The Road to Integrating Science and Management: Planning Your Next Trip Using Hierarchical Objectives and Assessment Points

objectives and assessment points, let’s carry our vacation-planning analogy a bit further. We can have a very general destination in mind (e.g., somewhere out West), or a very specific destination (e.g., Grandma’s house at 1916 Organic Avenue, Bozeman, Montana). Arriving at our desired destination requires different types of planning and preparation, depending on where we decide to go. If we choose the general destination, then there are many possible routes we could follow; all would get us to where we want to be. A trip to Grandma’s house, however, would require more detailed planning and navigation. Needless to say, we would never give someone generalized directions to a specific destination: “To get to Grandma’s house, just head west.” Those instructions might get us headed in the right direction, but more details will be required along the way. An objectives hierarchy functions in much the same manner: broad, overarching goals are defined, and supported with finer levels of detail later, depending on the desired objectives. Now imagine that we have started our road trip and, unbeknownst to us, someone has removed all of the road signs in North America. It will be much harder to reach either destination without clues along the way to tell us where we are and which way we need to go. If objectives are akin to the travel directions in this analogy, then assessment points are the road signs. Assessment points essentially capture the current condition of a resource (i.e., where you are) and provide perspective on whether that condition is good or bad (i.e., Are you traveling in the correct direction?). In this paper, we discuss three types of assessment points: those that identify desired condition, those The George Wright Forum 78 The Road to Integrating Science and Management: Planning Your Next Trip Using Hierarchical Objectives and Assessment Points