In the beginning

I started this journey into the black art of decision making as a young-ish engineer full of ideals of how to improve the quality of decisions through proper structuring and detailed methodologies that were going to change the world (of engineering projects that is).

It’s been a few years and plenty of grey hairs since I stood in front of my examiners defending the idea that good quality decisions could only be achieved through the methodological understanding of the universe around the problem or opportunity. We had to gather and harness as much information as possible; quantify the measurables; rate and scale the intangibles, discard the outliers that skewed our data and so on.

In the years that have gone by, I’ve learned that my approach was doomed from the beginning. I was trying to insert a round peg into a square hole, trying to apply static theory to a dynamic world where uncertainty goes beyond the maddest laws of probability. Above all, I was ignoring the fact that every decision includes a dose of human randomness that is hardly ever consistent with previous behaviours, that is likely to change in the middle of the decision process and that sometimes presents symptoms of clear irrationality.

This blog is about my thoughts, epiphanies and curiousities in decision making and related beasts. Be welcome.

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