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October 28, 2009

Are you the victim of "decisional set-up"?

In a recent Harvard Executive course I took, our decision making class instructor said - "it's not the information you HAVE that clouds your decision making, it's the information you DO NOT have".

What a brilliant way to summarize the problems that many organizations face when making decisions. By this, I don't just mean that they lack the data to support their decision making, I mean, they often forget to ask for the data they don't have.

We've discovered that some of the poorest decisions occur because of "decisional set-up". I'm sure many of the readers of this post don't find themselves victim to this but let me try to describe the process:
1. The team has identified an issue and suspects they know the origins of a problem.
2. They research the answers, but find themselves looking in places that comfort their beliefs (intentionally or not).
3. They present it back to Management.

Sound familiar?

What happens next sets apart best performing teams from the rest. Winning teams deconstruct the premises of the argument, ask to look in areas where others hadn't looked before. They don't restrict their thinking to the data and analysis that's available to them. They work from the problem backwards, disregarding the limits of what's measureable and what isn't.

Some organizations, such as the VHA, as we highlight in Drive Business Performance, go as far as creating new roles and new processes to measure the "un-mesureable".

Have you seen this happen at your organization or else-where? What was it like? How did you handle the problem?

Join the conversation @ http://tinyurl.com/yk7l5u4

Best,
Bruno Aziza
Co-author, Drive Business Performance
Follow @ http://twitter.com/brunoaziza
Join on Facebook @ http://tinyurl.com/ykcwkap

Posted by Bruno Aziza at 7:15 AM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2009

Augmented reality...how about just reality?

"Augmented reality or "AR" is getting a lot of press these days. While the Economist Technology Quarterly features it in a positive light, FastCompany provides a dubitative opinion of the opportunity. If you are not familiar with AR, it refers to technology that overlays information on top of real-life experiences in order to enhance them (watch this Nokia Research below video for more context).

While the visionary videos and articles are interesting, research suggests that people are not equipped to handle the information that is already available to them. This year, Accenture published a report that shows that executives make decisions based on gut feel 40% of the time.

According to the research, employees and managers alike are having a hard time finding 'good' data to support their decisions, or when data is available, technology to use and share it prevents them from taking full advantage of it.

In your opinion - what needs to happen so we can get "augmented reality" in the field of decision making?

Best,
Bruno Aziza
Co-author, Drive Business Performance
Follow @ http://twitter.com/brunoaziza
Join on Facebook @ http://tinyurl.com/ykcwkap

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References:
FastCompany article and Nokia's video @ http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/nokias-sad-augmented-reality?1252911284
Economist article @ http://www.economist.com/search/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14299602
CIO magazine quoting Accenture's research @ http://advice.cio.com/thomas_wailgum/to_hell_with_business_intelligence_40_percent_of_execs_trust_gut
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Posted by Bruno Aziza at 6:15 AM | Comments (0)