In this work1, Paul Grogan and I present a framework to dissect and visualize the structural strategic components in a collective system.
What is it about?
This work studies strategic decision-making in complex systems with many actors. It presents a method for assessing two structural forces that impact strategic decisions and assisting in designing incentives to align individual actions toward favorable outcomes.
Why is it important?
We offer a method to capture the complexity of strategic decision-making and individual and collective incentives in contexts with an increasing number of actors. This approach addresses significant limitations of traditional methods when capturing strategic tradeoffs in developing large-scale systems involving many stakeholders. Our framework can help system designers anticipate and mitigate structural challenges to facilitate collaboration and lead to successful and robust engineering systems.
Perspectives
By embracing the evolving complexity and interconnectedness between independent actors in a complex engineering system, our work can serve as the basis to develop improved incentive mechanisms that recognize the challenges of managing multiple individual objectives to drive collective actions toward achieving the system’s mission. This work contributes to transdisciplinary systems science by connecting engineering design, mathematics, and the social sciences and helps advance strategic engineering design research.
Ambrosio Valencia-Romero
- Valencia-Romero A, Grogan PT (2024) The strategy dynamics of collective systems: Underlying hindrances beyond two-actor coordination. PLOS ONE 19(4): e0301394. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301394 ↩︎