This application of OnBalance demonstrates the power of value structures to preserve and distribute knowledge. Krysalis was invited to join a consortium to improve the decision processes surrounding environmental issues of waste disposal.

When drilling for oil, synthetic fluids are pumped through the pipe to cool and lubricate the drill head as it passes through the rock. The drill "tailings" that emerge carry the rock debris, some of which may be toxic or otherwise harmful. Bringing this waste ashore and simply dumping it is no longer considered acceptable. Disposal presents a number of options: dump it on the seabed, bury it in desert sand or pipe it ashore for treatment. Each of these options will offer advantages, which are dependent on geography, climate and terrain.

A consortium consisting of the Oil Company, Environmental Consultancy, and Krysalis was set up to investigate these options. The project lasted some 9 months covering problem structuring, data collection, analysis, software tailoring and deployment. Of special interest were the types of the multiple stakeholders involved. These consisted of Oil Company HQ, Oil Company Country Management, Marine Conservation for the prospective site, residents and fishermen near the prospective site and the Oil Company's sustainable development team.

Following a detailed analysis by of the environmental issues, a Decision Conference was used to draw all these threads together and to determine the critical issues that needed to be considered. Value scales were built to map these issues using OnBalance. The success of the project can be summed up in a quote from the Environmental Consultancy:

The power of this method is that the client is involved at an early stage and the result is not just a dry report but a living model which can be used to show others how decisions were reached. If new information arrives then it is simply added. Surprisingly, a well-built model is robust against small changes to the input data.

A by-product of this project was the resulting value tree, which it was used by the Oil Company whenever future decisions of this type needed to be made. Thus was born the "Run time version" for OnBalance.

Please contact us to see how we can help with your decision process.