Introduction to decision‐making for graduate entrants

I want in this article to show that a training officer can build a variety of different models and can achieve different purposes by their use. I want to diversify, as the marketing men might say. Driftwood Tools was a comparatively rigid structure which lay squarely in the field of industrial engineering and directed the student's attention to a single ‘right’ answer. Much of its value depends on that answer being reached: without it there is insufficient motivation to get valuable discussion of the related issues. A model does not necessarily have to be concerned with industrial engineering nor does it need a ‘right’ answer. I want to demonstrate these points with two more examples. Before doing so I want to make a distinction between a MODEL and a CASE STUDY. The two media have a lot in common but I believe that the differences are quite important and ought to be appreciated if you are going to get maximum value from your training sessions. The chief characteristic of a model is that it is intended to encourage experiment and to facilitate the comparison of alternative solutions. This means that whatever data is used to compile it has to be fairly specific and must be interrelated in a definite way. It must be possible to deduce with some accuracy how the alteration of one piece of data would affect the whole.