Abstract for: New Scripts for Group Model Building – Online Questionnaires and Open Loops

We introduce prototypes of two new GMB-scripts that help overcome the following issues: Firstly, GMB-workshop participants often have little time available. Building a seed model beforehand to use workshop time more efficiently meets the difficulty that participants’ time for eliciting information for seed model construction may also be limited. To alleviate this, the first script guides on how to use online questionnaires to enable to collect necessary information from the participants before the GMB-workshop starts. Secondly, sometimes undesirable system behavior results from potential feedback loops that are not closed in the real system. Existing scripts however, aim at eliciting closed feedback loops only. The second script helps participants find open loops the closure of which may improve system behavior. The creativity for finding policy options that is unleashed by this script can be used by subsequent scripts.