Problem Structuring Methods
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Problem Structuring Methods
Problem structuring methods (PSMs) are a group of techniques used to model or to map the nature or structure of a situation or state of affairs that some people want to change. PSMs are usually used by a group of people in collaboration (rather than by a solitary individual) to create a consensus about, or at least to facilitate negotiations about, what needs to change. Some widely adopted PSMs include * soft systems methodology * the strategic choice approach * strategic options development and analysis (SODA) Unlike some problem solving methods that assume that all the relevant issues and constraints and goals that constitute the problem are defined in advance or are uncontroversial, PSMs assume that there is no single uncontested representation of what constitutes the problem. PSMs are mostly used with groups of people, but PSMs have also influenced the coaching and counseling of individuals. History The term "problem structuring methods" as a label for these techniques ...
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Conceptual Model
The term conceptual model refers to any model that is formed after a wikt:concept#Noun, conceptualization or generalization process. Conceptual models are often abstractions of things in the real world, whether physical or social. Semantics, Semantic studies are relevant to various stages of process of concept formation, concept formation. Semantics is fundamentally a study of concepts, the meaning that thinking beings give to various elements of their experience. Overview Concept models and conceptual models The value of a conceptual model is usually directly proportional to how well it corresponds to a past, present, future, actual or potential state of affairs. A concept model (a model of a concept) is quite different because in order to be a good model it need not have this real world correspondence. In artificial intelligence, conceptual models and conceptual graphs are used for building expert systems and knowledge-based systems; here the analysts are concerned to repres ...
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Michael C
Michael may refer to: People * Michael (given name), a given name * he He ..., a given name * Michael (surname), including a list of people with the surname Michael Given name * Michael (bishop elect)">Michael (surname)">he He ..., a given name * Michael (surname), including a list of people with the surname Michael Given name * Michael (bishop elect), English 13th-century Bishop of Hereford elect * Michael (Khoroshy) (1885–1977), cleric of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada * Michael Donnellan (fashion designer), Michael Donnellan (1915–1985), Irish-born London fashion designer, often referred to simply as "Michael" * Michael (footballer, born 1982), Brazilian footballer * Michael (footballer, born 1983), Brazilian footballer * Michael (footballer, born 1993), Brazilian footballer * Michael (footballer, born February 1996), Brazilian footballer * Michael (footballer, born March 1996), Brazilian footballer * Michael (footballer, born 1999), Brazilian football ...
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Procedural Justice
Procedural justice is the idea of fairness in the processes that resolve disputes and allocate resources. One aspect of procedural justice is related to discussions of the administration of justice and legal proceedings. This sense of procedural justice is connected to due process (U.S.), fundamental justice (Canada), procedural fairness (Australia), and natural justice (other Common law jurisdictions), but the idea of procedural justice can also be applied to nonlegal contexts in which some process is employed to resolve conflict or divide benefits or burdens. Aspects of procedural justice are an area of study in social psychology, sociology, and organizational psychology. Procedural justice concerns the fairness ( formal equal opportunity) and the transparency of the processes by which decisions are made, and may be contrasted with distributive justice (fairness in the distribution of rights and outcomes), and retributive justice (fairness in the punishment of wrongs). Hear ...
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Communicative Rationality
Communicative rationality or communicative reason () is a theory or set of theories which describes human rationality as a necessary outcome of successful communication. This theory is in particular tied to the philosophy of German philosophers Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and their program of universal pragmatics, along with its related theories such as those on discourse ethics and rational reconstruction. This view of reason is concerned with clarifying the norms and procedures by which agreement can be reached, and is therefore a view of reason as a form of public justification. According to the theory of communicative rationality, the potential for certain kinds of reason is inherent in communication itself. Building from this, Habermas has tried to formalize that potential in explicit terms. According to Habermas, the phenomena that need to be accounted for by the theory are the "intuitively mastered rules for reaching an understanding and conducting argumen ...
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Argumentation
An argument is a series of sentences, statements, or propositions some of which are called premises and one is the conclusion. The purpose of an argument is to give reasons for one's conclusion via justification, explanation, and/or persuasion. Arguments are intended to determine or show the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called a conclusion. The process of crafting or delivering arguments, argumentation, can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectical and the rhetorical perspective. In logic, an argument is usually expressed not in natural language but in a symbolic formal language, and it can be defined as any group of propositions of which one is claimed to follow from the others through deductively valid inferences that preserve truth from the premises to the conclusion. This logical perspective on argument is relevant for scientific fields such as mathematics and computer science. Logic is the study of the forms ...
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Stopping Rule
In probability theory, in particular in the study of stochastic processes, a stopping time (also Markov time, Markov moment, optional stopping time or optional time ) is a specific type of "random time": a random variable whose value is interpreted as the time at which a given stochastic process exhibits a certain behavior of interest. A stopping time is often defined by a stopping rule, a mechanism for deciding whether to continue or stop a process on the basis of the present position and past events, and which will almost always lead to a decision to stop at some finite time. Stopping times occur in decision theory, and the optional stopping theorem is an important result in this context. Stopping times are also frequently applied in mathematical proofs to "tame the continuum of time", as Chung put it in his book (1982). Definition Discrete time Let \tau be a random variable, which is defined on the filtered probability space (\Omega, \mathcal F, (\mathcal F_n)_, P) w ...
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Project Stakeholder
Project stakeholders are persons or entities who have an interest in a specific project. According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), the term ''project stakeholder'' refers to "an individual, group, or organization, who may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project, program, or portfolio. ISO 21500 uses a similar definition. Types of stakeholders Stakeholders may be located inside or outside an organization, including: # The project's sponsor; # Those with an interest or the potential to gain from the successful completion of a project; # Anyone who may have a positive or negative influence in the project completion. The following are examples of project stakeholders: * Project leader * Senior management * Project team members * Project customer * Community Served or the Community that is being Served (example of a stakeholder affected by a non-profit organization or government agency) * Resource manag ...
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Donald Schön
Donald Alan Schön (September 19, 1930 – September 13, 1997) was an American philosopher and professor in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He developed the concept of reflective practice and contributed to the theory of organizational learning. Education and career He was born in Boston and brought up in Massachusetts, at Brookline and Worcester.Donald Schon at infed.org
accessed July 2007
After undertaking a Bachelor's at , he completed Master's and doctoral studies in philosophy at . His thesis dealt ...
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Ronald Heifetz
Ronald Heifetz (born February 7, 1951) is an academic and author. He is the King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership, Founding Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, and co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates. Formerly a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area, Longwood Medical Area in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is the third oldest medical school in the Un ..., Heifetz works with leaders in government, nonprofits, and business. His work on adaptive leadership has garnered attention in educational fields.Parks, S.D. (2005) "Leadership Can Be Taught". Harvard Business School Press: Boston, MA. Named "case-in-point" (CIP) teaching, this method focuses on implementing aspects of Heifetz's work within the class itself. CIP has four mai ...
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Jerome Ravetz
Jerome (Jerry) Ravetz is a philosopher of science. He is best known for his books analysing scientific knowledge from a social and ethical perspective, focusing on issues of quality. He is the co-author (with Silvio Funtowicz) of the NUSAP notational system and of Post-normal science. He is currently an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford. Life and work Ravetz was born in Philadelphia; his grandfather was a Russian-Jewish immigrant and his father a truck driver and trade union organiser. He attended Central High School and Swarthmore College. He came to England in 1950 on a Fulbright Scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied for a PhD in Pure Mathematics under the supervision of A.S. Besicovitch. In 1955 his passport was taken away, as part of the wave of McCarthyism; it was returned in 1958 and in 1961 he became a British citizen. He taught mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania and then ...
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Herbert A
Herbert may refer to: People * Herbert (musician), a pseudonym of Matthew Herbert * Herbert (given name) * Herbert (surname) Places Antarctica * Herbert Mountains, Coats Land * Herbert Sound, Graham Land Australia * Herbert, Northern Territory, a rural locality * Herbert, South Australia. former government town * Division of Herbert, an electoral district in Queensland * Herbert River, a river in Queensland * County of Herbert, a cadastral unit in South Australia Canada * Herbert, Saskatchewan, Canada, a town * Herbert Road, St. Albert, Canada New Zealand * Herbert, New Zealand, a town * Mount Herbert (New Zealand) United States * Herbert, Illinois, an unincorporated community * Herbert, Michigan, a former settlement * Herbert Creek, a stream in South Dakota * Herbert Island, Alaska Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Herbert (Disney character) * Herbert Pocket, a character in the Charles Dickens novel ''Great Expectations'' * Herbert West ...
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Wicked Problem
In planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; "wicked" does not indicate evil, but rather resistance to resolution. Another definition is "a problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point". Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems. Due to their complexity, wicked problems are often characterized by organized irresponsibility. The phrase was originally used in social planning. Its modern sense was introduced in 1967 by C. West Churchman in a guest editorial he wrote in the journal ''Management Science''. He explains that "The adjective 'wicked' is supposed to describe the mischievous and even evil qualit ...
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