When it appeared that the community partner and researchers were at a stopping
point regarding the objectives hierarchies, we asked ourselves how these structures
might support specific decisions and decision processes. That is, the values
structures served not only to help our partners clarify their understanding of the
preferences, goals and constraints that characterized their housing and community
development activities, but also to provide tangible guidance regarding decision
alternatives. As explained below, two case sites felt that it would be useful to
evaluate a range of alternative decision strategies with our values structures. We did this by developing weights for the various objectives, quantifying a collection of
decision alternatives to create strategies, and ranking the strategies. We performed
sensitivity analysis by altering objective weights to reproduce the preferences of
different community stakeholders in addition to the CDC. Another case site felt that
the holistic and community-engaged nature of their mission made such a
conventional use of values structures less relevant; they preferred to consider
how values structures we created could be used as a jumping-off point to suggest a
wide range of potential community development actions. These actions could be
classified according to specific means objectives, thus allowing the CDC to
understand what portions of their mission might be fulfilled by pursuing one activity
versus another.