Thursday
Jul082010

Give a man a fish....

DateThursday, July 8, 2010 at 9:40AM | Authorlib | CommentPost a Comment

Unfortunately I missed David Snowden’s recent ‘Making sense of complexity workshop’ but I was impressed with this response by the guys at the River Restoration Centre (http://bit.ly/98LbhP) which speaks about the difference between a cook who follows a recipe and a chief, who understands their ingredients and mixes them with style and flair to create a unique result.

I particularly agree that there is a tendency towards cooks in natural resource management in Australia - driven by a need to be transparent and tick the boxes.  However, this is a fallacy, as true transparency and repeatability only comes if the chef (or practitioner) can adequately communicate and defend why they used a certain ingredient in the mix and why it was added in just that way.

I am often frustrated by being asked to provide a cookbook, or a toolkit for analysis and decision making in NRM.  It is so much more important to understand your ‘ingredients’ - complexity, logic, multiple-criteria techniques, than having a black box recipe handed to you.

And just to labour the food idea, I suppose, for me it comes down to ‘give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach him to fish and he’ll eat forever’.

As consultants, it is imperative to not just give a recipe for a single decision, but to enable our clients to understand and value the decision making process, so that better decisions are made in the future in lots of different circumstances.

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Tuesday
May182010

Cognitive Biases and decision making

DateTuesday, May 18, 2010 at 10:08AM | Authorlib | CommentPost a Comment

I’m sure anyone who works in the field of complex decision making is aware of the impact of personal bias.

I still remember a professor who spent six months and an excessive amount of grant money building more elaborate experimental rigs.  He was testing a theory about the settling patterns of small particles in a fluid flow, and did not get the answer he had expected.  For those keeping score, the laws of physics remained unimpressed with the new, expensive rigs and kept doing what they’d always done.

But decision making biases can be more insidious than that, especially in complex systems wiith high levels of uncertainty, like ecology or economic modelling/budget forecasting. 

It’s true that good physical and stochastic models can go a long way to lower uncertainty, and multicriteria decision analysis can help in sorting and ranking a wide range of factors, simple cognitive bias can trump the most well planned decision framework.

The first step in eliminating these biases is the ability is to understand their existance.  The link below is a beautifully rendered study guide to a range of cognitive biases.  A couple of my “favourites”

  • The texas sharp shooter fallacy: The fallacy of selecting or adjusting an hypothesis after the data has been collected, which makes it impossible to fairly test the hypothesis.  The name refers to the analogy of shooting a bunch of bullets into a wall, drawing a circle around a closely clustered set and declaring that was your target.
  • The zero-risk bias: The tendency to try to reduce a small risk to zero over acheiving a greater reduction in a larger risk.
  • Planning fallacy: The tendency to underestimate task completion times (honestly, who hasn’t commited this one?)

Hope you find it useful.

 

Cognitive Biases - A Visual Study Guide by the Royal Society of Account Planning

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Monday
Apr262010

Introducing ANSA - A toolkit for analytics

DateMonday, April 26, 2010 at 4:55PM | Authorlib | CommentPost a Comment

There is an old tale about Rolls Royce mechanics, in the golden era of motoring deep last century.  The story goes that the first job an apprentice was given was to forge their own tools.  Hand crafted tools were the best fit for the hand crafted Rolls’ and the best way to gain expertise.

For years now Symbolix have been working on delivering the silver bullet of analytics - a Toolkit. We have spoken with clients, delivered countless flowcharts and decision matrices along this journey.

One of the problems we’ve always faced is that powerful tools have steep learning curves. This is also the problem with every other tool kit out there. Most of our tools (software, processes and methods) have been hand crafted to some degree by our consultants, so we can be confident that we will find the best tool and apply it in the best way..

…but how could we provide our clients with the kind of analysis power we can access?  How can we communicate the range and depth of models available (above and beyond your standard hypothesis tests)?

We have struggled at Symbolix to provide tools that are correct and generate insight, with a full duty of care attached to protect you the decision maker.

We now proudly introduce the ANSA - a toolkit for applied analytics.

ANSA (ANalytics Services & Applications) is based upon the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS), but has some benefits over such an approach.

Symbolix will continue to apply and supply the most powerful tool and techniques to your application.  ANSA allows us to provide pay-per-use analytics engines, along with our traditional consulting services.

ANSA consists of suites of analysis tools, codes and engines, all with the usual duty of care promise.  You are now free to choose your level of service to meet your budget and needs – from a complete custom analysis, through to sending us your database and receiving the model’s output in the mail.

You give us the data (or the problem, the expert opinions etc), we’ll give you the ANSA.

No more learning curve, no more stress, just a complete decision support service.

We’d love to know what you think, and if there are any additions you’d like to see…you can search our ANSA listing here

 

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