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Hello all,
new to the forum: I just found a link to Consideo from Stenum...
I am Grégoire Leclerc, a researcher working with French CIRAD (www.cirad.fr). Presently based in Senegal, I am moving to Costa Rica and planning to do -among other things- some qualitative modelling.
Consideo is a very interesting piece of software, I enjoyed playing with it. The only flaw I see would be perhaps that it is not doing full Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (or perhaps I missed that functionnality?). It would be quite easy to improve the Qualitative Modelling with some dynamics using the tricks of FCM. So we could explore dynamics without having to go through the quantitative modelling steps. Also it would be good if it did some network analysis (or link to e.g. Pajek), but this is another story.
So my question: is Consideo doing FCM? Or is there a scientific reason for not doing it (e.g. "it is demonstrated that dynamics based on qualitative models are useless")? Are there plans to add that functionnality?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Grégoire

Well, I have just answered your very similar question in the other thread. Our simulated insight matrixes allow to look at more dynamics than FCM does. Another reason why we do not use FCM is that we have made the experience that all the expert's tools of the last 50 years (e.g. system dynamics) still aren't widespread and they are not at all used by the actual decision makers. Thus we have to provide a tool similar to spreadsheets, mind-mapping and the like without sophisticated scientific explanations of the backgrounds. To experts it is difficult to understand but it works (any kind of decision maker is already using it and with more than 500 schools and universities already modeling a whole generation of systems thinker is coming up) and some day there will be a shift when the visualization and analysis of interconnections is a common method that needs to be refined be experts again (...).
I have to admit that we are surprised by many expert's inability to take a simple way (which I don't say because of your post but because of a current, international research project (btw. related to the European Environmental Agency) where in different groups the Consideo groups come up with great results while the expert groups get stuck in definitions and questions of choice of methodology. But that is another story....)
So, please try to simulate impulses with the simulated insight matrixes and make use of the automatic quantification of qualitative models to further differentiate the dynamics by slightly changing the automatically set formulas...
I would appreciate to get a further comparison to the approach of FCM...
Happy modeling
Kai

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Kai Neumann

Consideo