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In the knowledge economy, teams play a central role in decisions made within and across organisations. The reason why teams with diverse compositions are often used is arguably their ability to develop solutions that none of their members could have produced alone. Systems design, strategy and policy development, risk management, and innovation are just a few of the areas that call for team decisions. Unfortunately, a considerable number of behavioural research studies show that teamwork is fraught with difficulties. Teams often underestimate their fallibility, struggle with conflict, or are unable to share and integrate critical information effectively. Indeed, the evidence shows that two out of three teams do not achieve their goals and half of organisational decisions – many of which are team decisions – fail.

In this book, the authors draw from research in psychology, decision and systems sciences – as well as their own research and consulting work that spans more than 20 years – to show how designed interventions can enable team decision making to become rigorous, transparent, and defensible. They cover theory and practice regarding the design, delivery, and evaluation of interventions to support team decision making in situations of varied complexity. Written as an applied resource for researchers and advanced students in particular, this book offers a guide to proven interventions that enhance the process of making team decisions and increase the chances of superior team results.

AbstractThe increasing need to manage biosecurity threats, such as diseases, zoonoses, and biological weapons, poses serious challenges for risk analysts and policymakers. These threats are large in number, can occur concurrently, and may cause multiple tangible and intangible impacts. They often have an emerging nature, exacerbated by incomplete evidence about their probability of occurrence and potential impacts. There is also a limited amount of time and resources available to evaluate the risks posed by each threat, and it is difficult to learn from past projects. On the other hand, there is also a need to provide policymakers with transparent and consistent threat prioritizations, together with evidence‐based recommendations. In response to these challenges, we propose a risk analysis framework for the prioritization and management of biosecurity threats. The framework encompasses key design choices that analysts may use in risk analysis projects along three dimensions: risk support, risk group, and risk organization. The framework has prescriptive value, as a design tool to inform risk analysis projects in this context, along with descriptive value, as a learning tool to understand past projects. We applied the framework prescriptively in two biosecurity threat prioritization projects for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and illustrate its descriptive value by reporting our experience of these projects as in‐depth case studies. Overall, the proposed framework provides important insights into the impact of different design choices on the success of risk analysis projects for biosecurity threat prioritizations.

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Preventive Veterinary Medicine and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.prevetmed.2012.08.007 ; The UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs supports the use of systematic tools for the prioritisation of known and well defined animal diseases to facilitate long and medium term planning of surveillance and disease control activities. The recognition that emerging events were not covered by the existing disease-specific approaches led to the establishment of the Veterinary Risk Group (VRG), constituted of government officials, and supporting structures such as the Risk Management Cycle and the Emerging Threat Highlight Report (ETHiR), to facilitate the identification, reporting and assessment of emerging threats to UK's animal health. Since its inception in November 2009 to the end of February 2011, the VRG reviewed 111 threats and vulnerabilities (T&V) reported through ETHiR. In July 2010 a decision support system (DSS) based on multi-criteria-decision-analysis (MCDA) improved ETHiR to allow the systematic prioritisation of emerging T&V. The DSS allows the regular ranking of emerging T&V by calculating a set of measurement indices related to the actual impact, possible impact on public perception and level of available capabilities associated with every T&V. The systematic characterisation of the processes leading to the assessment of T&V by the VRG has led to a consistent, auditable and transparent approach to the identification and assessment of emerging risks. The regular use of MCDA to manage a portfolio of emerging risks represents a different and novel application of MCDA in a health related context. © 2012.