“When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?” — John Maynard Keynes In many situations, we don’t follow Keynes’ approach. In fact, in light of new evidence, we usually don’t update our initial beliefs as…
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A few years ago, Lance Armstrong finally faced doping charges. Shortly before he confessed, a number of organizations, like ESPN or the LA Times ran polls to know if people thought he had been doping. The results were pretty evenly balanced: In ESPN’s…
Tom and Ray Magliozzi—the Tappet Brothers—are MIT-educated mechanics that take calls from listeners and help them solve their car issues while making jokes about themselves, the caller, and others. The premise is straight-forward: callers describe the symptoms of their automotive…
Management consultants use issue trees to help them structure how they solve complex problems. A closely related animal is the question map, which is at the heart of our problem-solving approach and, therefore, a recurrent theme on this site. There…