interplay of strengths. There is a much enhanced chance that specific questions of 

 importance will be addressed, that priorities for key information needs can be 

 established and that fruitful and unexpected policies can be identified. 



Organization Has to be A daptive Too 



Smallness can allow for regulated flexibility. Even problems of large scale and 

 purpose can be structured as a set of smaller functions that can be interrelated with 

 the minimum of organizational overhead. The organization we evolved by trial and 

 error involves four groups: 



The Project Team. The project team is the client who has typically been charged 

 by one institution to perform an assessment or to design and evaluate alternative 

 policies concerning a resource and environmental problem. That problem in the past 

 has been as narrow as management of a specific fisheries or wildlife population or as 

 broad as a regional analysis of a major hydro-electric, or other development that has 

 broad social, economic, environmental and resource consequences. In one instance, 

 the problem was continental — albeit involvin^the sparsely occupied continent of 

 Antarctica.'^ There is no reason why the problem could not be global (e.g. climatic 

 change resulting from CO2 accumulation) except for the need to identify alternatives 

 to the nonexistent global decision maker. 



Workshop Staff. This is the group of four to six analysts who jointly have 

 backgrounds in a number of different resource disciplines, are familiar with a 

 spectrum of analytic modeling and policy techniques, and have the talents and 

 experience to facilitate and guide groups of people in workshop and post-workshop 

 settings. 



The Core Planning Group. This is made up of the leader of the Project Team, 

 perhaps one or two of his senior staff, and the workshop staff. Their responsibility is 

 to plan and set the sequence of activities, to identify institutional opportunities and 

 problems, and to identify key participants in various institutions — experts, managers 

 and policy people. The Program Leader and Workshop Staff lead and guide the 

 workshop(s), acting as a policy analytic staff for the Participants. 



The Participants. The participants are the experts, managers and decision 

 people, typically from a number of institutions, who have key roles to play in 

 technical or decision aspects of the problem. They are the ones invited to the first 

 workshop. Their talents and experience are orchestrated to produce a first-cut model 

 of the problem that is used to assign priorities for information and data needs, model 

 development and policy analysis. 



The sequence of activities starts with a scoping session of one or two days involving 

 only the Core Planning Group. The problem is explored in some detail in order to 

 develop an initial bounding of the problem — actions, indicators, variables, spatial 

 extent and resolution, time horizon and resolution. That is done only to the degree 

 necessary to identify key participants and information requirements for the first 

 workshop. Responsibilities are assigned for collation and organization of existing 

 information, for selection and invitation of participants and for organization of the 

 workshop itself. 



The first workshop follows within two months, and over five days operates in a 

 rhythm that moves from establishing the policy framework (actions and indicators), 

 to interdisciplinary identification of variables, space and time and the inter- 

 connections between them, to development of submodels by disciplinary groups, and 

 finally to exploration of policy and information questions. The result is a set of 

 priorities for information, for modeling, analysis and policy design, together with 

 responsibilities to address those needs. 



That typically is followed by a two- to three-month period of independent work 

 leading to a second workshop with the same people to produce a refined analysis, 

 model and policies, and priorities for subsequent steps. Again, periods of inde- 



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