Managing Complexity through Consensus Mapping: Technology for the Structuring of Group Decisions

Writers on group decision making stress the importance of interaction during the evaluation and synthesis of ideas, but pay little attention to the structuring of ideas into organized and interrelated sets, despite the importance of such structuring for reducing the complexity group members must handle.A tool for structuring ideas, consensus mapping, is described, using a case application for illustration.The limits of the technique's applicability and its practical and research implications are discussed.