Setting Strategic Agendas: The use of qualitative methods in highly politicised contexts

摘要

In the early phases of using simulation models to support strategic decision-making,the emphasis is on expressing information and physical flows. While this isappropriate for many managed systems, we suggest that it is inappropriate for a largeclass of problems involving the motivations and powers of agents in the system. Insuch highly politicised systems it is necessary to take the political aspects of powerinto account at an early stage in the analysis.We present an approach to this class of problems, using a qualitative procedurebased on influence diagrams. This method has been extensively and successful use inconsultancy to study the motivations and powers of agents and thereby producesnaturally an output directed at action planning at the strategic level. While it iscomplementary to numerical system dynamics approaches, it is more successful inderiving components of strategic action directly from analysis.