Uncertainty appears to the chief bugaboo of organizations. Max Miller, the Hamburg sociologist in his 2002 paper, Some theoretical aspects of systemic learning, abstracting organizational theorists (such as Simon and Weick), wrote, “If there is anything that defines the central problem of an organization, it is the inescapable and enduring struggle of coping with uncertainty. [...]
Management —
Category Archives: Management
Another vote against planning from the 37 Signals guys: Plans “aren’t worth the stress”
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hannson in their new Rework published by Crown Business advise going against most of what we’ve come to accept as sacred business truths. Having worked with federal funded programs from education to drug and alcohol prevention, I know their proclivity toward forcing recipients to use business ways. So I am [...]
Five rules to reinvent Best Practices from Nick Milton
Wednesday Nick Milton in his blog listed these five “rules.” They made a lot of sense to me and so I am reprinting them:
There is a lot of pushback in the KM world about the term “best practice”. In the discussion groups, we hear people saying “we don’t believe in best practice”. Respected KM gurus [...]
New look for Brook Besor Consultants
We are excited. We just received permission from Chris Raschka to use one of his copyrighted illustrations as a logo for our company, The Brook Besor Consultants, Inc. We asked if we could use his hands reaching toward one another from the book, Skin Again with text by bell hooks. We’re fans of Mr Raschka. [...]
What does training look like in complex environments?
This morning reading my emails from overnight I found a link to a post by Harold Jarche. He uses David Snowden’s Cynefin Framework as an illustration. I thought I would share it with some of my colleagues and wrote an email about it to them. After I was done, the email look like a blog [...]
“Too many standards, too little time” writes a teacher with
40 years of experience. In a blog by ContraCosta Times education reporter, the teacher, Steven Weinberg writes:
Having written previously about ways education has improved in the 40 years since I began teaching, I would like to address one change that I do not believe has been beneficial: the attempt to make “content standards” the basis [...]
Resurrecting IDEF0/ICOM modeling work
In the last half of the 90s I worked in the Indianapolis field office of PRC, Inc., a high tech “Beltway” defense contractor with headquarters in McLean. Our office, though, was geared toward servicing educational clients. We had a ESEA Chapter 1 (or Title I, depending on which political party occupied the White House) [...]
Here are some biases I am aware that I fall prey to …
Information bias and Planning fallacy. Big time for the latter. I know evaluators and researcher often succumb to Confirmation bias, Déformation professionnelle, and Experimenter’s or Expectation bias. We, evaluators, often interview and survey others as to why they chose or did certain things. They may select among the options given, when, in reality, their decisions [...]
Decision-making & behavioral biases: How are you affected?
Here’s the list from Wikipedia. It has grown since I studied them years ago in speech com at West Virginia University. I more or less specialized in what was called then, “receiver” biases. If we do have four “systems” operating in our brain and, as Kahneman suggests, we lean toward the intuitive first in making [...]
More on Kahnerman: List of cognitive biases on Wikipedia
It appears to be rather comprehensive. Here’s an intro paragraph:
The notion of cognitive biases was introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972 and grew out of their experience of people’s innumeracy, or inability to reason intuitively with the greater orders of magnitude. They and their colleagues demonstrated several replicable ways in which human [...]