Dr Alistair Fletcher of CSIRO Petroleum has developed iiris, a new suite of decision-making software for the oil industry, to provide a simple, powerful visual representation of evidence and belief for any management challenge.
"We're dealing with classic questions like: what's the single most important factor to reduce risk? Where did these numbers come from? Have we got any evidence to prove this will work? Where are we weakest? Are we really ready to take this decision? How can we be sure our assumptions are correct? And so on."
"The iiris approach captures not only values representing the user's strength of belief - but also the reasons behind them," Dr Fletcher explains. "This turns it into an audit tool, and recognises that management is a process - not an event; that decisions don't just happen, but mature over time, as gut feel, intuition and judgment develop in the light of better information and improved processes.
"It provides a snapshot of the state of health of a process that can prompt action to be taken. As those actions lead to better evidence or clarity, iiris can be updated and become a living, repeatable and auditable guide for managers."
The iiris approach has three main elements:
a process model of the management process highlighting dependencies; a record of the attributes of the process; a rich uncertainty calculus for the integration of uncertainties.
The uncertainties are expressed in a way that allows the evidence for success to be separated from the evidence against success.
The attributes of the process include: people issues - players and points of view, clients, stakeholders.
objectives and criteria for success - how will we know if this has been a real success? hazards and vulnerabilities - what are the 'banana skins' on which we might slip up? timing and resourcing - what is required of us and what are the constraints?
"The importance of these attributes is clear when we consider the cause of problems," Dr Fletcher says.
"It is very surprising how in many sectors of industry, things still go wrong because processes are not clearly identified and their objectives and criteria for success are not explicitly stated."
Dr Fletcher emphasises the new approach isn't just another decision-making tool - it's an entirely new process and methodology.
"It's the first time that gut feel or intuition has been objectively modelled in this way. It can be used for almost any management task from strategic planning to project management.
"It can also tell you how firm a grip management has on the situation.
"It's fast, objective and auditable and, best of all, it puts the decision in the hands of the whole team, and empowers them to use their skills, to interact and to take part in the decision."
Because the underpinning technology stores all the reasons behind the judgments being made, it has big implications for corporate learning - and allows companies to tap the wisdom and experience of managers who may have left, retired or been promoted into other jobs.
"That way it can build the collective intuition and experience of the whole organisation, even though staff may be constantly changing," Dr Fletcher says.
In a recent independent market test exercise carried out for CSIRO by Nightingale Consulting, initial responses to the new decision-making approach from the oil and gas industry have been extremely positive. Three companies wish to trial the new process on pilot projects.