So, after hearing the most common pitfalls, take some time to critically look at your own work.

There are two things you really need to check.

The first one is:
Is there anything that looks like a solution in one of your goal hierarchies? And if so, did this solution make it to your set of criteria? You can quickly recognize this if your the overall goal for instance is sustainable energy and one of your criteria is ‘number of wind turbines’. Clearly, more wind turbines may contribute to more sustainable energy, however, if you measure the ‘amount of sustainability’ of the energy in terms of how many wind turbines have been built, you focus on a solution and that is not the point of criteria. With criteria you want to compare different promising ideas for sustainable energy. Building wind turbines might be of them. If one of your criteria is then ‘number of wind turbines’ you run into trouble, as ‘building wind turbines’ (a potentially interesting solution or system change in this case) will always score very well on the criterion ‘number of wind turbines’. However, none of the other potential system changes will score on this criterion, so your comparison does not work.

The second one is:
Check whether your goal hierarchies do not have a too general highest goal like ‘better world’. Also the highest goal needs to be related to the complex situation you are analysing. If not, your goal hierarchy becomes so general that you end up with far too many irrelevant criteria.

OK, now check your goal hierarchies, make the changes you think are necessary and put your new set of criteria below.