Identifying Product Development Crises: The Potential of Adaptive Heuristics

This paper introduces adaptive heuristics as a tool to identify crises in design projects and highlights potential applications of these heuristics as decision support tool for crisis identification. Crises may emerge slowly or suddenly, and often have ambiguous signals. Thus the identification of a project crisis is often difficult. Yet, to allow fast crisis response, timely identification is critical for successful crisis management. Adaptive heuristics are judgement strategies that can strive in circumstances of limited and ambiguous information. This article presents a theoretical proposition for the application of heuristics in design sciences. To achieve this, the paper compares crises to 'business as usual', and presents sixteen indicators for emerging crises. These indicators are potential cues for adaptive heuristics. Specifically three adaptive heuristics, One-single-cue, Fast-and-Frugal-Trees, and Tallying, are well suited to support design practitioners to make robust inferences about the situation. The paper presents potential applications of these three heuristics and provides an outlook on further research on adaptive heuristics in design sciences.