How can intuition and analysis be blended to make rapid decisions? - Chapter 6

Claim 3: To make a decision, generate several options and compare them to pick the best one.

Claim 3 is taught in business schools. These leaders believe that all they need is more good options and stronger methods to select the best. Claim 3 makes a stronger statement; that when faced with a decision, we should go trough the drill of listing a set of alternatives and then contrasting them.

»
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Summaries per chapter with the 1st edition of Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Klein - Bundle

Study guide with Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Klein

Study guide with Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Klein

Study guide with Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making

Online summaries and study assistance with the 1st edition of Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Klein

Related content on joho.org

What sparks the passion for procedures? - Chapter 2

What sparks the passion for procedures? - Chapter 2

What does claim 1 entail?

Claim 1 is "Teaching people procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully". The process of transforming skills into procedures is irresistible. All we have to do is break a complex task down into steps and provide some tips about when to start and finish each step.

Procedural checklists are a shield against interruptions, reducing the chance of distraction. Procedures also help us to evaluate performance. We can see if someone knows the procedures, and is following them.

Procedures are also relevant to health care. Peter Pronovost developed a procedural checklist approach for a specific and common problem in intensive care units, line infections:

  • Step 1: Wash your hands with soap

  • Step 2: Clean the patient’s skin with antiseptic.

  • Step 3: Cover the patient with sterile drapes.

  • Step 4: Wear a sterile mask and gloves.

  • Step 5: Put a sterile dressing over the line once it is inserted.

Results: Line infections dropped to zero for the next year, and the hospital saved several million dollars.

The Dreyfus model of expertise emphasizes intuition and tactic knowledge that can’t be captured in rules and procedures. People might need some rules in order to get started, but they have to move beyond rules in order to achieve mastery.

Procedures are tools. Every tool has limitations. Organizations often overstate the importance of procedures. Example: during an accident investigation, if someone finds that a procedure wasn’t followed, even if it didn’t directly cause the accident, there is a good chance that procedural violation will be trumpeted as one of the contributing factors.

By appreciating the limitations of procedures and checklists we’ll be able to make better use of them. What are those limitations?

Procedures alone aren’t sufficient

In complex settings in which we have to take the context into account, we can’t codify all the work in a set of procedures. No matter how comprehensive the procedures, people probably will run into something unexpected and will have to use their judgment. It often takes government regulation to force organizations to compile reasonably comprehensive sets of procedures, and those procedures usually have gaps.

One way to ensure that a set of procedures is sufficient is to take every eventuality into account. However, this strategy can result in the opposite problem: procedural guides that are over-sufficient and sometimes incomprehensible. The problem here is that the more comprehensive the procedures are, the more voluminous they become. And the more voluminous, the more forbidding they appear, the more work to find what is needed, and the lower the chances that anyone will try.

Why is it difficult to keep procedures updated?

Procedures are often out of date, because work practices keep evolving. This is called procedural drift. Another problem is that procedural changes that get made are often excessive. The changes, though imposed to reduce the chance of adverse consequences, may create inefficiencies in working with the new procedure.

Because procedures keep evolving, procedural guides are rarely complete.

Greg Jamieson & Chris Miller (2000) studied four petrochemical refineries in the United States and Canada to see how they managed their procedures. In none of the four cases did the workers ever completely trust the procedural guides and checklists, because they never knew how updated these guides were. Over time, some procedures had become obsolete or even counterproductive.

But there is a bigger problem than the fact that procedures are rarely sufficient and often out of date. In many cases, procedures can make performance worse, not better. They can lull us into mindlessness and complacency, and cause an erosion of expertise. In some cases, procedures can mislead us.

How can procedures lead to mindlessness and complacency?

Procedures can lull people into a passive mindset of just following the steps and not really thinking about what they are doing. When we become passive, we don’t try to improve our skills. The checklists and procedural guides can reduce our motivation to become highly skilled at a job.

Important example for forecasters. It might be cheaper to hire inexperienced forecasters and give them enough procedures to get the job done, but those who depend on accurate forecasts might pay the costs and hire experienced forecasters.

How can procedures erode expertise?

When we get comfortable with procedures, we may stop trying to develop more skills. Why bother, if procedures usually get the job done? The result may be an erosion of expertise in organizations that rely too heavily on procedures.

Research supports the idea of eroding expertise. A number of studies have shown that procedures help people handle typical tasks, but people do best in novel situations when they understand the system they need to control. People taught to understand the system develop richer mental models than people taught to follow procedures.

How do procedures mislead us?

The biggest worry is that following procedures can lead us in the wrong direction and that we won’t notice because the reliance on procedures has made us so complacent.

Example: Lia Dibello found the same thing in her observations of maintenance technicians. Experts may claim to follow procedures, but when DiBello watched them she saw them deviate from the procedures when they needed to. Typically, Experts don’t compulsively follow the procedures. If they did they wouldn’t be doing their job.

Summary: We can see that procedures are insufficient, can get in the way, can interfere with developing and applying expertise and can erode over time. Procedures work best in well-ordered situations in which we don’t have to worry about changing conditions and we don’t have to take context into account to figure out how to apply the procedures, or when to jettison them.

Unintended consequences

We would establish ‘adequate performance’ as the new ideal. It is too difficult and inefficient to continually fiddle with better procedures, which creates an endless cycle of updating. By signing on the procedural strategy we would live with ineffective designs. Then we:

  • Would discourage people from using their judgment.

  • Generate massive volumes of procedures, because it is too expensive to go back and cull procedures we don’t need anymore

  • Would save money by retaining our current ways of doing the work. Anyone who proposed a different business or work strategy would have to ensure that it was consistent with all the existing procedures. Or else, we would just let the paperwork discourage anyone from suggesting improvements.

  • We would issue procedures as a way to change behavior, even though there may be simpler and more effective strategies.

Replacement

By now it should be understandable why "Claim 1: Teaching procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully" doesn’t always apply.

  • Well ordered situations: Procedures are most useful, they can substitute for skill, not augment it.

  • Complex situations: Procedures are less like to substitute for expertise and may even stifle its development.

Like all tools, procedures have strengths and weaknesses. Although I have been describing their limitations, we certainly shouldn’t discard them:

  • They are training tools. They help novices get started in learning tasks.

  • They are memory aids. In many jobs they help workers overcome memory slips.

  • They can safeguard against interruptions. For example, pilots following a flight checklist often get interrupted, the checklist helps them carry out all the steps.

  • They reduce workload and make it easier to attend to critical aspects of the task.

  • They are a way to compile experience and historical information. Procedures are useful when there is a lot of turnover and few workers ever develop much skill. They help less-experienced workers do a reasonably acceptable job.

  • They can help teams coordinate by imposing consistency. If the people on the team know the same procedures, they can predict one anothers next moves.

Getting procedures ‘right’ is not just a matter of getting them to be accurate or efficient or updated or covering all needed contexts, which may well be impossible and prohibitively expensive. It is also a matter of getting the organization to have the right attitude toward procedures. To put procedures into perspective, it is very important to consider the difference between directions and maps.

Teaching procedures

When we do want to teach some procedures, the typical way is to present the standard procedures and make everyone memorize them. Another way to teach procedures: set up scenarios for various kinds of challenges and let the new workers go through the scenarios. If the procedures makes sense, then workers should get to see what happens when they depart from the optimal procedures.

When procedures are taught in a scenario format, people can appreciate why the procedures were put into place and can also gain a sense of the limitations of the procedures. The scenario format seems to work better than having people memorize the details of each step. The scenarios provide a good counterpoint for learning the steps of complicated tasks.

Why does claim 1 matter?

Claim 1 matters because it creates a dilemma for workers. Too often supervisors insist that workers follow some shallow rules that never were validated. It matters because when we emphasize procedures over skills we set a standard of mediocre performance. The standard procedures become a basis for evaluating job performance, making people even less likely to adapt or improvise and more careful to comply with the rules.

It also matters because we too often issue procedures in order to change behaviour even though there may be simpler and more effective ways to do that.

How can the invisible be seen? - Chapter 3

How can the invisible be seen? - Chapter 3

Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge) is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it.

Explicit knowledge is easy to write down, easy to communicate, easy to teach, and easy to learn. Explicit knowledge are rules and facts. Tacit knowledge is being able to do things without being able to explain how. We can’t learn tacit knowledge from a textbook. We know more than we tell.

How biased is our thinking? - Chapter 4

How biased is our thinking? - Chapter 4

For more than 35 years, decision researchers have been demonstrating the biases that corrupt our judgments and decisions. They have been showing that our thinking processes are flawed, inaccurate and unreliable. Heuristics are automatic decision rules, these are strategies we commonly use in thinking and that can bias us. There are different kind of heuristics.

How do intuition and analysis compare or differ? - Chapter 5

How do intuition and analysis compare or differ? - Chapter 5

Claim 2a: Successful decision makers rely on logic and statistics, instead of intuition.

In 1954 Paul Meehl published a book describing 18 studies that showed the limitations of human judgment. These studies compared the judgments of professionals against statistical rule-based predictions about parole violations, success in pilot training and academic success. Meehl’s work has been repeated in a number of different areas with the same outcome. The statistical methods are more accurate than the expert judgments. In 2000, Grove et al. published a review of studies comparing clinical judgments using experience with mechanical judgments using statistics.

How can intuition and analysis be blended to make rapid decisions? - Chapter 6

How can intuition and analysis be blended to make rapid decisions? - Chapter 6

Claim 3: To make a decision, generate several options and compare them to pick the best one.

Claim 3 is taught in business schools. These leaders believe that all they need is more good options and stronger methods to select the best. Claim 3 makes a stronger statement; that when faced with a decision, we should go trough the drill of listing a set of alternatives and then contrasting them.

Why do experts sometimes commit errors? - Chapter 7

Why do experts sometimes commit errors? - Chapter 7

Experts are not just accumulating experiences. People become experts by the lessons they draw from their experiences, and by the sophistication of their mental models about how things work.

Mental models are developed through experience: individual experience, organizational experience and cultural experience,The richer mental models of experts include more knowledge and also enable the experts to see more connections. These are two defining features of complexity. The mental models of experts are more complex than those of other people. We need not to conduct research projects to appreciate the mental models of experts. We can see it all around us.

How can decisions be automated? - Chapter 8

How can decisions be automated? - Chapter 8

Many decision-support systems are a fail. The developers think that people will welcome decision aids that make it easier to conduct decision analyses. The developers often can’t believe that decision makers are too stupid to appreciate all the benefits of such decision aids. But decision makers are not rejecting the aids. They are rejecting the mindset that keeps churning out these kinds of systems. Decision makers are rejecting the mentality that idealizes reflective, analytical thinking and marginalizes automatic, intuitive thinking, instead of blending the two kinds of thinking.

Those who advocate for a balance between the automatic (intuitive) system and the reflective system are continually challenged to ensure that their organizations value their employees’ tacit knowledge.

When is more less? - Chapter 9

When is more less? - Chapter 9

Claim 4: We can reduce uncertainty by gathering more information.

There are different types of uncertainty. Sometimes we are uncertain because we don’t have the information we need. That’s the type of uncertainty that claim 4 covers. Sometimes we have the information, but we don’t know if we can trust it. Sometimes we trust it but it conflicts with other information we also believe. And sometimes we believe it, but we can’t figure out what it means.

Claim 4 covers only the first type of uncertainty, which stems from missing information. When we are faced with the other types of uncertainty, adding more information may not help at all.

When is practice a vice? - Chapter 10

When is practice a vice? - Chapter 10

Claim 5: It’s bad to jump to conclusions. It’s better to wait to see all the evidence.

Whenever you hear about a dramatic news event, track the initial account and watch as it changes over the next few days. Sometimes we don’t get the real story for months.

When a story is likely to be wrong, it clogs our minds. It gets us thinking in the wrong direction, and it makes shifting over to the truth more difficult. When we get contradictory evidence, we fixate on the first story and preserve our mistaken impressions.

What is our problem? Our fixation on our initial beliefs.

What are the limits of feedback? - Chapter 11

What are the limits of feedback? - Chapter 11

Claim 6: To get people to learn, give them feedback on the consequences of their actions.

You can’t learn without feedback. Faster feedback is better than slower feedback. More feedback is better than less feedback. In countless experiments experiments, with animals as well as with humans, feedback is essential for helping people become more skilled. Is this always true? Before we think feedback is always perfect, we should know what its limitations are,

How can one connect the dots when it comes to sensemaking? - Chapter 12

How can one connect the dots when it comes to sensemaking? - Chapter 12

Claim 7: To make sense of a situation, we draw inferences from the data

Some people picture the mind as an assembly line. Data arrive from the senses, then get refined and processed and combined and polished and assembled until we have insights and conclusions. Claim 7 stems from the assembly line metaphor. It portrays our sensemaking as making more and more inferences from the data we receive. The data get converted into information, then get further enriched to become knowledge, and finally transformed into understanding.

Do we think like computers? - Chapter 13

Do we think like computers? - Chapter 13

Ever since the development of digital computers, we have been told that our minds work like computers. Both are machines, both think, both can perform complex operations. However, on closer inspection the computer metaphor is misleading. Computers work in the world of clarity rather than the world of shadows. They perform best in well-ordered situations, with explicit knowledge/clear goals. They struggle with ambiguity.

When is it time for moving targets? - Chapter 14

When is it time for moving targets? - Chapter 14

In complex situations, our attempts to make adaptations may fail if we persist in pursuing the goals we started with, if we rely too heavily on identifying and minimizing risks, and if we maintain the ground rules we set at the beginning of an activity. Adapting means revising our goals, becoming resilient to threats we can’t predict, and changing the way we work together.

To adapt, we have to learn, but we also have to unlearn.

Claim 8: The starting point for any project is to get a clear description of the goal.

What are the risks of Risk Management? - Chapter 15

What are the risks of Risk Management? - Chapter 15

As manager you spend a lot of time worrying about how to avoid risks. We have ethical, legal and financial responsibility for managing risks. Organizations have turned risk management into a specialty. They develop safety programs to reduce the chances of accidents.

But it isn’t possible to achieve perfect protection. So we have to make choices. We have to decide which risks to worry about and how to protect ourselves. Fortunately, there is a basic type of risk-management strategy that lets us to do just that.

How is cognitive wavelength correlated to the creation of common grounds? - Chapter 16

How is cognitive wavelength correlated to the creation of common grounds? - Chapter 16

Common ground is the knowledge, beliefs and history we share that let us coordinate smoothly with one another. In a relay race, the runners know what to expect from one another. They are on the same wavelength. Shared beliefs let us make accurate assumptions about other people. More important, they let us make accurate predictions about what others are going to do. Teams do better when the members can predict one another’s actions more accurately.

We need to predict in order to coordinate with others, even if the others are complete strangers.

Claim 10: Leaders can create common ground by assigning roles and setting ground rules in advance.

What is the significance of unlearning? - Chapter 17

What is the significance of unlearning? - Chapter 17

Filling a mental storehouse. Much of the training and guidance that we receive relies on the storehouse metaphor: our minds are store houses to be filled, and as we grow up and gain experience we add more and more information into them.

The storehouse metaphor assumes that we can organize our knowledge into explicit rules, and procedures, also a comforting notion. The storehouse metaphor works best in well-ordered domains that have neatly sorted out the concepts, principles, trends and dynamics. As inventory managers we can easily check whether the trainees storehouse contains a certain fact, rule, or procedure.

Summaries per chapter with the 1st edition of Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Klein - Bundle

Study guide with Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Klein

Study guide with Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Klein

Study guide with Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making

Online summaries and study assistance with the 1st edition of Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Klein

Related content on joho.org

What sparks the passion for procedures? - Chapter 2

What sparks the passion for procedures? - Chapter 2

What does claim 1 entail?

Claim 1 is "Teaching people procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully". The process of transforming skills into procedures is irresistible. All we have to do is break a complex task down into steps and provide some tips about when to start and finish each step.

Procedural checklists are a shield against interruptions, reducing the chance of distraction. Procedures also help us to evaluate performance. We can see if someone knows the procedures, and is following them.

Procedures are also relevant to health care. Peter Pronovost developed a procedural checklist approach for a specific and common problem in intensive care units, line infections:

  • Step 1: Wash your hands with soap

  • Step 2: Clean the patient’s skin with antiseptic.

  • Step 3: Cover the patient with sterile drapes.

  • Step 4: Wear a sterile mask and gloves.

  • Step 5: Put a sterile dressing over the line once it is inserted.

Results: Line infections dropped to zero for the next year, and the hospital saved several million dollars.

The Dreyfus model of expertise emphasizes intuition and tactic knowledge that can’t be captured in rules and procedures. People might need some rules in order to get started, but they have to move beyond rules in order to achieve mastery.

Procedures are tools. Every tool has limitations. Organizations often overstate the importance of procedures. Example: during an accident investigation, if someone finds that a procedure wasn’t followed, even if it didn’t directly cause the accident, there is a good chance that procedural violation will be trumpeted as one of the contributing factors.

By appreciating the limitations of procedures and checklists we’ll be able to make better use of them. What are those limitations?

Procedures alone aren’t sufficient

In complex settings in which we have to take the context into account, we can’t codify all the work in a set of procedures. No matter how comprehensive the procedures, people probably will run into something unexpected and will have to use their judgment. It often takes government regulation to force organizations to compile reasonably comprehensive sets of procedures, and those procedures usually have gaps.

One way to ensure that a set of procedures is sufficient is to take every eventuality into account. However, this strategy can result in the opposite problem: procedural guides that are over-sufficient and sometimes incomprehensible. The problem here is that the more comprehensive the procedures are, the more voluminous they become. And the more voluminous, the more forbidding they appear, the more work to find what is needed, and the lower the chances that anyone will try.

Why is it difficult to keep procedures updated?

Procedures are often out of date, because work practices keep evolving. This is called procedural drift. Another problem is that procedural changes that get made are often excessive. The changes, though imposed to reduce the chance of adverse consequences, may create inefficiencies in working with the new procedure.

Because procedures keep evolving, procedural guides are rarely complete.

Greg Jamieson & Chris Miller (2000) studied four petrochemical refineries in the United States and Canada to see how they managed their procedures. In none of the four cases did the workers ever completely trust the procedural guides and checklists, because they never knew how updated these guides were. Over time, some procedures had become obsolete or even counterproductive.

But there is a bigger problem than the fact that procedures are rarely sufficient and often out of date. In many cases, procedures can make performance worse, not better. They can lull us into mindlessness and complacency, and cause an erosion of expertise. In some cases, procedures can mislead us.

How can procedures lead to mindlessness and complacency?

Procedures can lull people into a passive mindset of just following the steps and not really thinking about what they are doing. When we become passive, we don’t try to improve our skills. The checklists and procedural guides can reduce our motivation to become highly skilled at a job.

Important example for forecasters. It might be cheaper to hire inexperienced forecasters and give them enough procedures to get the job done, but those who depend on accurate forecasts might pay the costs and hire experienced forecasters.

How can procedures erode expertise?

When we get comfortable with procedures, we may stop trying to develop more skills. Why bother, if procedures usually get the job done? The result may be an erosion of expertise in organizations that rely too heavily on procedures.

Research supports the idea of eroding expertise. A number of studies have shown that procedures help people handle typical tasks, but people do best in novel situations when they understand the system they need to control. People taught to understand the system develop richer mental models than people taught to follow procedures.

How do procedures mislead us?

The biggest worry is that following procedures can lead us in the wrong direction and that we won’t notice because the reliance on procedures has made us so complacent.

Example: Lia Dibello found the same thing in her observations of maintenance technicians. Experts may claim to follow procedures, but when DiBello watched them she saw them deviate from the procedures when they needed to. Typically, Experts don’t compulsively follow the procedures. If they did they wouldn’t be doing their job.

Summary: We can see that procedures are insufficient, can get in the way, can interfere with developing and applying expertise and can erode over time. Procedures work best in well-ordered situations in which we don’t have to worry about changing conditions and we don’t have to take context into account to figure out how to apply the procedures, or when to jettison them.

Unintended consequences

We would establish ‘adequate performance’ as the new ideal. It is too difficult and inefficient to continually fiddle with better procedures, which creates an endless cycle of updating. By signing on the procedural strategy we would live with ineffective designs. Then we:

  • Would discourage people from using their judgment.

  • Generate massive volumes of procedures, because it is too expensive to go back and cull procedures we don’t need anymore

  • Would save money by retaining our current ways of doing the work. Anyone who proposed a different business or work strategy would have to ensure that it was consistent with all the existing procedures. Or else, we would just let the paperwork discourage anyone from suggesting improvements.

  • We would issue procedures as a way to change behavior, even though there may be simpler and more effective strategies.

Replacement

By now it should be understandable why "Claim 1: Teaching procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully" doesn’t always apply.

  • Well ordered situations: Procedures are most useful, they can substitute for skill, not augment it.

  • Complex situations: Procedures are less like to substitute for expertise and may even stifle its development.

Like all tools, procedures have strengths and weaknesses. Although I have been describing their limitations, we certainly shouldn’t discard them:

  • They are training tools. They help novices get started in learning tasks.

  • They are memory aids. In many jobs they help workers overcome memory slips.

  • They can safeguard against interruptions. For example, pilots following a flight checklist often get interrupted, the checklist helps them carry out all the steps.

  • They reduce workload and make it easier to attend to critical aspects of the task.

  • They are a way to compile experience and historical information. Procedures are useful when there is a lot of turnover and few workers ever develop much skill. They help less-experienced workers do a reasonably acceptable job.

  • They can help teams coordinate by imposing consistency. If the people on the team know the same procedures, they can predict one anothers next moves.

Getting procedures ‘right’ is not just a matter of getting them to be accurate or efficient or updated or covering all needed contexts, which may well be impossible and prohibitively expensive. It is also a matter of getting the organization to have the right attitude toward procedures. To put procedures into perspective, it is very important to consider the difference between directions and maps.

Teaching procedures

When we do want to teach some procedures, the typical way is to present the standard procedures and make everyone memorize them. Another way to teach procedures: set up scenarios for various kinds of challenges and let the new workers go through the scenarios. If the procedures makes sense, then workers should get to see what happens when they depart from the optimal procedures.

When procedures are taught in a scenario format, people can appreciate why the procedures were put into place and can also gain a sense of the limitations of the procedures. The scenario format seems to work better than having people memorize the details of each step. The scenarios provide a good counterpoint for learning the steps of complicated tasks.

Why does claim 1 matter?

Claim 1 matters because it creates a dilemma for workers. Too often supervisors insist that workers follow some shallow rules that never were validated. It matters because when we emphasize procedures over skills we set a standard of mediocre performance. The standard procedures become a basis for evaluating job performance, making people even less likely to adapt or improvise and more careful to comply with the rules.

It also matters because we too often issue procedures in order to change behaviour even though there may be simpler and more effective ways to do that.

How can the invisible be seen? - Chapter 3

How can the invisible be seen? - Chapter 3

Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal, codified or explicit knowledge) is the kind of knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it.

Explicit knowledge is easy to write down, easy to communicate, easy to teach, and easy to learn. Explicit knowledge are rules and facts. Tacit knowledge is being able to do things without being able to explain how. We can’t learn tacit knowledge from a textbook. We know more than we tell.

How biased is our thinking? - Chapter 4

How biased is our thinking? - Chapter 4

For more than 35 years, decision researchers have been demonstrating the biases that corrupt our judgments and decisions. They have been showing that our thinking processes are flawed, inaccurate and unreliable. Heuristics are automatic decision rules, these are strategies we commonly use in thinking and that can bias us. There are different kind of heuristics.

How do intuition and analysis compare or differ? - Chapter 5

How do intuition and analysis compare or differ? - Chapter 5

Claim 2a: Successful decision makers rely on logic and statistics, instead of intuition.

In 1954 Paul Meehl published a book describing 18 studies that showed the limitations of human judgment. These studies compared the judgments of professionals against statistical rule-based predictions about parole violations, success in pilot training and academic success. Meehl’s work has been repeated in a number of different areas with the same outcome. The statistical methods are more accurate than the expert judgments. In 2000, Grove et al. published a review of studies comparing clinical judgments using experience with mechanical judgments using statistics.

How can intuition and analysis be blended to make rapid decisions? - Chapter 6

How can intuition and analysis be blended to make rapid decisions? - Chapter 6

Claim 3: To make a decision, generate several options and compare them to pick the best one.

Claim 3 is taught in business schools. These leaders believe that all they need is more good options and stronger methods to select the best. Claim 3 makes a stronger statement; that when faced with a decision, we should go trough the drill of listing a set of alternatives and then contrasting them.

Why do experts sometimes commit errors? - Chapter 7

Why do experts sometimes commit errors? - Chapter 7

Experts are not just accumulating experiences. People become experts by the lessons they draw from their experiences, and by the sophistication of their mental models about how things work.

Mental models are developed through experience: individual experience, organizational experience and cultural experience,The richer mental models of experts include more knowledge and also enable the experts to see more connections. These are two defining features of complexity. The mental models of experts are more complex than those of other people. We need not to conduct research projects to appreciate the mental models of experts. We can see it all around us.

How can decisions be automated? - Chapter 8

How can decisions be automated? - Chapter 8

Many decision-support systems are a fail. The developers think that people will welcome decision aids that make it easier to conduct decision analyses. The developers often can’t believe that decision makers are too stupid to appreciate all the benefits of such decision aids. But decision makers are not rejecting the aids. They are rejecting the mindset that keeps churning out these kinds of systems. Decision makers are rejecting the mentality that idealizes reflective, analytical thinking and marginalizes automatic, intuitive thinking, instead of blending the two kinds of thinking.

Those who advocate for a balance between the automatic (intuitive) system and the reflective system are continually challenged to ensure that their organizations value their employees’ tacit knowledge.

When is more less? - Chapter 9

When is more less? - Chapter 9

Claim 4: We can reduce uncertainty by gathering more information.

There are different types of uncertainty. Sometimes we are uncertain because we don’t have the information we need. That’s the type of uncertainty that claim 4 covers. Sometimes we have the information, but we don’t know if we can trust it. Sometimes we trust it but it conflicts with other information we also believe. And sometimes we believe it, but we can’t figure out what it means.

Claim 4 covers only the first type of uncertainty, which stems from missing information. When we are faced with the other types of uncertainty, adding more information may not help at all.

When is practice a vice? - Chapter 10

When is practice a vice? - Chapter 10

Claim 5: It’s bad to jump to conclusions. It’s better to wait to see all the evidence.

Whenever you hear about a dramatic news event, track the initial account and watch as it changes over the next few days. Sometimes we don’t get the real story for months.

When a story is likely to be wrong, it clogs our minds. It gets us thinking in the wrong direction, and it makes shifting over to the truth more difficult. When we get contradictory evidence, we fixate on the first story and preserve our mistaken impressions.

What is our problem? Our fixation on our initial beliefs.

What are the limits of feedback? - Chapter 11

What are the limits of feedback? - Chapter 11

Claim 6: To get people to learn, give them feedback on the consequences of their actions.

You can’t learn without feedback. Faster feedback is better than slower feedback. More feedback is better than less feedback. In countless experiments experiments, with animals as well as with humans, feedback is essential for helping people become more skilled. Is this always true? Before we think feedback is always perfect, we should know what its limitations are,

How can one connect the dots when it comes to sensemaking? - Chapter 12

How can one connect the dots when it comes to sensemaking? - Chapter 12

Claim 7: To make sense of a situation, we draw inferences from the data

Some people picture the mind as an assembly line. Data arrive from the senses, then get refined and processed and combined and polished and assembled until we have insights and conclusions. Claim 7 stems from the assembly line metaphor. It portrays our sensemaking as making more and more inferences from the data we receive. The data get converted into information, then get further enriched to become knowledge, and finally transformed into understanding.

Do we think like computers? - Chapter 13

Do we think like computers? - Chapter 13

Ever since the development of digital computers, we have been told that our minds work like computers. Both are machines, both think, both can perform complex operations. However, on closer inspection the computer metaphor is misleading. Computers work in the world of clarity rather than the world of shadows. They perform best in well-ordered situations, with explicit knowledge/clear goals. They struggle with ambiguity.

When is it time for moving targets? - Chapter 14

When is it time for moving targets? - Chapter 14

In complex situations, our attempts to make adaptations may fail if we persist in pursuing the goals we started with, if we rely too heavily on identifying and minimizing risks, and if we maintain the ground rules we set at the beginning of an activity. Adapting means revising our goals, becoming resilient to threats we can’t predict, and changing the way we work together.

To adapt, we have to learn, but we also have to unlearn.

Claim 8: The starting point for any project is to get a clear description of the goal.

What are the risks of Risk Management? - Chapter 15

What are the risks of Risk Management? - Chapter 15

As manager you spend a lot of time worrying about how to avoid risks. We have ethical, legal and financial responsibility for managing risks. Organizations have turned risk management into a specialty. They develop safety programs to reduce the chances of accidents.

But it isn’t possible to achieve perfect protection. So we have to make choices. We have to decide which risks to worry about and how to protect ourselves. Fortunately, there is a basic type of risk-management strategy that lets us to do just that.

How is cognitive wavelength correlated to the creation of common grounds? - Chapter 16

How is cognitive wavelength correlated to the creation of common grounds? - Chapter 16

Common ground is the knowledge, beliefs and history we share that let us coordinate smoothly with one another. In a relay race, the runners know what to expect from one another. They are on the same wavelength. Shared beliefs let us make accurate assumptions about other people. More important, they let us make accurate predictions about what others are going to do. Teams do better when the members can predict one another’s actions more accurately.

We need to predict in order to coordinate with others, even if the others are complete strangers.

Claim 10: Leaders can create common ground by assigning roles and setting ground rules in advance.

What is the significance of unlearning? - Chapter 17

What is the significance of unlearning? - Chapter 17

Filling a mental storehouse. Much of the training and guidance that we receive relies on the storehouse metaphor: our minds are store houses to be filled, and as we grow up and gain experience we add more and more information into them.

The storehouse metaphor assumes that we can organize our knowledge into explicit rules, and procedures, also a comforting notion. The storehouse metaphor works best in well-ordered domains that have neatly sorted out the concepts, principles, trends and dynamics. As inventory managers we can easily check whether the trainees storehouse contains a certain fact, rule, or procedure.

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