Creating conservation strategies with value‐focused thinking

Biodiversity and human well‐being strategies are only as good as the set of ideas people think about. We evaluated value‐focused thinking (VFT), a framework that emphasizes creating objectives and strategies that are responsive to the objectives. We performed a proof‐of‐concept study of VFT with 6 conservation planning teams at a global conservation organization. We developed a package of materials related to VFT, including meeting–session agendas, a virtual facilitation template, facilitator's guide, and evaluation questionnaires. We used these materials to test whether VFT applied in a group setting resulted in high‐quality conservation strategies and participant satisfaction and whether our materials were scalable, meaning that someone newly trained in VFT could facilitate planning meetings that resulted in high‐quality strategies and participant satisfaction, as compared with an experienced VFT facilitator. Net response indicated positive compelling, feasible, creative, and representative ratings for the conservation strategies per team. Participants indicated satisfaction overall, although satisfaction was greater for objectives than for strategies. Among the participants with previous conservation planning experience, all were at least as satisfied with their VFT strategies compared with previously developed strategies, and none were less satisfied (p = 0.001). Changes in participant satisfaction were not related to facilitator type (experienced or inexperienced with VFT) (p > 0.10). Some participants had a preconceived sense of shared understanding of important values and interests before participating in the study, which VFT strengthened. Our results highlight the advantages of structuring the development and evaluation of conservation planning frameworks around VFT.


INTRODUCTION
Reversing ecological damages and protecting valued natural and cultural places are some of humanity's greatest challenges.Interest in responding to these challenges with carefully planned and implemented conservation strategies has received significant attention (Groves & Game, 2016;Margules & Pressey, 2000).A conservation strategy is a set or grouping of individual actions designed to collectively achieve desired outcomes for teams that implement the strategy or those affected by it.Example actions are land protection, habitat restoration, policy advocacy, and landowner engagement.Strategies are typically designed to group multiple actions around a common theme or unique conservation approach, implement the body of work sequentially through time, and address challenges to the current state of knowledge (Gregory et al., 2012).Strategies are meant to be implementable at an appropriate temporal and spatial scale and are constrained by capacity limitations (CMP, 2020).
Strategy creation is a focusing process that directs effort toward the most promising means of improving ecological and social conditions.Conservation planning teams have many ways to make strategic decisions, but those decisions are only as good as the ideas they generate to solve complex problems (Keeney, 2012).
At least 2 sets of cognitive difficulties are associated with generating ideas.First, critical thinking is constrained by factors such as irrational judgments (Slovic, 1995) and cognitive biases (Kahneman, 2011).In the absence of effective guiding processes, people struggle to accurately predict or interpret the consequences of possible actions (Morgan & Henrion, 1990), FIGURE 1 Conceptual overview of value-focused thinking, a prescriptive approach to decision analysis (gray, examples adapted from Blomquist et al. [2010]): (a) elicitation prompts are used to gather and interpret values, and facilitation techniques transform those values into objectives, (b) facilitation and conceptual devices, such as an objectives hierarchy, are used to specify and organize objectives, (c) elicitation prompts are used to gather and interpret possible actions to achieve the objectives, and facilitation techniques and conceptual devices, such as a strategy table, organize those actions into possible strategies, and (d) strategies are evaluated on their desirability, which is informed by how much of the objectives and other important factors can be achieved.
have a hard time separating facts from personal values (Maguire, 2004), and often overlook some personal values of genuine importance (Bond et al., 2008).Second, people generally bypass systematic thinking and jump straight to solutions (Keeney, 1992;Russo & Shoemaker, 1990).It is unclear whether ideas can be generated reliably in an unstructured manner that accounts for the multiple dimensions of potential effects, as needed by persons engaged in conservation planning or those affected by it (Árvai & Gregory, 2020).
Limited research and guidance exist on idea-generation processes for creating conservation strategies.The quantity and quality of ideas could improve if such guidance were provided.We draw on the field of decision analysis, a well-established philosophy and sociotechnical process for creating value from complex management problems (Parnell et al., 2013).Applying decision analysis to environmental management problems is also known as structured decision-making (Gregory et al., 2012;Runge et al., 2020).Conservation decision-support frameworks that use elements of decision analysis are reviewed in Schwartz et al. (2018) and Hemming et al. (2022).
Value-focused thinking (VFT) is a theoretical underpinning of decision analysis and operationalizes the strategy development process (Keeney, 1992).It consists of 4 interdependent components (Keeney, 2012): use of values to create objectives, organization of objectives, use of objectives to create strategies, and use of predictive objective outcomes to evaluate strategies and make decisions (Figure 1).While VFT has primarily been used in Western contexts, structured decision-making approaches have the potential to support inclusion of multiple knowledge systems, including Indigenous and local knowledge systems (Christie et al., 2018;Hamilton et al., 2020;Runge et al., 2015).
We define values as "what we care about" (Keeney, 1992, p. 3).We used this definition consistently as it relates to VFT, but we recognize that the term has other meanings in different contexts.In particular, the IPBES (2022) provides a typology for nature's values that is inclusive across diverse worldviews and knowledge systems.In planning and decision-making contexts, values can be elicited from a team of participants (or individuals) through various prompts (e.g., What are you aiming to achieve?What concerns are we trying to address?) and are responsive to socioenvironmental challenges or opportunities to improve conditions.
Objectives are succinct value statements with a desired direction of change (Figure 1a).We used this definition consistently in this paper, while noting that some other conservation planning frameworks use different terms for the same concept (e.g., CMP, 2020).Transforming values into objectives operationalizes decision-making for identifying and evaluating conservation strategies.
Initially, values and objectives are unclear and interrelated when elicited from participants.Objectives need to be clarified and their relationships specified to provide a guiding direction.VFT emphasizes specifying objectives where relevant and separating means from ends using elicitation prompts (e.g., What do you mean by that?Why is that important?)(Figure 1b).This process allows for a clear distinction among fundamental objectives (endpoint objectives), means objectives (achieve other objectives), and process objectives (refer to how any objectives will be achieved, such as building trust and maintaining transparency) (Keeney, 2007).It also allows for considering different causal factors and developing strategies that can directly contribute change in an objective.An objectives hierarchy is a useful visual device to specify and organize objectives (Keeney, 1992).
Objectives focus on effective strategies (Figure 1c).Teams are prompted to consider objectives, 1 at a time or in combination, and to ask deliberately how can the objectives be achieved so that the resulting ideas comprehensively address the range of objectives (Keeney, 2007).Developing some initial details and key considerations about preliminary strategies is a good tactic.Identifying measurable attributes for each objective can also assist strategy specification (Keeney & Gregory, 2005).A strategy table is a useful device to organize actions into strategies (Spetzler et al., 2016) (Figure 1c).
Strategies may be evaluated by how much they achieve the objectives, among other important factors and considerations (Figure 1d).For this reason, strategy evaluation and trade-off analyses are well-established areas of research and innovation.The literature and undergraduate and graduate coursework focus mostly on understanding trade-offs (Alexander, 1982;Colorni & Tsoukias, 2020), despite the fact that the best choice is limited to the ideas generated (Keeney, 2012).We focused on the underappreciated, yet central, role of strategy creation that is responsive to a conservation planning team's set of objectives.

Literature review
We reviewed comparable methods to generate ideas and related studies that test those methods.We focused the review on citations of related studies.We distinguished among 3 types of research: analyses of VFT relative to its ability to provide decision insights and therefore reveal anecdotal evidence; comparisons of VFT with other frameworks, where participants are provided with alternatives and trade-offs to review, process, and evaluate; and comparisons of VFT with other frameworks, where objectives are identified and used to create alternatives.There are numerous applications of decision analysis and structured decision-making that provide anecdotal evidence (e.g., Gregory et al., 2012;Runge et al., 2020).Likewise, many studies show that VFT improves decision-making (e.g., Arvai & Gregory, 2003;Arvai et al., 2001;León, 1999;Martin, 2021).We focused on comparisons of VFT with other frameworks to create alternatives, which has not been done previously in conservation or environmental management.
VFT includes elements of strategic foresight (Cook et al., 2014) and prospective hindsight (Mitchell et al., 1989).These methods involve considering future conditions in the form of imagining or forecasting that an event (or multiple events or scenarios) has already occurred and then working backward toward enabling actions.They are based on the assumptions that information to resolve problems can be readily gathered or already resides in people's memories and that specific devices can be used to extract that information.Visioning methods can increase people's ability to identify strategies that achieve their visions (Mitchell et al., 1989).In this context, these methods are similar to VFT.Yet, they are not meant to be used for choosing a preferred solution; VFT expands on these methods and attempts to generate strategies and help decision makers choose among strategies.
Goal setting is an approach used to determine what thresholds to achieve and actions are needed to achieve them.Goals are different from objectives conceptually and operationally.Goals have the features of objectives with a requisite quantitative threshold to be achieved (Locke, 1996).Goals are sometimes warranted because of an underlying scientific process (e.g., viable population size [Martin et al., 2009;Tear et al., 2005]), but goals can also be static and subject to public and private choice.Goals substitute a binary valuation (achieved, not achieved) for considering a continuous range of possible outcomes, where what is desirable for the decision maker is not described by a binary outcome.This implies that goal setting constrains a decision-making process to be convergent.Idea generation is generally considered an expansive and divergent process (Kaner, 2014).In our experience, planning teams or individuals seek to achieve multiple objectives, which makes goal setting particularly constraining at early phases of conservation planning (Gregory et al., 2012;Keeney, 1992).Ideas that fail to achieve goal thresholds with certainty, even though they might increase value considerably, can be easily dismissed under a goal-setting process.In contrast, value creation and quantitative measures become important once there is motivation to evaluate how much value each strategy can reasonably achieve (Figure 1d).In summary, there should be a compelling reason to consolidate to a single goal when considering a wide range of values and objectives.Otherwise, the idea generation process is subject to withholding information, obstructing others' progress, and undermining desired outcomes on other important objectives (Latham & Locke, 2006;Locke et al., 1994).
Experimental studies underscore the difficulty with generating ideas in the absence of an intervening process, such as VFT.One study revealed that considering objectives caused ideas to increase, in some cases more than doubling (Bond et al., 2010).This and a related study (Bond et al., 2008) provide evidence that groups find it hard to identify what they are trying to achieve if they are left to their own devices and that sufficient time and VFT devices help groups create objectives and strategies.Another study revealed that the quantity and quality of ideas generated by groups increased with VFT, as compared with unaided groups left to their own devices (Siebert & Keeney, 2015).This study thus provided evidence that spending time to generate ideas based on objectives produces higher-quality ideas, compared with spending an equivalent amount of time without devices.

Research questions
Our central research question was, can VFT improve the idea generation process in real-world applications?We considered this question with a case study conducted in cooperation with a global nonprofit conservation organization.We examined 3 hypotheses.VFT results in a set of high-quality strategies (hypothesis 1).If participants were satisfied with their objectives and draft strategies and the strategies were of high quality, namely, compelling, feasible, creative, and representative (Spetzler et al., 2016;Tani & Parnell, 2013), then VFT was successful.We examined this hypothesis with closed-and open-ended questionnaire responses.
VFT results in user satisfaction (hypothesis 2).If participants achieved a shared understanding of each other's values and interests (Pahl-Wostl & Hare, 2004), thought they worked well together throughout the process (Pahl-Wostl & Hare, 2004), and were satisfied with the facilitators and products of the process (Arvai & Gregory, 2003;Lauber et al., 2011), then VFT was successful.We examined this hypothesis by comparing questionnaire responses before, during, and after the study.
VFT is scalable (hypothesis 3).Scalability implies that good ideas can be useful to more people without incurring extra operational costs.For almost 2 decades, many resources have been put into training conservation professionals and university students in decision analysis and structured decision-making, as well as other frameworks, such as the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation (CMP, 2020), yet there is little indication that any of that training has resulted in improvements to the practice and application of decision analysis that can extend beyond consultations with experts.To be scalable, facilitators who have had no previous training or exposure to VFT can be trained to be successful in supporting planning teams through VFT, as compared with facilitators with experience facilitating the VFT process.If relevant content expertise can be transferred and used by newly trained facilitators to take participants through the VFT process and results in a set of high-quality strategies and satisfied participants, then more people could use VFT.We examined this hypothesis by comparing questionnaire responses before, during, and after the study.We tested whether participants' satisfaction and judgments differed between 3 groups led by a single experienced facilitator and 3 groups led by 4 newly trained facilitators.If there were no differences between these groups, then the training and facilitation were successful and, hence, scalable because not every VFT consultation requires an experienced facilitator.

Study design
We evaluated VFT in practice, with the aim of judging whether it was a worthwhile approach for conservation planning teams to use for strategy development and to test it against other methods.We adapted methods from other fields and suggested improvements to VFT (Arvai et al., 2001;Bond et al., 2008Bond et al., , 2010;;Siebert & Keeney, 2015) while remaining consistent across disciplines.
We made use of an ongoing strategic planning project involving 6 conservation teams in a U.S. business unit of a global nonprofit conservation organization.Forty-three people across all teams gave voluntary consent to be participants in the study with the following planning scopes and scales: forestland conservation and management, coastal climate adaptation, climate mitigation, nature preserve marketing and management, and stormwater management.The number of participants per team ranged from 5 to 8. The teams convened several times and had an understanding of the planning context prior to the study, including agreements on the scope and scale of planning, which are critical for reconciling initial biases or differences in understanding.Further description of the planning teams is beyond the scope of this article given space constraints because our focus was on evaluating methods; therefore, depth of understanding about each of the planning contexts is not necessary.
We implemented 3 virtual sessions between April and July 2022 with several online facilitation devices (Table 1).Three teams used the devices with the assistance of an experienced facilitator, whereas 3 teams used the devices with the assistance of 4 newly trained facilitators.Although there are no formal definitions, we used suggestions from others (Burgman, 2016;Phillips & Phillips, 1993) and defined an experienced facilitator as one who is considered by peers and society at large to have specialist knowledge and who is consulted on use of VFT concepts and methods.The experienced facilitator in this study previously received expert certification in decision analysis through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's National Conservation Training Center and has facilitated many VFT studies over the past 10 years and published findings in peer-reviewed journals.We defined a newly trained facilitator as one who is a recently trained novice in using and facilitating VFT concepts and methods with no prior consultation experience.

Setting objectives
Session 1 consisted of an introduction to VFT and a discussion about values and objectives.This session involved 2 important agenda items: transforming values into objectives and organizing objectives.Prior to the session, facilitators gathered individual responses about participants' previous experiences with planning and elicited values with a questionnaire.We asked 4 questions to elicit a range of values from each participant based on suggestions from the literature (Gregory et al., 2012;Keeney, 1992): What does this team aim to achieve through its conservation work?What needs to be maintained or improved for the places and/or issues this team is focused on?What is concerning about the current conservation situation for the places and/or issues this team is focused on?For partners and communities in your planning context, what is your understanding of what these groups care about that should inform what this work aims to achieve?The resulting values were used as discussion entry points for developing objectives.This was done so as not to distract participants' thoughts away from their own minds and give credence to their personal contributions  (Keeney, 2012).This approach more closely aligns with the nominal group elicitation protocol (Delbecq et al., 1975).
Organizing objectives included further specifying objectives, where relevant, and separating means from ends.For specification, facilitators asked questions such as: What does that mean?For separating means from ends, facilitators asked questions such as, why is that important, to determine fundamental objectives and, how could that be achieved, to determine means objectives (Gregory et al., 2012;Keeney, 2007).Process objectives were another result of the elicitation.Each planning team summarized the content and organization into an objectives hierarchy.A few teams complemented their hierarchies with narrative objective statements, sometimes referred to as problem statements (Smith, 2020), to support different learning styles.
Values and objectives were discussed but not completed by the end of session 1.This was anticipated because 1-time sessions do not take advantage of reflection that typically provides its own stimulus for generating ideas (Bond et al., 2008;Phillips, 2007).Facilitators held ad hoc consultations with participants who missed session 1 or who required extra time to process the facilitation prompts.The newly trained facilitators checked in with the experienced facilitator for 1 meeting to receive coaching and discuss possible objectives and organization between sessions 1 and 2.

Creating strategy ideas
Session 2 consisted of reviewing objectives and brainstorming initial strategy ideas.This session involved 2 main agenda items: checking the quality of objectives and prompting participants to brainstorm strategy ideas.
Prior to this session, facilitators gathered responses about participants' experience with session 1 and elicited possible strategy ideas with a questionnaire.There is strong experimental evidence that ideas can be stimulated by examining and reflecting on objectives (Siebert & Keeney, 2015).We used multiple combinations of fundamental and process objectives individually and as a group to stimulate ideas.The facilitation included reviewing questionnaire responses and eliciting new ideas.There were no final products from session 2 because it was an exploratory work session.
Prior to session 3, the facilitators held additional ad hoc consultations with participants who missed session 2 or who required extra time to process the facilitation prompts.Most of the ideas that facilitators elicited during and after session 2 included action elements, which might be useful for achieving the objectives but are not themselves strategies.The facilitators drafted a strategy table to synthesize and aggregate all strategy ideas and action elements, eliminate redundancies, and combine similar action elements into draft strategies per planning team (Spetzler et al., 2016).The newly trained facilitators consulted with the experienced facilitator for 1 meeting to receive coaching and discuss possible strategies between sessions 2 and 3.
Session 3 consisted of reviewing and providing feedback on the strategy table.During this session, facilitators used virtual breakout rooms and a think-pair-share approach to gather feedback about the draft strategies.If time remained, the teams were prompted to check the quality of their draft strategies at the end of session 3. Additional quality checks on the strategies were gathered in post hoc consultations with the team leaders to examine hypothesis 1. Session 3 was the final session of the VFT study for all teams, except for 1 team under the trained facilitator group, which needed extra session time to go over the team's scope and scale of work and refine objectives and strategies.

Virtual whiteboard
We used a virtual whiteboard as a self-directed facilitation device (Appendix S1).The introductory section of the board included an overview and key concepts and terms.Numbered sections of the board included information gathering and process features.Sections 1-3 addressed identifying objectives, organizing objectives (specification and relationships), and checking objective quality, whereas sections 4-6 addressed drafting strategies, checking strategy quality, and steps for capturing open questions after the sessions.

Facilitator training
The newly trained facilitators engaged with the experienced facilitator and other members of the author team in 2 trainings prior to the sessions.The first 60-min training included a discussion about the session agendas and hypotheses to be tested.The second 90-min training included an overview of the objective and strategy development components of VFT, facilitator's guide, and the virtual whiteboard.The facilitator's guide provided guidance on how to facilitate the planning teams through their proper use of the whiteboard and VFT.Open-ended a Key: I, variation of this question given in prework questionnaire; II, variation of this question given after session 1 (setting objectives); III, variation of this question given after session 2 (drafting strategies); IV, part of 3-month consultation with team leaders.b Questions that were not used to evaluate the hypotheses are not included here.Questionnaire templates are provided in Appendix S2.

Questionnaires
Three online questionnaires were delivered to the participants before, during, and after the sessions to elicit objectives and strategy ideas and gather input about the VFT process (questionnaires I-III) (Table 2).The questionnaires had 2 common elements: a set of closed-ended 5-point self-rating questions and a set of open-ended discussion questions.The questionnaires used an anonymous self-identifier so that the author team could track responses by individual participants.One additional questionnaire was delivered as a 3-month consultation with the team leaders (questionnaire IV) (Table 2).The consultation included 5-point self-rating questions to evaluate the quality of the draft strategies.Team leaders, who were the individuals responsible for decision-making and delivering planning products, rated their agreement on compelling, feasible, creative, and representative criteria (adapted from Spetzler et al., 2016;Tani & Parnell, 2013) (Table 2).They were given the definitions of each criterion and asked to judge their set of strategies with the rating scale.Two additional questions asked team leaders whether the set of draft strategies covered possible actions that outside viewers (interested parties and partners) might suggest and whether interested parties or partners would see their views included in the strategies (Appendix S2).These last 2 questions were meant to prompt them to think about whether their objectives and strategies were inclusive of others they might engage with as they implement their strategies.Research involving human subjects was approved by an assigned delegate of the organization's chief scientist following the internal Standard Operating Procedure titled Research Involving Human Subjects (available upon request).

Data analyses
Analyses were carried out on the questionnaire responses and postsession consultations.The samples included 43, 34, and 30 participants who completed questionnaires I, II, and III, respectively.Descriptive statistics (means, standard deviations [SD]) were used to summarize answers to 5-point self-rating questions.A simple content analysis was used to summarize answers to the open-ended questions.For comparisons, Fisher's exact test was used to evaluate whether the change in participants' self-rating judgments was different from a baseline.For this test, we focused on the participants who responded to all questions over the course of the study.Our use of this statistic was analogous to a paired association experiment with the following stepwise logic: participants were the experimental unit, we measured their baseline judgments, they underwent a test (VFT), and after the test we measured the change in judgments relative to their baseline.In some instances, we measured changes in judgment between previous planning experiences before the study and their experience using VFT during and after the study.
In other instances, we measured changes in judgment between setting objectives (session 1) and drafting strategies (sessions 2 & 3).We controlled for subject effect with these within-subject comparisons (Charness et al., 2012).We proposed null hypotheses that changes in group judgments were unrelated to their baseline judgment (hypothesis 2) or facilitator type (hypothesis 3).Strength of evidence based on p values indicated the degree to which the observed association was not due to chance alone and how the participants felt after VFT was related to how they felt before VFT.A p ≤ 0.10 indicated some evidence and p ≤ 0.05 indicated strong evidence.A p > 0.10 indicated an absence of evidence.Data are provided in Appendix S3.Statistics were run in the R 4.2.1 programing environment.

Quality of strategies (hypothesis 1)
There was positive net satisfaction with the objectives (mean [SD] = 3.94 [0.63]) and strategies (mean [SD] = 3.66 [0.77]).There were no dissenting satisfaction ratings (not at all satisfied, somewhat satisfied) from participants on their objectives or strategies.A majority, 67%, of participants (20 out of 30) expressed the same satisfaction level for objectives as for strategies.However, among the 19 participants who were very satisfied with the objectives, 8 (42%) were moderately satisfied with the strategies, 2 (11%) were extremely satisfied, and 9 (47%) did not change their level of satisfaction (p = 0.058).
Regarding the quality of the strategies, the compelling (mean Participant judgments were mixed on whether more time was needed to draft strategies; however, participants were not confident that more time would yield more or better strategies.The theme among participants who did not want more time was that the draft strategies were generally good enough to move on with planning and decision-making.The theme among participants who did want more time was that they thought more time would almost always be useful for discussion and deliberation.Whether participants needed more time was independent of their relative satisfaction with the strategies; that is, participants who were less satisfied with the strategies did not think they needed more time.

User satisfaction (hypothesis 2)
Participants who did not have previous planning experience indicated a positive net satisfaction with the strategies (mean [SD] = 4.07 [0.88]).Among the participants who expressed their level of satisfaction with strategies developed in previous planning experiences (baseline), there was a marked increase in satisfaction with their strategies after implementing VFT (p = 0.001).All participants were at least as satisfied with their strategies resulting from VFT compared with previous strategies; no participants expressed decreased satisfaction.When participants were either not at all (1), somewhat (2), or moderately (3) satisfied with their previous strategies, their satisfaction increased markedly Figure 2a (Figure 3a).In other words, participant satisfaction with their strategies tended to increase due to using VFT.
Participants who did not have previous planning experiences yielded a positive net satisfaction with the facilitation after setting objectives (mean [SD] = 4.41 [0.62]) and after drafting strategies (mean [SD] = 4.53 [0.64]).Among the participants who expressed their level of satisfaction with previous facilitation, their satisfaction increased after setting objectives relative to their prior experience (p < 0.001).Likewise, satisfaction increased with the facilitation after drafting strategies relative to their prior experience (p < 0.001).In general, the change in satisfaction with facilitation was positive.Strong increases in satisfaction were seen among those least satisfied with previous facilitation experiences (Figure 2b,c, Figure 3b,c).
Participants' shared understanding of their values and interests after setting objectives was associated with how they judged their shared understanding at the beginning of the study (p = 0.031).Likewise, participants' shared understanding after drafting strategies was related to their shared understanding at the beginning of the study (p = 0.01).In both instances, participants who perceived strong shared understanding prior to the study noted a decline in shared understanding by 1 rating level between the beginning of the study and after setting objectives (12 out of 33) and drafting strategies (6 out of 30) (Figure 2d,e, Figure 3d,e).Although there was an increase in mean shared understanding after setting objectives (mean [SD] = 3.88 [0.82]) and drafting strategies (mean [SD] = 4.03 [0.76]), 2 participants dropped from neutral to dissenting ratings after setting objectives.
There was a positive response from participants when they were asked whether they thought they worked well together after setting objectives (baseline) (mean [SD] = 3.94 [0.70]) and drafting strategies (mean [SD] = 4.03 [0.72]).There was no statistical relationship in the change in how well they thought they worked together during the study (p = 0.743), meaning that participants who thought they worked well together after setting objectives were also likely to think they worked well together after drafting strategies (Figure 3f).).Changes in satisfaction with the facilitation between setting objectives and drafting strategies were not related to facilitator type (p = 1).This was also consistent with comparisons against previous experience.Changes in satisfaction with the facilitation between previous experiences and VFT was not related to facilitator type (p > 0.76) (Figure 3b,c).

Scalability (hypothesis 3)
We did not find a significant relationship between facilitator type when evaluating changes in shared understanding of values and interests or in how well the participants thought they worked together.Changes in participants' shared understanding between their previous experiences and VFT were not related to facilitator type (p > 0.6) (Figure 3d,e).Likewise, changes in how well participants felt they worked together between setting objectives and drafting strategies were not related to facilitator type (p = 0.83) (Figure 3f).

DISCUSSION
Conservation practitioners are often confronted with multifaceted interests and an increasing range of potential trade-offs to navigate.A structured guiding process is essential to identify and align on objectives, develop strategies that are responsive to the objectives, and support effective conservation across diverse geographies, thematic contexts, and scales.Evidence that processes are effective can help conservation teams make smart choices about planning methods and strategic direction.We tested one such process, VFT, and found possible improvement to conservation strategy development given that the results supported each hypothesis.VFT resulted in a set of high-quality strategies and greater participant satisfaction than with their previous conservation planning experiences.Newly trained facilitators achieved the same or similar levels of satisfaction as the experienced facilitator, suggesting that VFT can be scaled up within an organization without extra operational costs.
Through multiple lines of evidence, we found a possible decline in satisfaction with strategies as compared with objectives.This decline in satisfaction indicates that the strongest gains from VFT appear while setting objectives, as compared with drafting strategies.To our knowledge, this potential distinction between the components of VFT has not been previously revealed.Shifting the focus of planning and decision-making from options to objectives was a foundational shift in decision analysis (McDaniels, 2019;Parnell et al., 2013).Several factors could improve future research on this finding.First, objectives are aspirational, whereas strategies are a mix of action elements that are separate from those aspirations by several degrees of freedom.Second, our study involved participants from 1 organization and therefore lacked engagement and potential expanded perspectives from external participants.The facilitators did not deviate from best practices under VFT, and previous research suggests creativity can be a limiting factor in these contexts (McFadzean, 1999).Third, facilitation techniques beyond those we used could expand opportunities for creative ideas, such as brainstorming prompts for strategies that meet different objectives.Other problem-solving techniques could be used that do not explicitly rely on brainstorming, but rather require planning teams to confront their strategic position in the face of other similar organizations, such as "nudges" (Campbell- Arvai et al., 2014).Fourth, it is unclear whether more time would lead to higher quality strategies.More time could lead to different results and corresponding satisfaction with those results.This is not always the case, especially if no structured ideageneration process like VFT is used (Siebert & Keeney, 2015).Adding more time may force planning teams to face the limits of what they know, given that a team's ideas are constrained by their understanding.
Using 5-point Likert-type ratings established a limit on the magnitude of change in participant judgments.The changes from baseline could have been between −4 and +4, but a participant's baseline judgment limits the possible magnitude of change.The expressed change in satisfaction with the VFT process was positive in almost all instances (Figures 2 & 3).Therefore, we infer that VFT directionally improved conservation planning products and participants' experiences in developing them.Some processes may move toward a feeling of consensus too quickly, whereas others productively challenge assumptions and disrupt and expose an underlying lack of shared understanding.Our results indicated that VFT challenged those assumptions and potentially exposed some premature shared understandings that planning teams might have judged before entering the study.To our knowledge, this aspect of VFT has been acknowledged anecdotally (Keeney, 1992) but never previously revealed experimentally.Participants could have believed that they understood each other's values and interests before being deliberately prompted to discuss, specify, and organize them (Figure 3d,e), but it is also possible that they had a different sense of shared understanding at the beginning of the study.More participants changed their shared understanding ratings in the negative direction after setting objectives than after drafting strategies.This suggests that time could be an explanatory variable and teams may have felt relatively rushed through setting objectives without processing and better understanding what the facilitators were trying to accomplish.As stated above, different facilitation and elicitation techniques could yield different results.
Adopting processes and supporting their consistent use are challenging for organizations working in diverse contexts, particularly if they must be delivered by specialized experts.We found evidence that VFT can be facilitated by recently trained persons with no prior expertise and yield same or similar results from experienced facilitation, which to our knowledge has never been previously revealed.Empirical comparison of planning process results is an important area for future research, especially for the more widely adopted conservation planning approaches (CMP, 2020).In general, it is unclear how much training or types of training and coaching time would yield different results.Our case study findings should not give conservation planners a sense that anyone could use VFT and have it result in high-quality strategies and user satisfaction without training and coaching.Yet, results of numerous studies imply that VFT is an important driver of human behavior and therefore is an important life skill that can be practiced by anyone (Baron, 2009;Hammond et al., 2002).
Our results also indicate a likely nuance through which newly trained facilitators can improve their learning and readiness to guide a planning team through a high-quality idea generation process and iterative consultations with an experienced facilitator.Although the newly trained facilitators were ultimately responsible for moving teams through VFT, they had access to the experienced facilitator in postsession debriefs and consultations.These ad hoc meetings were important to move the process along between sessions in an efficient and focused manner.In our view, the nuance is not whether newly trained facilitators can guide the development of same or similar objectives and strategies.Rather, the nuance is whether a generalized process can be facilitated effectively to guide an informative dialogue between participants and result in improved understanding that is transparent, defensible, and satisfying (Árvai & Gregory, 2020).This consideration is not specific to VFT, but rather is important when researching any process.These points highlight capacity building and whether organizations can institutionalize a process that supports teams in developing high-quality strategies.
There were study design limitations and multiple ways to interpret the data that could yield insights and conclusions.Across the 43 total study participants, we gathered judgments from only 15 participants who had previous planning experiences and 30 participants who completed all 3 questionnaires.These numbers break down even further under hypothesis 3 when we looked at differences between participant responses in the experienced versus newly trained groups.The patterns in judgment would have to be strong to reveal statistical significance, given the smaller number of responses in each group.The focus on associating relationships to changes in participant judgments over an experimental period was easier to interpret and statistically robust to the former approach.Likewise, the purpose of this study was to examine and better understand whether VFT can improve (not impede) ways of thinking rather than to assess the magnitude of improvements.Our results show the value of running future experiments with larger sample sizes and random assignment to treatment groups.
We did not control for human judgment bias.For example, outcome bias may have confounded the quality of VFT as opposed to the quality of processes carried out in participants' previous planning experiences ( Baron & Hershey, 1988).
It is possible that some participants were expressing excitement about a new process, especially if it ran contrary to previous experiences where the outcomes were known.The effect of outcome knowledge on human judgments has been studied, and it is unclear whether a negative previous outcome is associated with bias (Gino et al., 2008).Additionally, participants with no previous planning experiences may be more prone to feeling satisfied with new processes (e.g., affect bias [Kahneman, 2011]).Parallel or crossover experimental designs (Hills & Armitage, 1979) could safeguard against these potential study deficiencies.
We operationalized decision science for conservation planning (Hemming et al., 2022).Other idea-generation and decision support methods are available for conservation planners to adapt (Bower et al., 2018), but they have yet to be subjected to testing beyond reflective analysis.We have provided methodological detail so that our approach may be adapted or combined with others in future research and applied studies.
Our findings indicate that VFT can be a useful approach for inclusion in organizational planning frameworks.The extent to which VFT is useful beyond small planning teams, who can express their values honestly and with a good understanding of the scope and scale of the problems or opportunities they face, is unclear, as suggested by others (Cohen et al., 1972).This is a valuable direction for future work.

FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2Changes between (a) participant satisfaction with their previous experiences with conservation planning strategies (baseline) and their satisfaction with value-focused thinking (VFT) strategies, (b) facilitator satisfaction with previous experiences and facilitator satisfaction after setting VFT objectives, (c) facilitator satisfaction with previous experiences and facilitator satisfaction after drafting VFT strategies, (d) previously shared understanding of each other's (i.e., participants) values and interests and shared understanding after setting VFT objectives, (e) previously shared understanding of each other's values and interests and shared understanding after drafting VFT strategies, and (f) how well participants thought they worked together after setting objectives (baseline) and how well they thought they worked together after drafting VFT strategies (1, none; 2, some; 3, moderate; 4, very; 5, total; negative changes, less agreement; positive changes, more agreement; y-axis, proportion of participants with the same judgement).

FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3 For experienced (E) and newly trained (T) facilitator groups, changes between (a) satisfaction of participants with previous (i.e., baseline) conservation planning strategies and satisfaction with value-focused thinking (VFT) strategies, (b) facilitator satisfaction with previous experiences and facilitator satisfaction after setting VFT objectives, (c) facilitator satisfaction with previous experiences and facilitator satisfaction after drafting VFT strategies, (d) previously shared understanding of each other's (i.e., participants) values and interests and shared understanding after setting VFT objectives, (e) previously shared understanding of each other's values and interests and shared understanding after drafting VFT strategies, and (f) how well participants thought they worked together after setting objectives (baseline) and how well they thought they worked together after drafting VFT strategies (negative changes, less agreement; positive changes, more agreement; y-axis, proportion of participants with the same judgement).

TABLE 1
Design for studying the effects of value-focused thinking on conservation strategy development.* *The virtual whiteboard is in Appendix S1 and questionnaire templates are in Appendix S2.

TABLE 2
Questions used in a study of value-focused thinking.
II, III Do you feel like it would be useful if you had more time to develop objectives and strategies (yes or no)?If yes, explain what you think needs further discussion and resolution among team members.