Confronting Project Conflicts into Success: a Complex Systems Design Approach to Resolving Stalemates

In today's complex projects development, stakeholders are often involved too late. There is also in many cases a one-sided technical focus that only focuses on the system's behaviour and does not integrate the individual stakeholder preferences. This locks stakeholders into a 'technical' conflict instead of being able to emerge from it 'socially'. Moreover, stakeholders are often involved a-posteriori in a multi-faceted development process which is untransparent, leading to stalemates or even artefacts that nobody ever wants. There is thus a need for a purely associative and a-priori design-supported approach that integrates both system's reality and stakeholder's interests within a joint agreement and technical framework. The state-of-the-art Preferendus, the computer-aided design engine embedded within the proven Open Design Systems (Odesys) methodology, is a neutral tool in confronting complexity into success. The Preferendus is deployed to co-creatively generate a best-fit-for-common-purpose solution for a number of wind farm related degrees of freedom, project constraints and given a number of stakeholder objective functions. Since, the Preferendus design potential for a stalemate depends strongly on stakeholder interest, importance and trust, in this paper an structured stakeholder judgement approach is introduced to transparently arrive at individual stakeholder weights using a choice-based conjoint analysis (CBCA) method. This method also allows for obtaining an initial estimate for the individual stakeholder preference functions. By modelling disputable exogenous factors as endogenous design parameters, it is also shown for which factors the stalemate problem is indeed both technically and socially (un)solvable, while interests and reality are conjoined.