Common ground, complex problems, and decision making. Group Decision and Negotiation

Organisations increasingly have to deal with complex problems. They often use multidisciplinary teams to cope with such problems where different team members have different perspectives on the problem, different individual knowledge and skills, and different approaches on how to solve the problem. In order to solve those problems, team members have to share their existing knowledge and construct new knowledge. Theory suggests that nego-tiation of common ground can positively affect team decision making on the solution of complex problems, by facilitating knowledge sharing across perspectives. In a small scale study with student groups, external representa-tions supported by a specific negotiation ontology were used to facilitate negotiation by encouraging participants to make their beliefs and values explicit. Results showed that the external representations supported clarifying contributions to group members and increased group participation in discussions. Key words: complex problems, common ground, negotiation of meaning, negotiation of position, decision making, decision support, ICT-tools The many-sidedness of complex societal problems underlines the need for rich problem con-ceptualisations, and thus the need for multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder approaches. However, forming heterogeneous teams to solve complex problems is no guarantee for