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Archive for the ‘Decision Making’ Category

4 ways to avoid the planning fallacy

Posted in Decision Making, tagged , , on November 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

WHEN projects are commissioned, a business case is undertaken to establish costs, benefits, and schedule. In each of these domains there are probabilities of outcomes, so uncertainties must also be considered. This business case is built on estimates given by experts. But people (humans) are notoriously over confident. And more often than not an exact [...]

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Conspiracy or stupidity?

Posted in Decision Making, tagged , , , on October 30, 2011 | 3 Comments »

I AM often asked if I believe in conspiracy theories, especially given I do a lot of work in the Banking and Finance industry I am asked this in context of the financial crisis. My standard answer is an emphatic no, of course, with the explanation that it’s just the system of things and that [...]

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Planning fallacy: why people can’t plan and what to do about it.

Posted in Decision Making, Project management, tagged , , on March 16, 2011 | 6 Comments »

MANAGERS want to predict what revenue will be like in three months, or how long a specific project will take. But any prediction will be as good as predicting the weather in three months time: At best we will know what season it will be. Even experienced project managers can’t get dates right. Take the Sydney [...]

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Making data driven decisions: When to stop?

Posted in Decision Making, tagged , , , , on October 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Don’t assume: Too many times we take out preformed ideas into a problem. I don’t know this can be completely eliminated; we are human after all and much has been written lately about irrationality and it’s up and down sides. I think the key is judgement. Have a good understanding when you need to do [...]

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Uses of pessimism

Posted in Decision Making, Management on September 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

To cap off the post below on the uses of paranoia in business, I am across this book on the value off pessimism. The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope, talks to this very point. The blurb reads: Ranging widely over human history and culture, from ancient Greece to the current global [...]

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Nothing fails like success.

Posted in Decision Making, Management, tagged , , , on September 20, 2010 | 1 Comment »

In a speech given by Ed Catmull, titled Pixar: Keep your crises small. Given at given Standford Business, he explores this question: why is it that successful companies fail?   Well there are many reasons, among them that companies become protective and fail to innovate, which is true, but in this speech Catmull makes a [...]

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Perils of optimising

Posted in Decision Making, tagged , , , on September 15, 2010 | 1 Comment »

As humans we are spectacularly bad at predicting the future. No revelation there, right. But still people do, make bets on stocks, or given investments, and strategies paying off into the future. Then to make things worse, people then optimise their decisions. For example, betting is all on black. To quote an article from a [...]

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Looking forward versus looking backwards

Posted in Decision Making, tagged , on August 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Over at Time-Back Management, Dan quotes Steve Pear about what is being taught in business schools; namely that MBA’s teach retrospective thinking, as opposed to prospective thinking. Business managers are not trained to learn/discover.  Rather they are trained to decide about transactions.  Consider the MBA curriculum core: Finance–how to value transactions Accounting–how to track transactions [...]

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When good projects go bad

Posted in Decision Making, Management on August 19, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Business doesn’t like risk, or more specifically we don’t like it when things go wrong. Projects go wrong all the time because by definition projects are not done as part of day-to-day business, otherwise we’d have a good understanding of the risks. But we must still work to protect a plan. Below is a model [...]

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Implementation Formula – Rapid Response and Organization

Posted in Decision Making, tagged on May 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

If you want something done, then measure it.  Peter Drucker said “What gets measured gets done”, so measure what you want to get done. Or, if you do it, then measure it then you will know how well you are doing it! But measuring is not enough:  Sure, measure, but also get organized. Get super-organized [...]

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