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Structured Decision Making Overview
Citation:
Canfield, Timothy J. AND B. Dyson. Structured Decision Making Overview. Structured Decision Making Workshop, Seattle,WA, February 21, 2020.
Impact/Purpose:
The purpose of this workshop is to teach the stakeholders and practitioners how to structure their efforts into an approach that focuses on clearly identifying and making management decisions as opposed to doing research studies that effectively collect data but rarely lead to decisions being made at the end. By learning how to effectively structure their efforts around making decisions, this will ultimately help them to save significant time and money in addressing their goals to restore the Puget Sound.
Description:
Considerable work is being conducted to restore the Puget Sound. While the State of Washington and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is integrally involved with much of this work, there are regional and community groups that are partners in these efforts to restore Puget Sound. There are many efforts going on simultaneously by these groups to developing approaches, implementing projects and collecting data all with the focus to achieve a set of goals that each effort set forth prior to any action. Much of this work though ends up as lots of activity and expenditure of resources, both financial and human capitol, without necessary achieving these end goals. The problem is not with the efforts expended, but that at the onset of the efforts there was not a clear articulation of the decisions that had to be made or the fundamental objectives that the groups were ultimately trying to achieve. This is where the use of a Structured Decision Making (SDM) approach would help to focus these efforts. We will be conducting a workshop with several of the local community groups to present an overview of Structured Decision Making and how it would help them focus their efforts. As part of this workshop we will use of the EPA developed SDM too DASEES to help them learn to capture what decisions they need to make, what their specific objectives are for each of the efforts they are working on and how they can take this tool and apply it across all their efforts to better focus their work and achieve specific outcomes.