Why OA?

Consider the following problem:

Imagine you’re a military commander in charge of evacuating 20,000 people before a nearby volcano erupts. You’ll have to coordinate evacuation from the Philippines to the United States. This operation will require collaboration across multiple military services and domains.

You have extensive information about this situation — i.e., you have high situation awareness. For instance, you know how many people are at each military base, and where all the seaports and airports are, and you know the positions of ships and planes that can come to the rescue, as well as who could be impacted, for better or worse, based on how you choose to solve this problem.

So, what will you do to save 20,000 lives with the best use of time and resources, and the fewest negative consequences?

You have high situation awareness — so why is this problem still so hard?

A maze with a complicated, twisted path from problem to solution

Overwhelming Effort

It’s very difficult to compare multiple options across multiple criteria.

Time Pressure

There is so much to think about — if only you had more time to plan!

Uncertain Quality

With so many factors to consider, it is hard for you to understand which options are better or worse.

This true story illustrates the need for Option Awareness — or “what to do about it”.

Why are decisions so hard to make?

It’s hard to understand the implications of interdependencies.

It’s hard to understand how the evolving situation will affect the quality of option performance.

Inherent uncertainty leads to reliance on hunches and guesstimates.

Option Awareness support reduces your level of effort by …

Enabling deep analysis of interdependencies so you can achieve desirable effects.

Automatically updating option performance to reflect an evolving situation.

Indicating which factors are most influential, so you can take actions to increase robustness and offset the risks of uncertainty.

Why is decision making so rushed?

There are too many relationships and interdependencies to consider in the available time.

Options need to be re-assessed each time the situation changes, which is time-consuming.

It takes longer than usual to analyze options with highly-uncertain outcomes.

Option Awareness support improves the speed and agility of your decision making by …

Leveraging automation to quickly assess options in the background.

Re-assessing options in near-real-time to keep pace with evolving situations.

Searching for and recommending enhancements to increase option robustness.

Why is it so hard to know if I’m making a good decision?

It’s hard to understand the implications of interdependencies.

It’s hard to understand how the evolving situation will affect the quality of option performance.

Inherent uncertainty leads to reliance on hunches and guesstimates.

Option Awareness support increases your confidence in decision quality by …

Enabling deep analysis of interdependencies so you can achieve desirable effects.

Automatically updating option performance to reflect an evolving situation.

Indicating which factors are most influential, so you can take actions to increase robustness and offset the risks of uncertainty.

SA Support alone is not sufficient. For decision makers and their teams who are faced with complicated or complex problems, it’s not enough to know “what’s going on”. With an abundance of situation data from a variety of sources being communicated through a variety of mechanisms, SA decision support tools, like dashboards, can help to manage this rich information and extract insights about what’s going on. However, without OA (or knowledge of “what to do about it”), decisions will still feel overwhelming and rushed, and decision makers will lack confidence in their quality. Here the decision maker is rolling the dice as a deadline approaches, while saying, “That’ll have to do.”

Both SA and OA Support is necessary. When decision makers have both SA and OA, they know not only “what’s going on” but also “what to do about it”. SA Support still plays an important role, with SA data often being monitored via an SA dashboard. OA Support (from Synergy Search, exploratory modeling, and option data) is presented in a Decision Space Visualization. When decision makers and their teams receive both SA and OA Support, they reduce their level of effort, decide with agility, and feel confident in the quality of their decisions. Here the decision maker is giving their stamp of approval with plenty of time to spare, while saying, “That’s effective.”

SA and OA provide different insights for decision makers — but how do we know what support decision makers need?

When SA support is necessary: Within simple systems, the hard part for the decision maker is knowing what’s going on; often, dashboards, maps, and reports provide this SA Support. Once decision makers do have sufficient SA, they can readily identify what to do about it (OA) without external OA Support. The decision maker’s past experiences and well-established rules provide all the OA Support they need.

When SA and OA Support are both necessary: External OA Support is necessary when the problem is complicated or complex. A problem is complicated when the scope expands to include many options, many domains, and many stakeholders, introducing decision making challenges around visibility, managing scope, and collaborating effectively. When faced with complex problems, decision making is even harder. These environments are volatile, subject to cascading effects and emergent phenomena. They may even be actively shaped by adversarial forces.

A continuum showing three types of problems — Simple, Complicated, and Complex — with an explanation and example for each. An example of a simple problem is an expert calculating the fuel needed for a truck delivery. An example of a complicated problem is military logistics, where multiple services are needed to coordinate deliveries across land, sea, and air. An example of a complex problem is joint combat in a contested environment.

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