Identifying strategic action in highly politicized contexts using agent-based qualitative system dynamics

In the early phases of using system dynamics models to support strategic decision-making, the emphasis is on expressing information and physical flows. These aspects appropriately dominate those managed systems that can be thought of as being mechanistic. We suggest, however, that such an emphasis, to the exclusion of equally important system attributes such as power, leverage, influence and control, is inappropriate for a large class of problems involving agents and groups of agents in the system definition. Such politicized systems are ubiquitous, particularly in the strategic context, and in managing them it is necessary to take the political aspects of power into account at an early stage in the analysis. We present an approach to this class of problems, using a qualitative procedure based on influence diagrams. This method has been extensively and successfully used in consultancy to study the motivations and powers of agents and thereby produces naturally an output directed at action planning at the strategic level. While it is complementary to numerical system dynamics approaches, it is more successful in deriving components of strategic action directly from analysis.