University of Kalyani
Question
Asked 13 April 2015
Are there other applications of SenseMaker to conservation or natural resource management planning?
If other researchers or practitioners of conservation planning and natural resource management have been using the SenseMaker tools, I'd be interested to hear your experiences and opinions. I am undertaking SenseMaker training from Cognitive Edge (http://cognitive-edge.com/) as part of my sabbatical work. Very interesting approach to planning and decision making in complex adaptive systems where there are many plausible outcomes and cause-and-effect relationships are only coherent in retrospect because the "effect" is one of many possible outcomes that could have emerged in response to the "cause". These are situations where expert knowledge can mislead if poorly applied... "Relying on expert opinion based on historically stable patterns of meaning will insufficiently prepare us to recognize and act upon unexpected patterns." (Kurtz & Snowdon. 2003. The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sensemaking in a Complex and Complicated World, IBM Systems Journal 42(3), p8). While I've found much benefit from applying Structured Decision Making and Open Standards approaches to conservation problems and natural resource management decisions - there have been many times where I feel assigned to create a cause-and-effect model where such knowledge does not apply. The SenseMaker approach has not yet been broadly applied and tested in conservation settings - but for those curious, a paper was just published looking at applications of SenseMaker to the challenges of climate change and climate change planning (Lynam and Fletcher. 2015. Sensemaking: a complexity perspective. Ecology and Society 20(1):65) (http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol20/iss1/art65/). Looking forward to adding to my elicitation toolbox and thinking about the diverse structures of decision frameworks - simple, complicated, and complex. Thanks!
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