Behavioural Issues in PSMs

Leroy White University of Bristol, UK

IntroductionCurrently•There is a burgeoning interest in Behavioural OR •Until now behavioural considerations in OR have been almost completely ignored. •Yet, understanding the relationship between knowledge, behaviour and action has been a preoccupation since the beginning of the discipline Leading to•Uncertainty as to the precise definition of behaviour in OR theory and practice. •A lack of clarity as to whether tackling behavioural issues within OR will lead to a distinct area of study We aim to•Offer a framework for thinking about the behavioural issues in OR

Distinctiveness• Behavioural matters were Indirectly tackled in the debates on theory

and practice of OR (Mingers, 2010)• Some studies tended to assume some fairly basic behavioural

assumptions or theories (Eden, 1990)• Recently, Hamalainen, et al (2013) described some general and

basic behavioural assumptions relevant to OR studies as opportunities for OR

• Are attempts at a theoretical understanding the rationale of soft OR in order to • deflected attempts to empirically test its efficacy and • by-pass any attempts to address the behavioural concerns inherent in

soft OR. • Perhaps behavioural concerns are just too difficult to address in

evaluating soft OR processes (Eden, 2000; White, 2007). • Whatever the reasons, there is a clear sense that behavioural

concerns are under-developed in OR (Eden, 1990).

Process-performance puzzle• OR rationality is seen as a particular way to approach action

in a complex, intractable problem setting • Ever since Simon, there is the belief that good decisions in

the form of analytic problem solving that reflects attention to process will lead to good decisions

• The belief that these rational processes will lead to good decisions or actions is hard to prove (White, 2006).

• Generally, what is taken for what works is often based on ‘shallow insights’ (Anderson et al, 1997).

• Research is inconsistent and equivocal where it is observed that the OR processes perform sometimes well and sometimes poorly – the process-performance puzzle

Representing and intervening• An understanding of soft OR is that it maps the underlying

problem into a simple representation which, in turn, is amendable to mediating behaviour within a process as an intervention

• Representation in soft OR is imbued with theory as its source, and is a socially shared understanding of the problem as its subject.

• We often under-theorise or under-reflect the fact that the basis for this process is an act of representation

• We sometimes fail to recognize the inherent loose connection between our models of the world and the actual situations in which we act

• These are likely to lead to a dangerous degree of conceit on the part of decision makers (Neale and Bazerman, 1985)

Theorising interventions• Following Hacking we claim that a sound philosophy of intervention provides

compelling grounds for understanding behaviour in OR

• The classic work of Kahneman and Tversky (2000) not only see people as limited and biased in their judgements, but the research itself is limited and biased in its presumption that what people do is all that they can do (Phillips).

• We are not only Interested in what people do in practice

• People are capable of constructing futures that deal adequately with the complexities they face.

• Phillip’s view is to focus on a more positive interpretation of behaviour through soft approaches

• To meet the challenge of finding the conditions in which people can be “intellectual athletes rather than intellectual cripples”, i.e. to create a behavioural OR on what people can do

Methodology

• Difficult to identify a coherent and precise set of keywords for a search process to conduct a literature review.

• We relied on a non-keyword-based reviewing process that is akin to a systematic snowball approach.

• Our goal was to identify articles that made a core contribution, either conceptually or empirically, to addressing behavioural phenomenon in soft OR.

Assumptions

• Limited our definition of interventions to include only active, deliberative and facilitated efforts

• The operation of the concept of “decision” in facilitated group interventions is highly problematic. We instead used the notion of “action” (Taket and White,)

• Soft OR seldom, if ever, directly solves organisational or policy-level problems. Meaningful use of Soft OR could generically be called action proposals

Dimension 1: Individual and Collective behaviour

• There is vast literature on individual judgment and decision making, drawing on Tverksy and Kahneman’s (2000)

• Here, reported outcomes of the OR process remains an individual reaction at the confluence of individual, contextual, and process factors

• OR processes can also occur in situations characterized by high levels of interdependency and interconnectedness among participants,

• Here, individuals are embedded in systemic relations in which behaviour and learning are important and depend on processes such as sense making, negotiation, coalition building, and social networks

• The institutional and social positions of actors in OR interventions shape their views of their role in these systems, which in turn interact with their cognitive processes, which do not resemble simple rational models suggested by Kahneman and Tversky.

Dimension 1: Individual and Collective behaviour

•We suggest that relations between OR processes and behaviour are sufficiently different at the individual and collective levels to warrant different approaches.

•Our aim is to strengthen our understanding of the collective behavioural processes in (soft) OR interventions •We recognized that this perspective involves numerous individuals and usually produces systemic outcomes that cannot be easily specified and, as such, can considerably complicate (or preclude) a valid measurement of the effects. •This difference explains the gap between the strength of available evidence regarding the effectiveness of soft OR interventions and the relative weakness of the evidence on collective-level behaviour.

Dimension 2: Issue divergence

• Contexts are said to be characterized by low issue divergence when potential users share similar opinions and preferences regarding • the problematization of the issue, • the prioritization and salience of the issue

(compared with other potential issues), and • the criteria against which potential solutions

should be assessed.

• Conversely, as the level of consensus on those aspects diminishes, issue divergence grows

Dimension 2: Issue divergence

• There is some consensus that high issue divergence is a core feature of the soft OR intervention context

• Low issue divergence is a sine qua non condition for technically focused debates, in which participants try to resolve differences though ‘rational’ models based on shared worldviews

• Conversely, high issue divergence leads to ‘politically aware’ deliberations and strategic-type processes in which dialogue is unlikely to bring consensus and participants try to impose their views on others

Dimension 2: Issue divergence

• The literature reviewed explained the way in which divergences in opinions, preferences, and interests are organized• the extent of involvement in the soft OR

activities • the structure and shape of interventions and • the content of the information exchanged.

Operationalising the framework for behavioural OR

• The preceding discussion illustrates from both a theoretical and empirical perspective that the essential aspects of behavioural OR are:• whether we are concerned with individuals or the

collective; • whether the concern is characterized as low or high

divergence • The framework is offered as a way to formalize the

range of possibilities of behavioural issues pertaining OR interventions and in particular to provide a means of thinking about these issues for soft OR

Context

Behavior Low divergence High divergence

Individual Challenges: biases and judgment

Theoretical :Kahneman and Simon

ExamplesAny BDN

Challenges: conflict and negotiation Theoretical:Socially negotiated order

ExamplesEden and AckermannFranco and MeadowsKotiadis and Mingers

Collective Challenges: groupthink, Abilene paradoxTheoretical Procedural rationality Collective efficacyExamplesAny GDM and Brainstorming

Challenges: group learning process and efficacy of facilitated model use (eg social affordances v model affordances)Theoretical Social learning Expansive learningExamples

Collective behaviour

• Collective cognition in organisations (Hutchins, 1991) in order to explain collective cognitive processes.

• Weick and Roberts (2004) outlined the concept of collective minds as a means for understanding how individuals working together perform effectively as an ensemble

Collective mind

• The collective mind resides in the mindful inter-relations between individual in a social system. One person’s action, when considered by others shapes theirs, which in turn shapes the next.

• Introducing soft OR creates particular instances when peoples perspectives and experiences are brought together to bear on problematic situations in ways that may lead to distinctly new solutions.

• In these instances what to think of as the problem and how to think of it becomes a product of a collective process. This is not very well understood

How do we study Collective behaviour?

• Criticism of soft OR is that it is often described as offering “shallow” insights.

• We suggest that “shallowness” is not a characteristic of the evidence produced by any soft OR process itself, but is a characteristic of collective-level contexts, in which the internal validity of the evidence dissolves during the elaboration of action proposals

Final remarks• First, the focus on collective behaviour: It could be argued that

collective behaviour is not yet a coherent field, particularly in one dominated by the work of Kahneman and others.

• We think that collective behaviour, despite its loose formulation, is concerned with crucial problems and is pre-occupied with relating social psychological phenomena to (social) change.

• Fundamental to us in the study of collective behaviour and OR is to develop more imaginative evaluation techniques.

• Experimentalist or interventionalist? • Field studies, ethnography.. Horlick-Jones and Rosenhead and

autoethnography• Shortitudinal studies• Collaboratory