The ill-structured nature of the problems under analysis and the existence of “important intangibles and key
uncertainties” (Mingers and Rosenhead, 2004) suggests the adoption of Problem Structuring Methods (PSM). PSM
models may be expressed in a visual form, and “mostly use participants’ own language rather than mathematics or
quantitative data” to represent complex problematic situations (Franco, 2008). Hence, they are a natural choice to
help unveiling a cloud of objectives to be subsequently structured as a hierarchy.