Situation Assessment Heuristics

Set conditions for insight

  • Prioritize transparency over objectivity
  • Prioritize understanding over blame or fault
  • Resist narrative until late in assessment
  • Articulate mental frameworks before debating the resulting positions
  • Hold strong opinions weakly
  • Expect to expend time, resources, and effort
  • Don’t assume the first interpretation is best or complete
  • Limit assessment by the amount of uncertainty, resources, and time available
  • Do less assessment when you have a significant competitive advantage
  • Do more assessment when failure would be catastrophic
  • Expect to identify and critically evaluate the stories, narratives, and categories used to conceptualize the situation
  • Do not fully trust filtered or aggregated information

Gather information

  • Observe system behavior in person
  • Study existing documentation, theory, and data
  • Recruit and confer with experts
  • Study similar and competing systems
  • Define assumptions explicitly
  • Identify what is missing, uncertain, or unknown
  • Review responses to shocks or rapid changes
  • Evaluate the accuracy and precision of data
  • Free the data; identify distortion, delay, or sequestering
  • Identify where power, accountability, benefits, and risks lie
  • Identify reinforcing and balancing loops
  • Make pictures, flow charts, and maps
  • Be active in adjacent areas and projects

Encourage diversity of perspectives

  • Engage a broad range of stakeholders
  • Create a safe environment with standards for behavior
  • Resist using power to shortcut deliberation
  • Make deliberate, yet tentative boundary decisions
  • Use models to encourage reflection and debate
  • Share information freely and make it easy to visualize
  • Seek out and maintain independent sources of information
  • Engage individuals with local knowledge
  • Engage outsiders with no stake in the system
  • Solicit the opinions of disadvantaged or less assertive stakeholders
  • Think through the problem forward and backward
  • Discuss what would need to be true to support assumptions
  • Prioritize utility of information over searching for objective truth
  • Prioritize input from those who do the work

Assess on multiple levels

  • Cycle between deep dives and big picture analysis
  • Look for patterns of behavior over time
  • Look for events, results, and transactions
  • Look for organizing rules, priorities, and structures
  • Perform both synthesis and analysis

Define purposes and values

  • Define purposes and values before defining problems
  • Use purposes and values to guide problem definitions
  • Use purposes and values to guide boundary definitions
  • State problems in solution independent terms
  • Try stating the problem in both general and specific terms
  • Move to a larger purpose to widen the range of solutions
  • Move to a more specific purpose to narrow the range of solutions
  • Make boundary decisions to construct a solvable problem
  • Create narratives, categories, and stories to help conceptualize the situation

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