and heritage value, and knowledge and science value were the EGS that had the highest amount of coverage at 30, 42, 50, 39, 38, 34, and 60 NOAA mandates, respectively. There was some reinforcement across mandates, particularly for the top EGS, suggesting that the multiple facets of these EGS are being reasonably well addressed. Seventy percent of mandates informed the same EGS via implementation of the top 10 mandates considered to be the most important for NOAA. The large number of mandates and the overlap in the EGS they address suggest that some form of coordination is warranted, particularly via adoption of an ecosystem-based approach to management.