As audiences, we shouldn’t be careful about people who qualify their assurance. On the contrary, we should be careful about people who speak with certainty.
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The first time I taught problem solving at Rice, I gave my students a full semester of concepts and tools: questions maps (which I called issue trees, back then), SCQs, decision matrices, etc. They politely listened during the boring lectures,…
Not all types of evidence are equally trustworthy. The higher the level, the more confidence you can have.
You take your seat in attendance, the meeting starts, and our friendly presenter, Bob, projects a “background” slide. It’s filled with information related to the issue at hand. Some of the information is clearly relevant, other appears barely peripheral, and…
I’ve never experienced anything like it: Even when staying at a race hotel, I’ve never been so close to the start line. We just happen to be able to see the start line of the 20k of Lausanne from our…
As some may know, I have a book on strategic thinking in complex problem solving. It uses a story to introduce the problem-solving process and tools: one day, my dog William goes missing, and there’s a pretty good chance that…
Decision making is a critical part of solving complex problems. In theory, it happens after framing the problem and exploring options and criteria, in the form of a climax where the fundamental components of the process—the question you’re answering, the…
Over the past five months, two Boeing 737 Max airliners have crashed, killing 356 people. Although the story is still unfolding and the investigation is underway, preliminary evidence suggests that design flaws are the cause of the crashes. Here’s a recap…
If someone starts a phrase with “strategy is about … ,” assume that what comes next is hot air. Because three phrases later, strategy will be about something else. And three phrases after that, it will be about something else….
“All models are wrong but some are useful.” – George Box As an engineer, I was trained to model the world: take a complex system—say, an oil-well drillstring extending several kilometers underground—make assumptions on what matters (e.g., contact with the…