Group items tagged

Common decision biases, with some nice graphics

Executives want greater speed and sophistication in their decision-making, but most say their ambition is greater than what their organisations are ready for.

The coming-of-age of artificial intelligence, 'social robots' and big data is having a massive impact on the way decisions are made in organisations. It follows that if we are to maximise know-how and expertise, the outputs from this technology-enabled channel must be integrated into how we work. Augmenting judgment and experience in this way also supports the move towards evidence-based decision making.

Despite improvements in cognitive technologies, that dream managerial scenario is still far from reality. Decisions that executives face don't necessarily fit into defined problems well suited for automation.

"Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can't make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can't determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case. We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts. Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitatio

You've probably encountered the usual issues of group decision making… People who dominate the conversation, quiet people whose ideas never get heard and all those post-it notes you have to write up. GroupMap solves this by capturing individual thinking first, then reveal the group perspective, all in real-time. Now that's true collaborative decision making.

It's not humans who are the recipients and decision makers of data and analysis, it's machines. Machines are making all or most of the decisions in areas like programmatic advertising, search engine optimization, credit approval, insurance underwriting, Internet of Things applications, and many more.

"The "big data, little brain" phenomenon is defined as managers who rely excessively on data to guide their decisions, abdicating their knowledge and experience."

"Relying on counterfactual explanations as a means to help us act rather than merely to understand could help us gauge the scope and impact of automated decisions in our lives. They might also help bridge the gap between the interests of data subjects and data controllers, which might otherwise be a barrier to a legally binding right to explanation."

Many companies have invested significantly in gathering vast amounts of data, yet they still struggle to extract insights, put them to work for the business and create truly data-driven organisations. The virtuous circle of data explores how organisations can spark a chain of events through top-down leadership and bottom-up employee engagement that creates a culture with data at the centre of decision-making.

Many companies have invested significantly in gathering vast amounts of data, yet they still struggle to extract insights, put them to work for the business and create truly data-driven organisations. The virtuous circle of data explores how organisations can spark a chain of events through top-down leadership and bottom-up employee engagement that creates a culture with data at the centre of decision-making.

PBS video with Richard Thaler looking at ationality in decision making

The TERMINUTER app is an automated cognitive meeting minutes tool, mainly based on speech-to-text technology. The app automatically writes and structures meeting minutes with decisions and to-dos and even alerts you if owners or deadlines are not defined.

APQC's Knowledge Management (KM) Capability Assessment Tool is a diagnostic that lets KM practitioners measure every aspect of their KM programs, from strategy and business case development to specific processes and technologies, and find out how they stack up against the competition. This white paper describes the assessment tool, the 12 categories in which participating organizations are measured, and how knowledge managers can leverage the assessment results to improve their strategic decision making.

"Tullow Oil, a London-based independent oil and gas exploration and production company, regularly wins awards for its innovative approach to problem solving. Its business culture is based on investing in the best people and then trusting them to work together to keep Tullow on the leading edge of the industry. Tullow's CIO recently challenged his team to develop an approach to devolve control of IT project prioritization to non-IT leaders within the company. This article explains the approach developed and how it is working to keep the business's IT strategy aligned with Tullow's entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to collaborative decision making."

Article for BIR - June 2015 issue Heuristics, the science of decision making.

BM's Watson Artificial Intelligence System is capable of searching across vast repositories of unstructured data and returning answers to natural language queries, but it won't replace humans. Instead, the system will augment humans and help us to make better decisions.

"The government wants to move towards a 'data culture' to make better spending decisions, says minister responsible for digital reform, Matt Hancock"