Conflict Transformation and Management. From Cognitive Maps to Value Trees
This addresses decision support for conflict management, offering a formal approach that is incremental in applying problem structuring methods to this domain.
The paper tackles the problem of supporting complex conflict transformation and management decisions by developing a framework that transforms cognitive maps into value trees, shifting from descriptive to prescriptive representations to construct innovative solutions.
Conflict transformation and management are complex decision processes with extremely high stakes at hand and could greatly benefit from formal approaches to decision support. For this purpose we develop a general framework about how to use problem structuring methods for such purposes. More precisely we show how to transform cognitive maps to value trees in order to promote a more design-oriented approach to decision support aiming at constructing innovative solutions for conflict management purposes. We show that our findings have a much wider validity since they allow to move from a descriptive representation of a problem situation to a more prescriptive one using formal procedures and models.