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. [...]
Decision making —
Category Archives: Decision making
Tufte & Miller weigh in on “the magic number 7 +/- 2
Pardon the copying below, but I just had to include this on the blog since I discovered this stuff this morning. After my post yesterday citing Miller, I thought it my duty. Edward Tufte has a long series of post and comments on the mis-reading and mis-use of George Miller’s article. Here are some excerpts [...]
Miller’s “the magic number 7 plus or minus 2″ meets chocolate cake and fruit cups
This morning on NPR’s Morning Edition had a feature from Radiolab on decision making and the role played by the “rational” and the “intuitive” systems of the brain/mind.
Using George Miller’s seminal study on the limits of distinct things we can keep “in mind,” Baba Shiv, a professor at Stanford’s business school, had subjects [...]
How our thinking is “entrained”
David Snowden talks about how our thinking/doing is entrained. I wasn’t familiar with the word when I first heard it used in a podcast of one of his presentations. I think he’s getting at how we have habitual patterns of thinking, of conceiving without considering the assumptions we have taken for granted. It is like [...]
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 [...]
What’s the witness of your “domestic” life?
I’ve been dipping again into the Anabaptist record. A piece by Alan Kreider took me particularly hard. He wrote, “The church has nothing to offer to the world other than what it has learned to live in its own ‘domestic’ life.”
It isn’t information; it isn’t principles; it isn’t laws and regulations that’s going to make [...]