So, after hearing the three most common pitfalls for this week’s part of the course, let me help you with critically looking at your own work through the following steps.

As I said, there are three things you really need to check.

The first one is:
In the situations that you considered analyzing during this course, you may have focused too much on very difficult situations, however, this course helps you in dealing with complexity. Complexity is not about difficult or easy situations, complexity is all about whether in situations there is something like ‘the correct description of the situation’ or ‘the best way to change it’. Check the case you identified and selected for this. As this might be your first encounter with complexity and analyzing it, it might be worthwhile to take an easier complex situation to analyze, rather than a very difficult situation

The second one is:
Check whether the stakeholders you identified are not too alike, so  as to really get some new perspectives on the complex situation instead of all the same ones.

The third one is:
Check your dilemmatic description of the complex situation for specific ideas for ‘how’ to change the situation. If you face a complex problem in your situation, you might have already mentioned the solution for it as part of the dilemmatic description of yourself or one of your stakeholders. For instance, if your situation is about energy and your dilemma is ‘more wind turbines, but at acceptable cost’, you see that you cannot come up with anything other than ‘cheap wind turbines’ any more. A dilemma without a particular idea or solution is ‘more electricity generation capacity without too much cost increase’. This leaves many more options open, such as hydrogen, solar power, etc.