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What’s New
June 2008
We're back!
Our apologies to anyone trying to access this site during late May 2008. Our former ISP went out of business and took our files and our domain with it. It's been fun pulling everything back together again ;-)

This website is under construction. Thanks for your understanding!

Structured Decision Making, or SDM, is an organized approach to identifying and evaluating creative options and making choices in complex decision situations.

SDM is designed to deliver insight to decision makers about how well their objectives may be satisfied by potential alternative courses of action. It helps find 'win-win' solutions across groups, clarifies the irreducible trade-offs that may exist between alternate potential courses of action and helps to communicate  how people view these various options.

This website has been developed to highlight some key concepts and ideas, to remove any mystery from SDM and to act as a resource to practitioners or to those considering its use. This website's content focus is on environmental resource management decisions, though the principles of SDM are universal and can be applied in any context.

Key Ideas
SDM uses rigorous methods developed in the decision sciences

SDM is particularly useful for decisions involving the integration of technical analysis with value-based deliberations

SDM has been adapted for on-ground decisions and is helpful for facilitating multi-disciplinary technical planning and stakeholder involvement

The goal of an SDM process is to inform difficult choices, and to make them more transparent and efficient 


A Guide to What's Here

Our SDM Overview is a quick introduction to structured decision making.

The Steps section is an overview of the key steps of a typical SDM process. Dig down for more detailed ideas on some of the issues involved.

In the Tools section you'll find a brief inventory of some of the tools and techniques available to make the application of SDM to real-world situations a little easier.

Applications has a number of case studies that highlight different aspects of applying structured decision making in resource management contexts.

Drop us a line via the Contact link.

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