Followup from yesterday's thought on patina and [temporarily] "perfect" devices. I love the connection Ruben makes here.
Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
Leaders in all fields-business, medicine, law, government-make crucial decisions every day. The harsh truth is that they mismanage many of those choices, even though they have the right intentions. These blunders take a huge toll on leaders, their organizations, and the people they serve.Why is it so hard to make sound decisions? We fall victim to simplified mental routines that prevent us from coping with the complex realities inherent in important judgment calls. Yet these cognitive errors are preventable. In Think Twice, Michael Mauboussin shows you how to recognize-and avoid-common mental missteps, including:
-Misunderstanding cause-and-effect linkages
-Aggregating micro-level behavior to predict macro-level behavior
-Not considering enough alternative possibilities in making a decision
-Relying too much on experts
Sharing vivid stories from business and beyond, Mauboussin offers powerful rules for avoiding each error. And he explains how to know when it's time to think twice-to question your reasoning and adopt decision-making strategies that are far more effective, even if they seem counterintuitive.
Master the art of thinking twice, and you'll start spotting dangerous mental errors-in your own decisions and in those of others. Equipped with this awareness, you'll soon begin making sounder judgment calls that benefit (rather than hurt) your organization.
I find it important to consider the counterintuitive; it's a form of long-term thinking. It's having the perspective of seeking global maxima in spite of moving away from local maxima.
And at first blush this notion of "think twice" runs against the type of argument Malcolm Gladwell popularized in Blink.
I think there are just two different types of intuition being referenced here: evolutionary and multiplexed.
The post just linked explains both, but in short: Malcom's evolutionary intuition is something like "mental muscle memory"; Mauboussin's multiplexed intuition emerges from absorbing information over time in a controlled/conscious manner.
I was at a talk by Jane McGonigal the other day. She think a lot about games. I found it quite poignant that she noted though it *seems* like the the object of games is to reach a goal, this is in fact not the case. She used golf as an example. Ostensibly, the goal of golf is to get a ball into a hole. Though if this were actually the case, we would pick up the ball, and put it in the hole. Instead, we try to hit to ball into the hole with a stick. From really far away. And on difficult terrain.
What's happening here is not the act of trying to reach a goal - it's the act of trying to master a challenge. What I liked about Jane's perspective is that she introduced the notion of games as *unnecessary obstacles*.
Recent behavioral studies are finding that when you give a gift, the recipient automatically values it lower than its actual worth. Why? Simply because it's a gift.
Group payment service WePay decided to take a look at how gift-giving works and found that what you give can be worth—in the mind of the recipient, that is—up to 18% less than its actual retail value:
(Click to enlarge.)
Hello friends and collaborators. I deal in innovation, working to build fantastic experiences enabled by the digital world. As part of this I track cultural change, primarily through observations guided by models and filters calibrated over years to sort out the cream.
These pieces of thoughts here reflect concepts that are elements of those models: ecosystem thinking, long-term value, information filters, and pattern recognition.
("How to break anything" is an abstract notion that reflects my background in observation and analysis. Rules are meant to be broken, but only through understanding the rules - observing them with an empathetic eye - can they be broken constructively.
So how to break anything? Observe everything.
[You can't observe everything so how do you know what to observe? That's another project that I call Filter Theory - see the About link above.])
