During this course you practice the content by applying it to a case, either your own case or one of the cases we provided.

Goal trees enable you to get a well-balanced set of criteria representing the perspectives of the involved actors. We invite you to construct goal trees using the action points Elianne provided you in the video. Also bear in mind the pitfalls she discussed. As a wrap up we have listed the action points and pitfalls below.

ACTION POINTS

1. What are possible goal trees for all of your actors?
   Create goal trees for as many actors as there are involved in your complex situation. Make sure all the lowest level goals in the tree are operational goals. I.e., that each of them is measurable. Each lowest level goal should have a unit.
   Design your goal trees in such a way that all the operational goals in the lowest layer of the goal tree can easily be transformed into criteria. Simply removing words like ‘lower’, or ‘less’ should do this.
2. Identify a set of criteria for further use in your analysis
   Identify a set of criteria for further use in your analysis. You do this by taking all the lowest level goals from all your goal trees. Remove the overlap, as there will be goals that are very similar. Of the remaining goals, remove words like ‘higher’, ‘lower’, ‘faster’, etc, so you really turn these goals into independent criteria.

PITFALLS

• Main goal too broad
• Main goal too specific
• Goal tree containing causal relations
• Goal tree containing alternatives