Dealing with Real-World Complexity : Limits, Enhancements and New Approaches for Policy Makers

The increasing complexity of our environment, the globalization of diverse business processes and their intercultural embedment create challenges, higher risks and hence interdependency between a growing number of participants. This is undoubtedly reflected in the current financial crisis and its spill-over into the global economic downturn. This business and political environment leads to complex decision-making and, therefore, a need for powerful tools to find sustainable solutions. The field of system dynamics has introduced models that imitate complex decision environments. The reality, however, has shown that such models are often either too relaxed or too formalized because the information is hardly ever available in the requested accuracy. Based on policy makers’ limitations in solving real-life problems and the fact that information is rarely available in a pure quantitative form, enhancements and new approaches to remedy this are proposed by Mark Hürlimann. He introduces simple and more sophisticated static and dynamic methods to analyze complex topics. In addition a semi-quantitative approach is presented that integrates quantitative and qualitative variables in a feedback system. The author, finally, illustrates on the basis of a case study the advantages and limitations of the various approaches in a didactically sound and easily understandable way.