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- Future trend: hypothesis mapping displacing ACHDecember 15 2008
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Slides from a presentation at an intelligence & security seminar in Canberra last week.
Thanks to Brett Peppler for getting me the gig.
- The three kinds of judgementNovember 13 2008
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[originally posted to BlogCisive]
To a first approximation, all deliberative judgements (i.e., those that turn on to-some-degree careful consideration of the relevant arguments) can be usefully sorted into three kinds.
These are the three Ds of judgement.
1. Decision
Decision is a matter of choosing from among options, particularly where those options are possible actions. The question here is “What should I (we) do?”
2. Diagnosis
Diagnostic judgements concern what is going on. The question is “What is happening?” or “What’s the situation?” The term diagnosis has medical connotations, but here I’m widening its use to include various kinds of investigation, hypothesis testing, and problem-solving. All diagnostic judgements involve hypotheses (conjectures) as to what is actually happening. A good example of diagnostic judgement in this sense is the assessment in intelligence analysis.
3. Deliberation
Deliberation is trying to determine the truth of some proposition by considering the arguments for or against it. The question is “Is it true?”
Austhink has two products - Rationale, and bCisive. Rationale, the argument mapping tool, supports deliberation. bCisive, the business decision mapping tool, has been positioned as supporting decision. We haven’t had a tool for diagnosis, and have tended to recommend that people wanting to make diagnostic judgements use
- Mapping Out the OptionsNovember 13 2008
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[Draft of a piece written for an IT weekly magazine]
“In the affair of so much importance to you, wherein you ask my advice, I cannot for want of sufficient premises, advise you what to determine, but if you please I will tell you how.”
So began some of the best advice on decision making ever given.
It was 1772, and the great Benjamin Franklin was advising his scientific colleague Joseph Priestley. But his advice is just as relevant today, when critical business and IT decisions must be made under conditions of great uncertainty and time pressure.
Recently, his insights have been incorporated into software packages which can improve and accelerate organisational decisions, including IT decisions.
His counsel, briefly, was take a sheet of paper, divide it into two columns, and write down all the advantages of a certain path of action in one column, and disadvantages in the other. Then, by “cancelling out” items in one column with items in the other, assess which column is the more weighty.
Simple but powerful, Franklin’s “Moral Algebra” has given great service over the decades. Research has shown that such methods reliably produce better decisions than ordinary unstructured deliberation. Even Charles Darwin deployed the method, using it in deciding whether to get married. Balancing considerations such as “terrible waste of time” on one hand with “object to be beloved and played with”
- Decision at the centerAugust 25 2008
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Chandler is an attempt to re-invent the “personal information manager” (think: Outlook). Dreaming in Code is a fascinating book about the Chandler journey.
The Chandler developers had to think long and hard about the nature of knowledge work. On their website, on a page called Chandler Project Vision, they describe their Target Users:
They work closely with every member of their team, acting as a communication hub. They know how to ask the right questions to gather input and feedback. They identify problem areas, figure out when meetings need to happen, who needs to be there, what needs to be discussed, and then they facilitate the discussion to define concrete next actions and ultimately drive their team towards informed decisions. They take on the responsibility of defining realistic goals for their team and getting everyone pointed in the same direction to reach those goals.
On this description, Chandler’s target users are very closely related to the target users of bCisive, i.e. “business decision makers.”
Alongside the description of their target users, the page has a graphic:
- Tools for Thinking - Management ConsultingAugust 10 2008
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Draft magazine piece. Comments welcome.
In the late 1950s, a young engineer by the name of Douglas Engelbart made a decision that was to have a immense effect on all of our lives. Engelbart realised that the massive challenges faced by humanity, such as hunger or nuclear war, would place unprecedented demands on our thinking capacities – indeed, they may be so complex that our finite human brains may be unable to find solutions.With youthful idealism, he wondered how he could fix this problem.
As an engineer, his natural inclination was to build something – in this case, something that could expand our innate thinking capacities, much as a shovel or an excavator can greatly extend our digging capacities.In short, his mission in life became building tools which augment human intelligence.Over the following decades, he and his co-workers developed the key aspects of the personal computer, including innovations such as the mouse, hyper-linking and videoconferencing. Via Apple and Microsoft, these innovations rapidly became a standard part of every office worker’s equipment.
These days it seems hard to imagine how a management consultant could function without spreadsheets, presentation software, email, and so fort
