Competence Set Analysis — An Effective Means to Solve Non-trivial Decision Problems

Abstract

Because of rapid change of our technology and environment, many problems we are facing are new, complex, and nontrivial. The solutions to these problems are usually outside our day-to-day experience, competence, or our habitual domains. Thus, they are fuzzy and challenging. In order to effectively solve this kind of fuzzy or challenging problem, we need to continually expand our competence or habitual domains so that we can make a good decision with confidence. This paper is to describe a holistic picture of using competence set analysis to solve this kind of decision problem. First, two types of competence set analysis, problem-oriented and skill-oriented, are introduced. Next, the concept of selecting optimal competence set that maximizes the net return is discussed. We then briefly describe a number of algorithms to find the optimal path for expanding our competence set. Finally, we gave some applications of expanding competence set with minimum cost.