Cognition and Multiple Goals: Lessons from Community Leaders in a Fragile Ecosystem

Our research aims to understand the mechanisms that allow leaders to create strategies that address multiple goals in versatile ways. From a systems perspective, individual decision-makers need to address multiple goals simultaneously, particularly when these goals appear to be in conflict. The need for leaders to address multiple goals has become more prominent in recent years, as sustainability crises and grand challenges have become more urgent.

 We study community leaders in the Colombian Pacific region, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, which is daily threatened by illegal businesses. The leaders in our sample need to address four goals: preserving their cultural heritage, conserving their natural resources, managing their land, and providing economic alternatives to the population. They work under conditions of economic scarcity, high uncertainty, and systemic goal interdependence, which allows us to learn from the rich and complex setting in which they operate.

We rely on in-depth interviews and think-aloud protocols to gather fine-grained data about forty-one leaders’ individual histories and present ways of solving problems. We analyze how they think about problems: how they formulate goals, how they perceive these goals to relate to each other, and how their solutions address different goals. We conducted a community survey about the leaders’ performance on each of the four goals. From our data, we derive variables that allow us to compare whether differences in multi-goal achievement are associated with variables related to the leaders’ past and their cognition. I will present preliminary findings that show two emergent configurations that leaders use to achieve high multi-goal performance. The configurations blend individual characteristics (e.g., education, leadership level and scope, early influences) with their cognition (e.g., complexity in their thinking, perceived relations between goals, ability to abstract). I plan to conclude the seminar sharing our planned next steps.