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Society For Risk Analysis Annual Meeting 2007

Risk 007: Agents of Analysis

Session Schedule & Abstracts

* Disclaimer: All presentations represent the views of the authors, and not the organizations that support their research. Please apply the standard disclaimer that any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations in abstracts, posters, and presentations at the meeting are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other organization or agency. Meeting attendees and authors should be aware that this disclaimer is intended to apply to all abstracts contained in this document. Authors who wish to emphasize this disclaimer should do so in their presentation or poster. In an effort to make the abstracts as concise as possible and easy for meeting participants to read, the abstracts have been formatted such that they exclude references to papers, affiliations, and/or funding sources. Authors who wish to provide attendees with this information should do so in their presentation or poster.

Common abbreviations

M2-H Military and Corporate Decision Making at the Crossroads Room: 207A   10:30 AM - Noon

Chair(s): TBD

M2-H.2  10:50  Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis Tools to Support Decision Making in Corporate and Military Settings. Linkov I*, Shilling C, Slavin D, Bennett E; Intertox Inc., 83 Winchester Street Suite 1., Brookline, MA 02446, ilinkov@intertox.com; Pfizer Inc., Sandwich, UK.   linkov@ Abstract: The goal of this paper is to introduce fundamentals and propose applications of mental modeling, risk assessment and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to improve credibility, efficiency and transparency of strategic and tactical decisions in both corporate and military settings. Efficient and effective development of new products requires making strategic decisions by individuals and teams consisting of scientists and managers from multiple disciplines in competitive economic and social environments. Business leaders are increasingly involved in operations in which they must make real-time decisions, and at the same time, be interdependent with the cultures of internal corporate structures and external stakeholders (e.g., governmental agencies, industrial partners, and customers). An additional challenge is increasing information availability and uncertainty. If past decisions were based on information available from a single information stream, competing information streams or information overflow, it may have impaired the direction of the new product in development. Developing a framework for resource prioritization and selection by making management decisions with uncertainty and incomplete information is the current challenge for both military and industry. The proposed risk-based decision analysis framework uses risk as the major decision criteria and utilizes MCDA methods for integrating heterogeneous scientific information, as well as explicitly incorporating both professional and stakeholder value judgments in deciding on the best course of decision making action. Additionally, both military and corporate leaders may benefit from using MCDA to add formalism and structure to their planning and communication challenges, including a quantitative assessment of a) what must be modeled and how; b) who must be involved; and c) what rules must be done, given the goals.

M2-H.4  11:30  Applying war gaming to the corporate environment to address uncertainty and risk management. Sheppard B*; Simfore Ltd   ben.sheppard@simfore.com Abstract: War gaming is a tried and tested practice the military use that offers considerable value for the corporate environment. This approach provides a simplified and structured framework to identify probable outcomes from the interaction of qualitative variables and uncertainties to pressure test and identify new strategies and approaches. For the armed forces, this allows for research and training in new strategic and technological developments, while enhancing their abilities to conduct operations. The presentation will provide an overview of ways the war gaming methodology has been adapted into a business development and risk management tool for the commercial environment including the pharmaceutical industry and public health sector. War gaming enables businesses to address uncertainty and inform decision making processes. A case study will be discussed on the use of war gaming by Pfizer to examine conditions under which precision medicines (drug-diagnostic combination therapy) could be attractive to the organisation. This case study includes assessing internal and external risks and benefits and decision processes exploring how the external environment could respond. The latter entailed regulatory groups, patient groups, and key public health bodies. Pfizer has benefited from running a number of simulations to assist in their decision making process from product development through to contingency planning. The interactive simulations are adapted from scenario planning, war gaming and financial modelling to enable organisations and stakeholders to develop and validate novel strategies in a hypothetical but credible exercise. They are typically 'played' over one or two days covering a period of weeks, months of years in sequential time periods. The simulations can either be used to explore new strategies or as a training tool. The output value derives from three distinct phases: simulation development, execution and analysis.

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