Transferring PSM craft skills in a 2 hour session

Many of those involved in the Problem Structuring Methods (PSM) community have commented on the struggle that novices face in building the craft skills associated with conducting a PSM intervention. As part of this year's Operational Research Society Conference, we have three 2-hour practical sessions which demonstrate the use of PSMs. These sessions aim to encourage the transfer of good facilitation practice by letting those who are less experienced learn from widely experienced facilitators. The sessions are on Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis and on two methods which are not yet as well established in the academic literature: Benefits Analysis and MARVEL (Method to Analyse Relations between Variables using Enriched Loops). In this paper we provide a short introduction to these methods which aim to complement the practical sessions.