The Decision-Making Process for Complex Situations in a Complex Environment

While all decisions are a guess about the future, as complexity builds upon complexity decision-makers must increasingly rely on their intuition and judgment.  This chapter explores the decision-making process for complex situations in a complex environment (complex adaptive messes) in terms of:  laying the groundwork for decision-making, understanding and exploring complex situations, discussing human additive factors, preparing for the decision process and mechanisms for influencing complex situations.  Laying the groundwork introduces the concepts of emergence, the butterfly effect, the tipping point, feedback loops and power laws.  Mechanisms for influencing complex situations include structural adaptation, boundary management, absorption, optimum complexity, simplification, sense and respond, amplification, and seeding.  The authors forward that decision-makers may be able to construct a strategy that guides problem resolution through a sequence of decisions and actions leading toward an acceptable solution.

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