Voltaire first mentioned this - he is supposed to have picked it fron an Italian aphorism. Shakespeare said it better, ‘Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well’ (King Lear). And as anyone who is in the business of problem solving outside the classroom would tell you, one of the practices that really distinguishes the... Continue Reading →

The other day, I saw a t-shirt slogan – ‘Update your priors!’ These nerdy t-shirt slogans are not uncommon in the Silicon Valley. This one caught my eye – to me, it has never been more relevant given the current swirl of data and analysis around Covid-19, now that epidemiologists and statisticians are in a... Continue Reading →

Ever so often, we are presented with analysis that doesn’t turn out anything that we already didn’t know, or even worse, superficial. We often put that down to intellectual laziness – but I wonder, is there more to it? While most organizations have some problem solving methodology or the other, and some teams in these... Continue Reading →

Last week, I talked about Complex systems and our limits to understanding. And when we do find ourselves in such situations, we are prone to fill the gaps or work through our limits of understanding with stories. Stories by themselves are not wrong – in fact, we are probably the only species on the planet... Continue Reading →

Over the last several weeks, I have been writing about decision making, with the focus being how to get better at navigating VUCA environments. This has been rooted in the paradigm of reasoning and a deterministic view of the world. Which to be sure, works pretty well in most situations. And then we got hit... Continue Reading →