2003; Gregory et al. 2001). Making such trade-offs explicit also helps gain buy-in
from these constituents (McDaniels et al. 1999).
Another feature of community and non-profit issues that lends them to VFT
applications is the need for critical inspection of the problems such organizations
face. Often, in these cases, the problem on the surface can mask deeper concerns
that are not obvious to even the practitioners themselves (Nye and Glickman 2000;
Frisch and Servon 2006). The introspective and iterative processes that are a
hallmark of such applications help to get at root issues that may require a more
critical lens to identify means-ends objectives that can effectively address such
concerns (McDaniels et al. 1999).
Finally, because VFT approaches are designed specifically to address complex
problems with a high degree of uncertainty (Keeney 1992), they have the potential
to be useful in community-based applications operating in a dynamic social,
economic, and political environment. CDCs are often subject to many constraints
beyond their control, including funding and resource availability, municipal
intervention, community engagement, policy, and internal organizational issues
(Gittell and Wilder 1999; Nye and Glickman 2000; Glickman and Servon 1998). A
flexible model that gets at fundamental objectives of the organization is thus
required to help such organizations better operate within an ever-changing
environment. VFT is then a promising candidate for analytic method to apply to
the study of CDC (and NPO) decision modeling and decision-making.