Context Sensitive Solutions: Good Process - Good Outcome

by William H. Cutler        bigbillcutler@aol.com

Why process

  • A choice: fighting skirmish by skirmish, or robust convergence to consensus?

The typical pattern in complex contentious issues is to fall into the adversarial mode, with two or more locked-in positions battling it out for supremacy.  This cannot lead to a good solution.  Either one side wins, forcing a partial solution to their advantage but negating the real needs of the losers, or a compromise is reached which is an ineffective solution satisfying no one.  Even worse, the process can mire down in endless bickering and reach no solution at all.  The remedy is to shift to the collaborative mode, based on the right attitudes and empowered by a structured decision process that converges on consensus. 

  • Getting on top of complexity

Complexity is the mother of all issues that looms over every specific issue.  The unaided human mind is very limited in its ability to comprehend a complex situation (three or more interdependent entities).  Consequently, regardless of good intentions and good attitudes, we are doomed to fail if we do not adopt a competent process framework.  The only recourse is to work in collaborative teams where the work is shared and appropriate methodologies are used to assist our meager cognitive capacity.

What is collaboration

  • Collaboration is not merely sweet agreement.

True collaboration does not mean giving up one's interests to arrive at some insipid state of agreement.  True collaboration means upholding one's interests and principles with insight as to what outcomes are really important, while respecting the interests and principles of all other parties to the conflict 

  • A good solution exists out there somewhere.  Let's work together to find it.

Collaboration is teamwork on a quest for discovery.  By searching together with open minds, it is much more likely that the novel combination of existing ideas or the innovative and creative new idea that resolves the conflict will be found.  At worst, the compromise that is acceptable to all and does serious harm to none will emerge.

  • Collaboration gets me a better deal than fighting, resisting or walking away.

The temptation, whether out of fear, anger, or conviction that I hold superior power, is to fall back into the old adversarial ways.  To counter that temptation, consider the likely outcome.  Unless I hold superior power, to remain adversarial in a collaborative milieu is to marginalize myself.  Very likely, I will be left out of the deal.  If I hold superior power, I may be able to prevail - this time.  But what are the long-term consequences?

Authority and accountability (the elephant in the room)

  • By statute, by sponsorship (purse-strings), or by democratic principles?

Clearly, by statute the High Speed Rail Authority holds the final authority over all decisions to be made in defining and implementing the HSR system.  As a consequence, the Authority is, in the final judgment, also accountable for the outcome of those decisions.  Further, as a practical matter, through control of the purse-strings, the Authority determines what does and does not happen.  Ultimately, however, democratic principles can prevail, provided the necessary effort is expended at the grassroots.  The Authority is accountable to elected officials, who are accountable to their constituents.  The Authority is also responsive to public pressure as organized at the grassroots, expressed through informal and formal contacts and reviews with the Authority, advocated through political channels, and revealed through the media.

  •  Ideally, the process leader is independent and disinterested. 

Ideally, the process leader would be above the issue, having no ax to grind, no position to advance.  The process leader's only motivation would be to reach a good resolution of the issue, which adequately satisfies the primary need and equitably serves the interests of all stakeholders.  In practice with the HSR issue, this ideal is obviously not the case.  The process leader, the High Speed Rail Authority, is also the dominant stakeholder.  The only recourse in this case is to form working agreements between the Authority and the other stakeholders that will define the dual roles of the Authority as both process leader and dominant stakeholder, maintaining as much separation as possible between those roles.  The vigilance of the grassroots stakeholders is the key to maintaining this separation.  These agreements will, of course, work to the advantage of the grassroots stakeholders.  They will also work to the advantage of the Authority by bringing the information resources and constructive energies of the grassroots into the project.

Qualities of a good process

  • Inclusive, thorough, open, transparent, beginning-to-end stakeholder engagement.  (Issue: Trust)

Stakeholder engagement is the foundation of good public solution-discovery for complex contentious issues.  Serving the stakeholders is the primary purpose of the project.  However, for both the self-confident public leader and the cubicle-bound expert, the thought of relating to pesky stakeholders is irksome.  Nevertheless, stakeholders are an invaluable resource and a potential source of opposition to convert into creative energy.  The overwhelming cause of failure to resolve public issues is failure to engage the stakeholders.  Best practice is to bring in stakeholders at the very beginning and keep them engaged as advisors and reviewers throughout the process.  The issue is trust.  Without trust the project is headed for big trouble. With trust, excellence beyond expectation is in reach.

  • Values before engineering (Issue: Goals before means)

Engineering is easy.  Clarifying values and expressing them in terms that guide engineering is difficult.  Commitment to an engineered solution before values are clear and the solution-qualities that realize those values are known is the invitation to disaster.  The issue is establishing goals before selecting the means.

  •   Logically and technically sound process structure (Issue: Complexity)

Human beings are ornery and thrive on contention.  Human beings are ill equipped mentally and emotionally to deal with complexity.  A disciplined, reasoned stepwise approach to working through an issue is no fun, but it is the only way.  We are subject to the twin sins of Plunging and Lunging.  We are more comfortable with plunging into familiar detail than we are with keeping focus on the big, complex and ambiguous picture.  We enjoy grabbing our own simple and self-contained pet solution and lunging off with it, bickering with other "lungers" bearing their own pet solutions.  The salvation from these sins is a disciplined process that leads us through the problem in orderly manner.  Fortunately the principles of such a disciplined process are known in many fields (although unfortunately not in politics).  Context Sensitive Solutions is one of the better manifestations.  The issue is employing a process that is competent to deal with complexity.  

  • Incrementally builds consensus (Issue: Contention)

A good process addresses the universal decision-types inherent in the issue in logical sequence (see Steps of a Good Process, below).  It reaches consensus on the decision made at each step before moving on to the next, automatically arriving at consensus on the final solution.  This gets to the best solution, more quickly and effectively, than any other process strategy.  In particular, it is better than crafting the solution behind closed doors and exposing it to public review only at a few review points.  The issue is contention, which is best managed and harnessed for creative output through a process of incremental consensus-building.

  •  Agreements captured in concrete products, audit trail (Issue: Closure)

A good process has specific concrete products at each step in the process.  This practice embodies the agreements reached along the way that add up to the final agreement, and captures the information that justifies those agreements.  The benefits are to make progress visible and measurable, to justify agreements to critics and thereby minimize possible disruption, to enable assessment of the consequences if it becomes necessary to revisit agreements, and to have full documentation of the solution to support its implementation.  The issue is closure: building the solution from base upward as an edifice of strong building blocks which are demonstrably reliable and need not be questioned as support for the levels above.

  • Gets to the solution better, faster, cheaper (Issue: Effectiveness)

A process that anticipates and addresses all the salient decisions in logical relationship gets to a better solution.  A process that encourages free creativity gets to a better solution.  A process that builds a firm base for each subsequent step and avoids contention gets there quicker.  A process that efficiently uses resources is cheaper.  The issue is effectiveness in getting the job done.

  • Has clear process metrics (Issue: Control)

Is the process on track according to the Plan, with regard to completing tasks on time and staying within budget?  Is the Plan as originally conceived still the right Plan in terms of its goals and the tasks to reach the goals, or does it need to change?  These questions need to be asked continually, and there need to be objective measures that can return conclusive answers.  The design of the process must build-in attributes that can be measured, the measures need to be identified, the data must be gathered, and appropriate action taken as a consequence.  In accordance with the principle "We manage what we can measure," we must decide what needs to be managed, and then put the metrics in place to do it.  The issue is Control, to be sure we are as efficient and effective as possible in arriving together at the destination we want.

A Matrix of Process Qualities and Steps

Does each step in the process (below) exhibit each process quality (above) as applicable?  Ask this question in designing the specifics of the Plan for creating the HSR system.

Context Sensitive Solutions: Structured decision-making

Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) is a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach that involves all stakeholders in providing a transportation facility that fits its setting.  It is an approach that leads to preserving and enhancing scenic, aesthetic, historic, community, and environmental resources, while improving or maintaining safety, mobility, and infrastructure conditions.

The decision structure embodied in Context Sensitive Solutions provides an organizing principle for the progression from initial problem awareness to consensus on a selected solution.  This decision structure is very general, universal and powerful.  It occurs in many fields in addition to transportation, such as systems engineering, architecture and urban planning, and family counseling.  The decision structure consists of certain universal types of decisions which are addressed in sequence, achieving (at least provisional) closure on each before proceeding to the next.  Closure on each step means that all essential work has been completed and the stakeholders are at consensus with the conclusion reached.  Final closure is not achieved with a single pass through the structure.  All the necessary information will not be available at the outset, and it is human nature to jump ahead to future steps and revisit the past, rather than to stay focused on the current step.  As a consequence, initial closure on each step is provisional, but a final pass at the end is made to be sure everyone is on board with the decisions and they all have been made properly. 

The steps of Context Sensitive Solutions

1. Understand the problem: Mission and Definition of Success

Bring in all the stakeholders.  Identify stakeholders by type or individual identity.  Employ active processes to bring in all stakeholders that need to be a part of the process, to be sure representation is complete and that no useful inputs are overlooked.

Discover the stakeholders' heartfelt interests, values and priorities.  Regarding any aspect of the problem or any aspect of the solution, how do the stakeholders see it affecting their lives, either positively or negatively?  What basic values are behind this assessment of impact?  Where aspects of the problem definition or solution appear to be in conflict, what are the priorities that might apply to resolving the conflict?  Make it personal, avoiding general principles or ideologies.

Define the problem and the mission.  What is it about the current state of affairs that is untenable? What are the causes, and how do those causes link in a network of cause-and-effect? When the problem has been extinguished, what will it look like? Having so defined the problem, condense it into a brief Mission Statement of what needs to be done, how, and by whom.  Note, in the case of HSR there really is no problem, other than, perhaps, lack of a conceptually better mode of intercity travel.  In this case the process might start directly with the Mission Statement.
Create a Definition of Success - in terms of the desired qualities of outcomes.  This is the product that answers the question "When a good solution shows up, how will we know it when we see it?" It also serves as the first step in creating the requirements to be fulfilled by the designers of the technical and operational elements of the solution.  It is in terms of qualities (adjectives) of a successful solution, both positive qualities to be delivered and negative qualities to be avoided.  The latter are particularly important because they are the means to convert the objections of opponents to any particular solution into constructive input to the process of finding a solution that is acceptable to all.  The Definition of Success is independent of and transparent to any choice of particular features (nouns) that may be part of a solution option.  Examples of qualities for High Speed Rail are "silent and invisible" and "no Manhattanization of downtown." In formulating qualities, the idea is to stretch the bounds of convention but remain realistic.  In other words, aim high but don't ask for the Moon.  
 

2. Develop evaluation criteria, the sieve for screening of alternatives

Agree on the criteria for ranking alternatives.  The objective of CSS is to select one particular alternative for the overall system concept from all the options that are available.  That selected alternative is then carried forward for detailed design and implementation.  Therefore, ranking or screening criteria are needed that delve into detail only sufficiently to discriminate one alternative from another.  The entire body of qualities in the Definition of Success may not be needed to make this discrimination, but the ranking criteria must encompass all the qualities sufficiently so that the ranking is valid.

This step also includes agreeing on the methodology for scoring alternatives against the criteria.  The stakeholders will not consider all the criteria to be of equal weight, and different stakeholders will have different weighting preferences.  The alternatives will satisfy each criterion to different degrees.  Therefore a methodology for extracting an overall ranking must be devised.  The possibilities range from simple weighted scoring to the rigor of multi-attribute decision analysis.  Mathematical techniques such as the theory of indistinct sets, or "fuzzy logic" may be employed. 

3. Develop the evaluation process to support the ranking of alternatives

Agree on the process for evaluating alternatives.  A process is set up to convert the properties and features of each solution alternative into a score vis-à-vis the ranking criteria.  What data and assumptions provide input? What models and analytic methods are used?

4. Develop alternatives, encouraging innovation, to be sure no good options are overlooked.

Agree on the process for generating alternatives.  Establish a process that creates a sufficiently wide range of alternative solutions that assurance is high that no better solution has been overlooked, yet sufficiently succinct that the screening can be done expeditiously.  Use a combination of methods that insure thoroughness in examining all existing concepts while encouraging creative innovation to find new, "outside the box" possibilities.  Then, use the process to develop a set of alternatives from which the selection will be made.

5. Perform the screening, evaluation and selection.

Execute the previously-agreed process steps.

6. Validate the selection.  Were inputs and processing sound?

Having come to the selection of a preferred alternative, validate that selection.  Are the input data sound and assumptions valid.  If data and assumptions were to vary within the range of reasonableness, would the selection change?  Have all the processes been done competently?  Are there any unforeseen risks or other flaws in the selected alternative that cannot be removed or mitigated? Perform this sort of validation at intervals throughout the process, and as a final check at the end.  

Action items

It is proposed that the PCC undertake to product the following products as a stimulus to the CHSRA and as a positive contribution to advancing the question of HSR on the Peninsula to a satisfactory conclusion

  • Definition of Success (Begin today in the Breakout session)
  • Screening criteria
  • Methodology for development of alternatives
  • Methodology for evaluation of alternatives

It is proposed that the PCC undertake the following actions in collaboration with the CHSRA

  • Resolve the issue of decision authority
  • Support implementation of Context Sensitive Solutions. 
    The primary issue is how to meld CSS with the existing CHSRA process that has already accomplished, to varying degrees, tasks called for under the steps of CSS.
    • Set up a task team with CHSRA staff and key stakeholders to support the Policymaker Working Group
    • Perform training for the task team
    • Plan the CSS implementation
    • Implement CSS within the HSR Project
    • Monitor the implementation of CSS and adjust as necessary