Hillel Glazer, Entinex, Inc.
We’ve all had a gut feeling about data or a decision. And in that feeling we knew something was either very right or very wrong but we couldn’t put our finger on it. Perhaps we knew a decision was bad but all the data and analysis pointed to what must have been “the right” choice. The invited talk at the PNSQC Technical Program, You’re Doing It Wrong: How Your Decision-Making Actually Increases Uncertainty & What to Do About It, will challenge many long-held beliefs and paradigms about traditional decision-making and may help explain why we just knew a decision was bad but couldn’t explain why. This workshop will start by helping you un-create the learned and long-applied thinking processes that occupy the space in your head where your knowledge of decision-making resides. To do this we will use hands-on experiences, deep dives and exploration of the techniques presented in the talk and how they contrast with traditional decision-making processes. We will use simple games and exercises to make visceral connections to the new concepts including, for example, the counter-intuitive requirement that workflows actually need plenty of slack in them, and, that traditional decisions are obsolete before they’re ever acted upon, and, that Lean Start-Up ideas are correct, but possibly by accident. The new awareness of many missing elements from our decisions will give your gut the confidence to express why decisions are good or bad and an understanding of the extent to which data on which our decisions rely is even reliable at all.
When the workshop is completed, the attendees will be able to:
- Notice when and why data and decisions from said data is unreliable and how to address it.
- Understand variation and variability and how it affects decision-making.
- Differentiate deterministic from probabilistic decision-making methods, and use them appropriately.
- Explain the importance of and relationship among slack, lag, and uncertainty.
- Use visualization techniques to quickly extract relevant and useful data from any work environment.
Target audience: Advanced
Hillel Glazer, 2014 Workshop
