Reconciling Rigor vs. Relevance: Lessons from Humanitarian Fleet Management

This position paper reframes the ongoing relevance vs. rigor debate in Operations Research (OR) as a Kuhnian epistemological crisis, in which the dominant paradigm of quantitative modeling shows signs of exhaustion. Humanitarian fleet management is presented as an empirical case of extensive operations theory, which has not been implemented by the stakeholders who paid for its production. The authors propose a possible way out of the crisis by combining “hard” and “soft” OR, illustrating the potential with a selected problem structuring method. Optimization solutions can become more productive by first surfacing the organizational context of decision-making. The illustration emphasizes that hard and soft OR are not binary opposites but interlocking, mutually-empowering components which expand the evidence base. Shifting the current paradigm towards more engaged scholarship could counteract the ongoing theoretical drift, for more strategic impact on the pressing problems of today.