Inspired or foolhardy: sensemaking, confidence and entrepreneurs' decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of confidence in how both new and experienced entrepreneurs interpret and make sense of their business environment to inform decision-making. We illustrate our conceptual arguments with descriptive results from a large-scale (n = 6289) survey on entrepreneurs' perception of business performance and their decisions taken at a time of uncertainty in an economic downturn. Quantitative findings are stratified along experiential lines to explore heterogeneity in entrepreneurial decision-making and directly inform our conceptual arguments, while qualitative data from open questions are used to explain the role of confidence. Newer entrepreneurs are found to be more optimistic in the face of environmental risk, which impacts on their decision-making and innovative capabilities. However, the more experienced entrepreneurs warily maintain margin and restructure to adapt to environmental changes. Instead of looking directly at the confidence of individuals, we show how confidence impacts sensemaking, and ultimately, decision-making. These insights inform research on the behaviour of novice and experienced entrepreneurs in relation to innovative business activities. Specifically, blanket assumptions on the role of confidence may be misplaced as its impact changes with experience to alter how entrepreneurs make sense of their environment

Challenges in collaborative modeling: A literature review

Modeling is a key activity in conceptual design and system design. Users as well as stakeholders, experts and entrepreneurs need to be able to create shared understanding about a system representation. In this paper we conducted a literature review to provide an overview of studies in which collaborative modeling efforts have been conducted to give first insights in the challenges of collaborative modeling, specifically with respect to group composition, collaboration & participation methods, modeling methods and quality in collaborative modeling. We found a critical challenge in dealing with the lack of modeling skills, such as having a modeler to support the group, or create the model for the group versus training to empower participants to actively participate in the modeling effort, and another critical challenge in resolving conflicting (parts of) models and integration of submodels or models from different perspectives. The overview of challenges presented in this paper will inspire the design of methods and support systems that will ultimately advance the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative modeling tasks

An Ontology for Collaborative Decision Making

International audienceThis article focuses on an ontology construction for collaborative decision making. To do this, a state of the art on collaborative decision-making, on ontology engineering and on collaboration engineering has been done. An eight-step ontology development methodology was adopted and implemented to build the ontology. A corpus made up of more than seventy-seven (77) documents was the starting point for the extraction of terms from the ontology and the UML (Unified Modeling Language) language served as a description language of our ontology. This ontology is intended to be the starting point for a facilitation support system in a Collaborative Decision Making process. The aim of the work is to produce a new system according the "Facilitator in the box" paradigm

A Voting Procedures Recommender System for Decision-making

International audienceFacilitation is a critical element in decision-making using the tools of new technology. Voting is a tool commonly used in decision making. The choice of a voting procedure is not easy for a novice facilitator. So it is interesting to propose a recommendation system that assists novice facilitators in their voting procedures choice. There are several voting procedures, some of which are difficult to explain and which can elect different options or alternatives. The best choice is one whose election is easily accepted by the group. Voting in social choice theory is a widely studied discipline whose principles are often complex and difficult to explain at a decision-making meeting. So, a recommendation system can alleviate the facilitator on his work in finding adequate voting procedure to be applied in a group decision

An assessment framework for practicing facilitator

There is an on-going recognition of the need for facilitation to support different group settings. However, the skills and expertise required to successfully facilitate a group of participants to achieve their goal is a challenging task to achieve. There are a number of barriers towards facilitation: A facilitator needs to operate at many different levels at the same time; understand the politics within the group; encourage interaction within the group; and guide participants through tasks and activities, while balancing the needs of the group and the client to reach real outcomes. One of the key competences of a facilitator is flexibility, to adapt to varying circumstances. The complexity and dynamic nature of delivering an appropriate and effective facilitation service makes it therefore difficult to assess the facilitator’s performance in any facilitated session. In this paper we describe a framework in the form of an artefact developed to aid the facilitators in assessing their own performance in different meetings. Facilitation Service Assessment Framework (FSAF) allows facilitators to define metrics and measures in the context of facilitator’s goals. The assessment framework consists of a structure and a process which facilitators use to apply the framework to facilitation scenarios. Finally, the paper describes how experts evaluated FSAF in alternative scenarios by running a survey and then by conducting interviews