President, Chief
Methodologist courand@synergia.com
Dr. Gregg Courand is a founding partner, President, and
Chief Methodologist of Synergia LLC. Dr. Courand has 25 years of experience conducting client engagements and research projects for federal and municipal government, and private industry. A significant part of this
has included work
to develop concepts, methods, and technologies to help individuals and teams of
problem-solvers and decision-makers better understand their situations and the
opportunities for effective joint action. He has extensive experience
developing precise models of client organizations and the actors/organizations
that form the context for their activities (collaborators, threats, and other
influential actors).
Dr. Courand leads Synergia’s development of the Practice
Mapping methodology for developing and validating models of dynamic,
concurrent, distributed practices of human systems and for analyzing their
properties. The method has been successfully taught to and used by individuals
with no formal background in Computer Science, Psychology, or the Social
Sciences. He develops instruments for data acquisition, and advises Synergia’s
ACCORD technology development program, on requirements and specifications for
data collection and management, event-behavior formalization, actor modeling,
choice analysis, argumentation, and forecasting. Recently, he has tailored
these organizational modeling and analysis methods to help organizations define
technology requirements that support their practice management and development
objectives.
He has primary responsibility for Synergia’s development of
formal risk management methods, to assess and improve organizational planning
and decision-making. He is developing a methodology, Critical Practice
Management, to integrate human-systems modeling tasks with formal decision
modeling. This method constrains the scope of what is modeled to best serve the
intervention and change objectives of the client. As part of this, he is extending
decision theory to support collaborative planning, anomaly resolution, and
real-time control over simulation of complex social phenomena.
From 1992 through 1996 he was a Research Associate and
Deputy Director of the Organizational Dynamics Center at Stanford University. Prior to that, he spent 14 years at Advanced Decision Systems and Delfin Systems,
conducting research and developing Artificial Intelligence, optimization, and
decision-making technologies in support of knowledge management, analysis,
planning, and decision-making.
Dr. Courand earned his Ph.D. in Distributed Artificial
Intelligence at Stanford University. He invented (and developed software) for
distributed argument formation and revision, a new basis for coordinating
beliefs and plans in multi-agent settings. Agents have differing values and
differential access to incomplete, uncertain, and conflicting data. He received
an MS in Systems Economics from Stanford. He graduated valedictorian and Summa
Cum Laude with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Boston University.
Concurrently, he completed the requirements for a BS in Systems Engineering and
virtually all requirements for a BS in Philosophy.
