Uncertainty X Design

Provides insights, scenarios, and applications to help students embrace uncertainty and become creative authors of their own futures.

In Uncertainty by Design Limor Samimian-Darash presents cases of the use of scenario technology in the fields of security and emergency preparedness, energy, and health by analyzing scenario narratives and practices at the National Emergency Management Authority in Israel, the World Health Organization's Regional Office for Europe, and the World Energy Council. Humankind has long struggled with the uncertainty of the future, with how to foresee the future, imagine alternatives, or prepare for and guard against undesirable eventualities. Scenario—or scenario planning—emerged in recent decades to become a widespread means through which states, large corporations, and local organizations imagine and prepare for the future. The scenario technology cases examined in Uncertainty by Design provide a useful lens through which to view contemporary efforts to engage in an overall journey of discovering the future, along with the modality of governing involved in these endeavors to face future uncertainties. Collectively, they enable us to understand in depth how scenarios express a new governing modality.

Today's business environment involves design decisions with significant uncertainty. To succeed, decision-makers should replace deterministic methods with a risk-based approach that accounts for the decision maker¿s risk tolerance. In many problems, it is impractical to collect data because rare or one-time events are involved. Therefore, we need a methodology to model uncertainty and make choices when we have limited information. This methodology must use all available information and rely only on assumptions that are supported by evidence. This book explains theories and tools to represent uncertainty using both data and expert judgment. It teaches the reader how to make design or business decisions when there is limited information with these tools. Readers will learn a structured, risk-based approach, which is based on common sense principles, for design and business decisions. These decisions are consistent with the decision-maker¿s risk attitude. The book is exceptionally suited as educational material because it uses everyday language and real-life examples to elucidate concepts. It demonstrates how these concepts touch our lives through many practical examples, questions and exercises. These are designed to help students learn that first they should understand a problem and then establish a strategy for solving it, instead of using trial-and-error approaches. This volume is intended for undergraduate and graduate courses in mechanical, civil, industrial, aerospace, and ocean engineering and for researchers and professionals in these disciplines. It will also benefit managers and students in business administration who want to make good decisions with limited information.

Probabilistic and Randomized Methods for Design under Uncertainty is a collection of contributions from the world’s leading experts in a fast-emerging branch of control engineering and operations research. The book will be bought by university researchers and lecturers along with graduate students in control engineering and operational research.

Today's business environment involves design decisions with significant uncertainty. To succeed, decision-makers should replace deterministic methods with a risk-based approach that accounts for the decision maker‘s risk tolerance. In many problems, it is impractical to collect data because rare or one-time events are involved. Therefore, we need a

Innovation is how businesses stay ahead of the competition and adapt to market conditions that change in unpredictable and uncertain ways. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, high-end cuisine underwent a profound transformation. Once an industry that prioritized consistency and reliability, it turned into one where constant change was a competitive necessity. A top restaurant’s reputation and success have become so closely bound up with its ability to innovate that a new organizational form, the culinary research and development team, has emerged. The best of these R&D teams continually expand the frontiers of food—they invent a constant stream of new dishes, new cooking processes and methods, and even new ways of experiencing food. How do they achieve this nonstop novelty? And what can culinary research and development teach us about how organizations innovate? Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways. A revelatory look at the R&D kitchen, The Uncertainty Mindset upends conventional wisdom about how to organize for innovation and offers practical insights for businesses trying to become innovative and adaptable.

As I write, the financial systems of the world are collapsing with still no clear indication of what the consequences will be and which measures should be taken to avoid such a crisis in the future. There seems to be agreement though, that the financial instruments introduced in the past few decades entailed far too much complexity and uncertainty and that there was too little regulatory control over the use of these instruments. Management of uncertainty with the aim of achieving self-control is the core concern of this book. It was not written with a focus on financial systems, but many concepts developed in this book are applicable to this field as well. The - neric principles of reducing, maintaining or increasing uncertainties in view of the different contingencies an organization is faced with, the fundamental issue of how much control is possible and who should be in control, and the question of how much and what kind of regulation is necessary with the overall aim of finding an appropriate balance between system stability and flexibility are at the centre of heated debates on the future of finance.