Shared Vision Models

The What and Why of Shared Vision Modeling

"The What and Why of Shared Vision Planning" is an excerpt from “The What and Why of Shared Vision Planning for Water Supply” by Dr. Kurt Stephenson.  Dr. Stephenson is an associate professor in the  Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech.  The remarks in this paper were prepared for the panel session “Collaborative Water Supply Planning: A Shared Vision Approach for the Rappahannock River Basin”, Universities Council on Water Resources, Water Security in the 21^st Century Conference, Washington, DC. July 30, 2002. 

— Kurt Stephenson (Excerpt) 

. . . The unique aspect of SVP (shared vision planning) is that the technical shared vision model (SVM) is built within a collaborative planning process, not as an outside add-on to it.  An SVM is built by the stakeholders themselves, with the assistance of technical analysts.  The process of collectively building an SVM facilitates mutual learning by the decision participants about important dynamics and relationships of the water resources system.  The process of designing SVM builds confidence in all stakeholder groups in their analytical capacity to answer “what is” questions.  Building a collective understanding of “what is”, however, is only a means to achieve the ultimate goal: negotiation and resolution among stakeholders about “what ought” to be done.  

With the assistance of technical analysts, stakeholders help design the model to address the objectives that are important to them and to provide information they need to assist in the formation and evaluation of alternatives.  Stakeholders help analysts identify key components in the water resources system and how these components are related to each other (water intakes, water supply reservoir operation, sources of water demand, recreational uses, aquatic resources, etc). The stakeholders share information about each of the components.  If the participants in the planning process believe the model is capable of answering “is” questions and believe the model sheds light on the values and interests that are important to them, the SVM can provide a forum for debate, and a better opportunity to discover, a plan that everyone can agree on.  

In order for planning participants to collectively construct a shared vision model, computer software must be both technically powerful enough to capture the complexities of the physical system, but also capable of being verified, used and manipulated by those without formal mathematical or technical computer training. The key characteristics of shared vision modeling software are flexibility, transparency, and ease of use.  Shared vision models need to be flexible, transparent, and easy to use, not for the technicians, but for the planning participants themselves.   

A shared vision model with these characteristics accomplishes the following:

• Permits planning participants to see and understand the causal relationships in the system: If A then B.  For example, decision participants will be able to trace the causal relationship between per capita water use (A) and downstream flow (B).  In conventional technical analysis, these relationships are embedded in a complex computer code.  A shared vision model displays these relationships in ways that stakeholders easily understand, visualize, and verify.  

• Relies on stakeholders in the planning and negotiation process to help produce and verify technically credible estimates of, and the functional relationships between, A and B.  What is per capita water use?  What percentage of water use is returned to the river as return flow? These are questions that the participants themselves help articulate and answer with the assistance of technical analysts.  SVM recognizes that not all knowledge is held by experts and that understanding and articulation of these functional relationships can be improved by people with a rich variety of on-the-ground experience and knowledge.

 The ability to see and articulate relationships in the system facilitates joint learning and expands understanding of how the system works for all involved stakeholders.  The model building process provides a way to identify and address cognitive conflict and builds confidence that the model can answer “what is” type questions.  Confidence is built because the relationships and components of the system are transparent and equally accessible to everyone involved in the planning process.

 SVM aims to build confidence to answer, “what is” questions with the ultimate purpose of facilitating discussion of the “ought” questions.  The characteristics of an SVM focuses attention on “ought” questions in the following ways:

• An SVM allows stakeholders, themselves, to actively manipulate the values and relationships between A and B.  If stakeholders personally want to change per capita water use from 70 gallons per day to 60 gallons per day, they can.  The stakeholder themselves can run the computer model with the new value and examine how such a change impacts downstream flow or the operation of water supply system. Point and click computer menus can make such changes easy. 

 The capacity to change key conditions in the model allows stakeholders to jointly investigate virtual “what-if” situations. For example, virtual drought simulations can be used by stakeholders to explore the severity of drought and alternatives to mitigate drought.  Stakeholders can use this flexibility and ease of use to investigate the effectiveness of different drought management alternatives and examine the circumstances that make alternatives less effective or desirable.  This flexibility would allow stakeholders to assess whether a drought curtailment plan that reduced per capita water consumption from 70 to 60 gallons per day would be able to meet the water supply and stream flow objectives.

• Perhaps most importantly, though, the SVM is flexible enough for users to add and modify elements of the program to reflect their own objectives.  A group of stakeholders might believe and accept the relationship between “A” and “B”. For example everyone might agree about the relationship between per capita water use (A) and downstream flow (B).  But stakeholders might view “B” as only an intermediate step to an end state that more directly concerns them, “C”. Downstream flow, for example, may only be of interest in the way it influences the composition of fish species.  A shared vision model would allow users to add stream flow-fish response relationship, if this is needed to facilitate the negotiation process.

 This flexibility allows the technical analysis to accommodate new and emerging concerns of the planning participants that are likely to emerge through a group learning and negotiation process. This flexibility is important because a deliberative process means that participant objectives, knowledge and experiences will evolve and change over time with the discovery process and the technical analysis must be able to handle and accommodate emerging concerns and issues.  The flexible and transparent nature of the model also requires participants to be explicit about their knowledge, objectives, interests, and values.  If the ultimate interests and objectives of the participants are transparently built in the model, it becomes clear to everyone how different water supply alternatives do or do not meet these objectives. 

This excerpt from “The What and Why of Shared Vision Planning” provides the basis for answering the questions "What is a shared vision model?" and "How can a shared vision model aid in the shared vision planning process?". Please visit the Methods section of this web site for a detailed explanation of Shared Vision Planning. The entire document is available in PDF format (pdf, 161 KB).

Reviewed 13 Feb 2009