How Does Concept Star work?

Many problems involve a large number of interrelated issues or ideas. The human brain at its best can deal with a maximum of about 7 ideas at once. This limits our ability to understand the full situation and formulate productive solutions that are grounded in logic.

Concept Star software allows you to analyze all of the ideas using the pair-wise comparison method and transforms the complex issue into a structured relationship model that is easier to understand. Because Concept Star links ideas rather than reject, eliminate or rank them, seemingly opposing ideas can find their place in the overall picture. This fact also reduces the friction between various people or teams representing different point of views. This inclusive nature of Concept Star is unique. It helps to provide a deeper understanding of the full issue-space. This visual model created by Concept Star is then used to formulate solutions to deal with the complex problem at hand. The following figure illustrates the process:

	1.Generate many ideas 2.Prioritize & select ideas 3.Use Concept Star to guide pair-wise analysis and create relationship model 4.Develop project plan for solution implementation

Concept Star is frequently used in a group environment to understand and resolve complex issues because a wider knowledge base is available to address the problem. Concept Star helps to extract the group's knowledge by focussing discussion on only one pair of issues at a time. The process of constructing a relationship map creates clarity and common understanding for the group. Almost always, a great deal of communication and analysis takes place during an Concept Star session and a common language emerges as a result.

The design of Concept Star is based on a powerful theory called Interpretive Structural Modeling as well as many years of practical consulting experience in executive decision making and organizational problem solving. Concept Star is easy to learn and apply due to its intuitive human interface. It is suitable for both individual or group use.

Concept Star is Unique

• It works directly with ideas and qualitative or subjective analysis, rather than attempting to convert ideas to numeric data which is seldom possible in complex situations.
• It links ideas to synthesize an overall picture of the situation, rather than breaking ideas down into small parts.
• It uses pair-wise analysis of ideas to transform a complex issue or problem involving a lot of ideas into a structured model that is easier to understand and put to practical use.
• New options are often uncovered by this technique.
• It does not attempt to discard ideas prematurely, but can carry conflicting ideas into the solution space. (These ideas can often be used to augment the solution rather than create conflict in the group).
• During the voting(pair-wise analysis) phase, a lot of discussion and clarification happens. This surfaces new information and insights for the participants. They learn a lot more about the issues than with other group processes. This is one of the reasons that Concept Star based process helps consensus building more than ordinary processes used by facilitators.

The fundamental difference between Concept Star based problem solving and commonly used problem solving methods is shown in the figure below:

Most processes and tools do a good job of generating ideas, and analyzing these individually, but they do not analyze and build the relationships or links between ideas. Instead, these processes dive directly into grouping and prioritizing activities and quantitative analyses. By neglecting to analyze the relationships between ideas, the opportunity for gaining a thorough understanding of the situation is lost. Concept Star based process allows for structured analysis of ideas and their relationships before prioritization and action planning.

People who have participated in Concept Star sessions, typically, say that they enjoyed the session and got more out of it than from ordinary sessions. They gained more insights, better clarification of key issues and effective action plans.

Concept Star decision support system is easy to learn & use. Concept Star professional software and training package is reasonably priced and includes all materials needed to learn and use Concept Star effectively.