Thursday, September 28, 2017

Mental Models for Decision Making

Greetings from the Systems Modelling Conference at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. The keynote is by Associate Professor Shayne Gary, UNSW on Mental Models and Dynamic Decision Making. In several training courses I have been encouraged to draw a mental model and even shown software to help with the drawing. However, there was never any rigor to this process, nor theory behind it, just "draw something", so I dismissed this as trivial. However, Professor Gary is pointing out there is research into how these models help people understand a complex problem.But mental models can be misleading.

References

Gary, M. S., Yang, M. M., Yetton, P. W., & Sterman, J. D. (2017). Stretch Goals and the Distribution of Organizational Performance. Organization Science. URL https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1131
Gary, M. S., Prietula, M. J., & Feltovich, P. (2017, January). Mental Models as the Interface between the Business Environment and Strategic Decisions. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2017, No. 1, p. 14588). Academy of Management. doi:10.5465/AMBPP.2017.14588abstract

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