A group approach for societal problem solving ...

A group approach for societal problem solving Towards an agenda for fighting crime in the innercity of Amsterdam Report 95-90

Stephan O. den Hengst Gert-Jan de Vreede Henk G. Sol

Faculteit der Technische Wiskunde en Informatica Faculty of Technical Mathematics and Informatics Technische Universiteit Delft Delft University of Technology

ISSN 0922-5641

Copyright c 1995 by the Faculty of Technical Mathematics and Informatics, Delft, The Netherlands. No part of this Journal may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means without permission from the Faculty of Technical Mathematics and Informatics, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Copies of these reports may be obtained from the bureau of the Faculty of Technical Mathematics and Informatics, Julianalaan 132, 2628 BL Delft, phone +3115784568. A selection of these reports is available in PostScript form at the Faculty’s anonymous ftp-site. They are located in the directory /pub/publications/tech-reports at ftp.twi.tudelft.nl

Delft University of Technology

REPORT 95-90 A group approach for societal problem solving Toward an agenda for fighting crime in the inner city of Amsterdam Stephan O. den Hengst Gert-Jan de Vreede Henk G. Sol

ISSN 0922-5641 Reports of the Faculty of Technical Mathematics and Informatics no. 95-90 Delft 1995

Keywords: Group support systems, problem solving, case study, Strategic Assumption Surfacing and Testing (SAST).

Abstract:

New insights in the world of organized crime and the realization that they only can tackle problems in cooperation with many other actors, made the police force of the inner city of Amsterdam feel the need to get insight in the problems it is dealing with and possible solution directions. As this situation constitutes a complex problem were many actors are involved, a participative approach for this problem is followed. A number of group sessions was designed, based on the principles of the Strategic Assumption Surfacing and Testing (SAST) technique. This paper discusses the design and results of the sessions and a point to future improvements.

1. Introduction The Amsterdam Municipal Police Force combats crime according to a market oriented strategy. To do so, criminality is divided into Market I and Market II. Market I consists of the local, visible criminal activities, while the criminal activities of Market II are more 'global' and invisible. The latter is better known as organized crime. According to these markets, the organization of the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force is divided in two parts (see figure 1). The largest division is of the force is concerned with Market I. About ninety percent of the Amsterdam Municipal Police Forces labor is working in one of the 30 neighborhood teams, which are grouped together in nine districts. The other ten percent, about 400 hundred employees, is combating organized crime (Market II) and provides the neighborhood teams with several supporting services. This part of the organization is called the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). The operational activities of the CID are organized in teams which tackle problem areas such as illegal exchange offices or drug cartels. Recently, a part of the CID's responsibilities has been transferred to the districts, forming nine Local Criminal Investigation Departments (LCID). Like the CID, the LCID runs projects with special teams. The District covering the inner city of Amsterdam, District 2, has defined four key issues for their LCID projects:

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D1 D2

N1

D3

CID Direction

N2 N3 District 4 N4

D4 Information Office

Juvenile and morality squad

Neighborhood teams D5 Tactical Assistance

Team Team Team

D6

Team Team Technical Assistance

D7

Team 7 Team 8

D8 D9

Market I

Market II

Figure 1: Organization structure of the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force

1. 2. 3. 4.

Tourism and Safety. Peace disturbance. Sex industry. Organized crime.

To be able to define projects within these four areas, it is important to indicate concrete problems and possible solutions. Trying to identify these problems, the LCID of District 2 encountered some difficulties. There were two main causes underlying these difficulties: • The role of the LCID in the combat of Market II crime. As we can observe from the fourth issue, a part of the Market II focus is transferred to the districts. The main reason for this reorganization/decentralization is the discrepancy between the districts with the neighborhood teams and the CID. Because of this discrepancy small ‘talented’ criminals easily grow into the organized crime scene. The combat of the organized crime at the district level resulted in an increased need for cooperation and coordination with the central CID. Through this cooperation and coordination questions could be answered like: which part of Market II is tackled by the CID and which part by the LCID. • Many actors involved. Problems, depicted in the four issues, are complex societal problems which the police only can tackle in cooperation with many other actors. For example, the problem of pickpockets is not solved when only the police force of District 2 intensifies their activities. The pickpockets simply shift their workspace to another district. Instead, an approach is pursued in which several parties work together on the solution of a specific problem. For the pickpockets this means for example informing and instructing tourists by shops and tourist information offices in combination with a coordinated approach of the police. Additionally, town planning could be adapted to create a less hostile environment.

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Due to the above mentioned difficulties, the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force had problems to get a thorough insight in: 1. The collection of visible and hidden threatening societal trends that are relevant to District 2, the inner city of Amsterdam. 2. The possible solution directions that can help to get control over these trends. Of special importance is one solution direction: the cooperation and coordination between the District 2 and the CID. In order to help the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force with these problems, a series of three Group Decision Room (GDR) sessions has been carried out. The results of these sessions have been framed in a base document which will serve as guideline for the definition and start of new projects in District 2. This document discusses these sessions in more detail. Section 2 will elaborate the approach that is used for the organization of the sessions. The session design will be highlighted in Section 3. Additionally, Section 4 reports the session results. These results will be discussed in Section 5. In the last section, some concluding remarks are drawn.

2. Approach The approach we employed for the District 2 sessions is based on Masons and Mitroff's (1981) Strategic Assumption Surfacing and Testing (SAST). SAST is a technique which originally focuses on organizational strategy formulation. It is designed to be used in situations in which problem formulation and structuring are critical to the problem solving process. In these situations, we are dealing with complex systems of highly interdependent problems. Most organizations fail to deal with this kind of problems, which Mason and Mitroff define as wicked. According to Sol (1982) an ill-structured or wicked problem has no definitive formulation. No matter how the ill-structured problem is formulated, the problem solver comes up with a requirement for additional information. Every formulation of the ill-structured problem corresponds to a statement of the solution and vice-versa. To understand an ill-structured problem is identical to solving the problem (Sol 1982). According to Mason and Mitroff, organizations fail to deal with ill-structured or wicked problems because it is difficult to seriously challenge accepted ways of doing things; change alternatives that diverge considerably from current practice are not given systematic consideration. SAST aims to ensure that alternative policies and procedures are considered. This is necessary because the problem situation alone does not force the problem owners to generate radically different policies or themes and therefore will not lead an organization to change its preferred way of doing things [Jackson, 1991]. To achieve the obligatory consideration of alternative policies or themes, SAST is based on the following principles: 1. Opposing Perspectives. A problem situation should be viewed from opposing perspectives. Doing so, a good base for judgment about ill-structured problems will be formed. 2. Participative. The knowledge, needed to solve such a complex problem, will be widely spread, so a participative approach is necessary. 3. Integrative. Opposing perspectives and viewpoints should be synergized into an action plan. 4. Learning. The parties involved need to achieve a greater/deeper understanding of other perspectives and viewpoints of the problem situation so that they buy in into the action plan.

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Although the problem situation of organizational strategy formulation is different from the more societal problems of the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force, the principles underlying SAST are very much applicable for this situation: 1. Opposing Perspectives. With respect to the problems of the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force many parties with opposing viewpoints and interests are involved. These are for example: the police divided in CID and Districts, Justice, local government, citizens, tourists, hotel and catering industry, other companies, etc. 2. Participative. For some years, the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force was focused on criminal activities in a repressive way. Because this did not result in a lower crime rate, the focus is changed toward a more preventive and regulative approach. In order to get information which makes this approach possible, it is necessary to cooperate with other organizations. Besides, it is commonly accepted that the problems are far too complex to be dealt with by the police alone. 3. Integrative. Due to the fact that criminality needs repression or regulation, the different opposing perspectives of the actors involved must converge to an integrated action plan. 4. Learning. To prevent an action plan from just being a plan, it is necessary to create a basis for commitment as wide as possible. This is best achieved when stakeholders get an enhanced insight in the problem area. A group session in which the action plan is created, may prove to be the appropriate setting to achieve this insight. As the principles hold for the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force, we expect that the SAST technique will be helpful for the design of the sessions to be held.

3. Session design From the previous section, the group focus is apparent and offers an excellent opportunity to employ a Group Support System, such as GroupSytems V. Previous experiences in the area of strategy formulation supports this expectation, see e.g. [Eden and Ackermann 1992; Lewis and Lewis 1994; Tyran et al. 1992]. The design of the sessions is divided in three stages: group structure, session structure and additional steps.

3.1 Group Structure When a problem is tackled where many actors are involved, a selection has to be made which actors should be invited to participate. In order to gather as much information as possible about the problem area and/or to achieve a high level of commitment among the actors, a wide selection is preferable. When many actors are invited for the problem solving process, a number of groups have to be formed. SAST clearly prescribes how actors should be grouped in order to maximize their possible contribution to the problem solving process. This group formation is based on the believe that a situation with opposing perspectives is a good basis for finding creative solutions [Jackson 1991]: 1. As wide a cross-section as possible of stakeholders should be involved. It is important that as many perceptions of the problem as possible are included. 2. There should be a maximal convergence of viewpoints within groups. This promotes a group being a good environment to work. 3. There should be a maximal divergence of perspectives between groups. This leads to opposing perspectives.

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3.2 Session structure. The session structure according to SAST is divided in three stages [Jackson 1991]: • Assumption-surfacing. In this stage the different groups underpin their preferred policies and strategies. This is done by ‘stakeholder analysis’ and ‘assumption rating’. With the first technique, ‘stakeholder analysis’, each group is asked which actors are important with respect to the success or the failure of their preferred policy or strategy. After the inventarization of the stakeholders involved, the group is asked what assumptions it thinks are necessary for the stakeholders to realize their policy or strategy. With the second technique, ‘assumption rating’, the group is asked to rate the importance of the strategy and to indicate how certain they are that the assumption is justified. The results of the assumption rating is visualized in a chart as shown in figure 2. After this visualization each group will be able to identify their key-assumptions on which the success of their strategy is based. These can usually be found in the most important/least certain quadrant of the chart. Most Certain

Least Important

Most Important

Least Certain

Figure 2: Chart of the assumption rating

• Dialectical debate. In the dialectical debate stage, the different groups come together to discuss their key assumptions from the previous stage. The aim of this stage is to develop a mutual understanding of the developed policies or strategies. This is done by letting every group ‘sell’ their case by clearly identifying the most significant assumptions it is making. Next to the clarification step, an open debate follows focused on different or differently rated assumptions. After the discussion every group should consider to adjust their assumptions or the rating of the assumptions. • Synthesis. The synthesis stage is focused on the integration of the assumptions made by the different groups. The modification of the assumptions, started in the dialectical debate, is continued until the list of agreed assumptions is sufficiently long. When the debate does not converge to an commonly accepted list of assumptions, a list of points of disagreement should be drawn. This list can be used to define a strategy to resolve the disagreements. The stages of SAST are well suited for organizational strategy formulation problems, where the solution finding is formed by underpinning preferred policies and strategies in terms of stakeholders and assumptions. However when a problem space is not yet defined in terms of policies or strategies, the stages are probably too restricted to fully support the desired problem solving process. It is, therefore, necessary to start the problem solving process with an inventarization of the problem area. When the problem area is clear, it is common-sense to separate important problems from less important problems before continuing with the problem solving process. This first rough demarcation of the problem area is an important step to prevent time being spent on trivial problems. When the problem area is demarcated, stages as assumption surfacing, dialectical debate and synthesis can be performed. For the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force case, this resulted in the following session structure: 5

1. Problem identification. Participants had to identify which negative trends are of considerable importance in the District 2. 2. Prioritization. Participants had to identify the ten to fifteen most important trends. Important in this context means, that dealing with the trend is imperative. 3. Solution finding. Participants had to indicate what they thought were possible solutions for the identified negative trends. The answers had to be formulated in terms of possible projects, actors involved, information needed and expected problems. These terms correspond to the stages of SAST as shown in table 1. Solution finding SAST Possible Projects Policy or strategy Involved actors Stakeholders Needed information and expected problems Assumptions Table 1: Solution finding steps in relation to SAST stages

4. Cooperation with respect to Organized Crime. In this step, the cooperation possibilities with respect to the combat of organized crime between the central CID and the second District's local CID, are investigated. Before step one to three were taken it was commonly accepted that projects of the LCID that had to deal with organized crime, only could succeed in narrow cooperation with the CID

3.3 Additional Steps After a session usually several additional steps will be carried out. In case of the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force sessions, a great deal of the information processing was done after the session. This resulted from the constraint that the length of each session was limited to one day. The following steps were taken after the sessions: 1. Integration. The results from the three sessions were integrated into one report. 2. Synthesis. When a compromise between the different actors is achieved, it is possible to define an action plan. The realization of this compromise is facilitated by the session report and the commitment it created by the participants. Although the steps mentioned above are not performed in a group setting, they can be compared with the confrontation and synthesis stage of SAST respectively.

4. Results In this section we will briefly discuss the results of the three sessions held for the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force. To maximize the divergence of perspectives, each session included a group from a different background: 1. Management group: managers from the CID and District 2. 2. Societal group: representatives from the companies, artists and citizens from the inner city of Amsterdam. Additionally a ward-master, the director of the tourist information and a representative of the Amsterdam Central Station joined the session. 3. Practical group: police officers that patrolled the streets in the inner city. To support the sessions, we used GroupSystems V in our Group Decision Room (GDR) where up to fifteen people can meet. The meetings are accompanied by a facilitator and a chauffeur. When necessary the chauffeur typed in the essential parts of the verbal discussions.

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According to the session structure, explained in the previous section, the following steps were taken during the sessions: 1. Problem identification. For this step we used Idea Organizer (IO) with Nominal Group Technique (NGT). Participants contributed their most important ideas regarding negative trends in two rounds. In the third collection round, participants contributed the remaining, non-contributed, important ideas. Between the collection rounds the contributed ideas were discussed, rephrased, explained, joined or deleted. Additionally, they were organized in one of the following categories: tourism and safety, peace disturbance, sex industry, organized crime, local government, police force and a category ‘other’. 2. Prioritization. We used two rounds of multiple choice voting to identify the most important trends. Participants were able to make ten choices at most. This resulted, for the different groups, in the selection of 12, 10 and 12 trends respectively. 3. Solution finding. The object of this step was to identify for each of the selected high priority trends a number of solution directions in terms of the possible projects, the actors involved, the information needed and the expected problems. For this activity is time consuming, we divided each group in three subgroups. Each subgroup was asked to draw up a set of solutions for one third of the selected trends. After the solutions were drawn up by the subgroups, we asked the subgroups to thoroughly examine the solutions of the other subgroups and to further elaborate the solutions if necessary. 4. Cooperation with respect to Organized Crime. In this step, we investigated the possibilities for cooperation with respect to the combat of organized crime between the central CID and District 2's LCID. Obviously, this step was only performed with the management group. Step one, the identification of trends, resulted in seven categories with 49 trends. After voting two rounds, 22 trends were selected for the solution finding step. The categories with their individual number of trends are shown in table 2. Trend name Tourism and safety Peace disturbance Sex industry Organized crime Local government Police Force Other

No. before voting 7 6 1 4 11 12 7 Table 2: Number of identified trends per category

No. after voting 4 3 1 2 4 4 4

5. Observations and discussion In this section, we will elaborate a number of observations that can be made, and how they relate to the approach and session design.

5.1 Group structure When forming groups for a session there are two extremes. One extreme is homogeneously spreading the actors over the groups. This setting may lead to an early convergence among the actors of the problem area. It also may lead to the exchange of expertise or knowledge between the actors involved. The other extreme is the forming of groups according to the principles of SAST. Here, the object is to maximize divergence of perspectives between groups and a maximum of convergence of viewpoints within groups. For the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force sessions the SAST principles were used. This led to 22 trends. In table 3 is shown to what extent the results of the different groups were equal.

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Place of results No. of trends Results found in three sessions 6 Results found in two sessions 5 Results found in one session 11 Table 3: Equality of session results

As table 3 shows, many trends are only found in the results of one or two groups. Most of this can be explained from the background of the group. So are three out of four trends in the category local government, only indicated by the societal group. On the other hand the societal group did not indicate a trend in the category organized crime, where both the management and the practical group rated trends rather high. Striking is the fact that all the groups did indicate some trends in the category internal problems of the police. As expected the trends in the categories tourism and safety and peace disturbance were indicated by all the groups (because they are most visible to all actors). From the above mentioned differences in results, we can conclude that the background of an homogeneous group is of significant importance to the type of results obtained. Clearly more research is needed to further investigate the differences between homogeneous groups organized according to SAST and groups formed according to the first mentioned strategy. Another positive aspect of striving towards maximal converging viewpoints within groups, is the fact we may expect new groups to get acquainted more easily. This may have a positively impact on the productivity.

5.2 Session structure With respect to the session structure defined by SAST we added the problem identification stage. This stage provides us with general information about the problem area and is needed when the problem space is not yet identified. We used this stage in over 20 other sessions. We feel that, this stage is important to prevent the wrong problem being solved. To be more specific, the following advantages can be identified: • Participants will get a shared, common picture of the problem area. • It decreases the chance that parts of the problem space will not get any attention. • As we pay attention to the problem space in an early stage, choices are made sooner and explicit. A drawback of the identification stage is that it can be very undefined, very broad. This may result in information overload in terms of group feedback which can be very time consuming to organize. To prevent a possible information overload, we often use NGT when performing the identification stage. Another possible solution is to tackle the large amount of information with automatic categorizers.

5.3 Nominal Group Technique (NGT) NGT is a technique were participants create their ideas in a private space [Van de Ven and Delbecq, 1974]. Submitting the ideas to the group space is done by explicitly sending them. Dependent on the collection method, one or more ideas are accepted to be placed in the group space. Since September 1993 the authors facilitated and chauffeured many sessions. During the first sessions Idea Organizer was used frequently without any specific techniques. As groups can generate over a hundred ideas in twenty minutes, every time a large effort had to be put into discussing, rephrasing, explaining, combining and deleting the ideas. This caused a relative large amount of time being spent on these activities.

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To overcome these problems NGT was used in later sessions. Based on the differences between the early sessions and the more recent ones, we conclude that NGT reduces the amount of submitted double ideas and offers great opportunities in structuring a brainstorming process. However, we identified some drawbacks which must be considered before using NGT. One potential drawback is that NGT is a constrained brainstorming method. Because participants cannot immediately see ideas from other participants, they cannot prompt them to add more or better ideas. This may influence the quantity and the quality of the results. Another drawback was noticed in the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force case. In this case, besides from step four in the first session, we worked with three groups in identical sessions. When we define performance as the mix of quantity and quality of session results over a period of time, it can be stated that the performance in session two was significant less than in the other sessions. This was especially true in the first phase of the session where we used IO with NGT. This lack of performance is possibly explained by the fact that the second group participants were strangers to each other. When a brainstorming round started using NGT it was not possible to get quickly aquatinted to the ideas of the other participants. This idea is confirmed by the fact that after a brief brainstorming round, a discussion started which made up the lack of performance. Another confirmation of this idea can be found in a session held in June 1993 [Vreede et al. 1993], where a comparable group met. This group did not use NGT and performed well.

6. Conclusions The aim of the sessions was to get a thorough insight in visible and hidden threatening societal trends and their possible solution directions. In more general terms: to achieve insight in which problems to tackle and directions how they should be tackled. Subsequently, the parties involved have to agree on which problems are actually going to be tackled in the near future. Because of change processes, currently taking place within the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force, this last step is explicitly left for the Police Force itself. Recently the reports of Koningh and Welten (1994) and Vreede et al. (1995) were published which describe problems around the positive perspectives for the criminals, that are operating between Market I and Market II. These reports triggered the integral dialog between the CID and the Districts about an enhanced cooperation and coordination. Due to the dominance of the problems in District 2, it played a key-role in this discussion, using the results of the sessions as guidelines. Up to now this resulted in the cooperation of District 2 and the CID on two projects. A more regular basis for cooperation and coordination is envisioned for the very near future. At the end of the sessions, all participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire. Questions were asked about the design, contents, process and results of the session as well as the use of GroupSystems and attributes of groups like anonymity. Answers to questions were given on a five point scale, where five is the highest rating. In general it seems that all participants experienced the session positively (average 4.0). The results of the different question categories are shown in more detail in table 4.

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Question category Evaluation mean Evaluation std Session design 3.8 0.8 Contents of the session 3.8 0.7 Session process 4.2 0.7 Session results 3.7 0.8 GroupSystems 4.4 0.7 Attributes of groups 3.9 1.1 Table 4: Results of session evaluation per category

The differences between the quiet societal groups and the other groups are visible in the evaluation results: They rated the productivity of the session lower and the available time for oral discussion higher than the other groups. As may be expected from the used group forming principles, the members of the different groups gave a high rating to the perceived cooperation in the group. Further research From the results mentioned above we may conclude that our approach was successful. However, we feel that there are limitations to the depth in which a problem situation can be described and analyzed using verbal group support such as GroupSystems. This seems especially true when we are dealing with very large amounts of information in which (quick) insight is imperative or when the problem area is changing continuously. We, therefore, are currently involved in another study at the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force, in which we investigate the extent to which visual group modeling tools such as TeamGraphics can be used to achieve a more detailed insight into the structure of a particular problem situation [Hengst, 1994].

7. References DEN HENGST, S.O., An environment to support criminal intellingence, Research Proposal, Delft University of Technology, 1995. EDEN, C., AND F. ACKERMANN, Strategy Development and Implementation - The Role of a Group Decision Support System, in: Bostrom, R.P., R.T. Watson and S.T. Kinney (eds.), Computer Augmented Teamwork, A Guided Tour, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1992. JACKSON, M.C., Systems Methodology for the Management Sciences, Plenum Press, New York, 1991. KONINGH, B. TH. AND B.J.A.M. WELTEN, Visie op de recherchefunctie 1994, Met het oog op morgen, Regiopolitie Amsterdam/Amstelland, Amsterdam, 1994. (In Dutch) LEWIS, P.S., AND T.A. LEWIS, Using GroupSystems V to Facilitate Strategic Planning, in: From Shared Visions to Shared Realities - Proceedings of the Fifth Annual GroupSystems Users' Conference, Tucson, Arizona, March 14-16, 1994. MASON, R.O., AND I.I. MITROFF, Challenging Strategic Planning Assumptions, Wiley, New York, 1981. SOL, H.G., Simulation in Information System Development, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Groningen, 1982. TYRAN, C.K., A.R. DENNIS, D.R. VOGEL AND J.F. NUNAMAKER JR., The Application of Electronic Meeting Technology to Support Strategic Management, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 313334, 1992. VAN DE VEN, A.H., AND A. DELBECQ, The effectiveness of nominal, Delphi, and interacting group decision making processes, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 17, pp. 605-621, 1974. VREEDE, G.J., A.H. LEEUWRIK AND S.O. DEN HENGST, Bestuurlijke vernieuwingen en georganiseerde criminaliteit, Resultaten van een GDR-sessie, Delft University of Technology, 1993. (In Dutch) VREEDE, G.J., S.O. DEN HENGST, G.F.S.J. KUIJLAARS AND H.G. SOL, Onderweg naar een projectmatige aanpak van de georganiseerde criminaliteit, Conceptualisatie en specificatie huidige situatie, Delft University of Technology, january, 1995. (In Dutch)

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