Metacognition Blog

You Know What Happens When We Assume

September 3, 2013 by Lou Quinto Leave a Comment

If you’re looking for signs of a pending Zombie Apocalypse, look no further than your nearest emergency room. Go to an ER at 2:00 a.m. and you will see what looks like a callout for zombie extras. Everywhere you turn you see bleary-eyed souls stumbling around a sea of people, mentally exhausted humans searching for help, or others half-asleep carrying dangerous blades.

And those are just the doctors!

At any hour of any day in any hospital in the United States, there is a chance you will be treated by a resident who has been working thirty hours without any sleep. It’s a chilling thought, but this practice is a common rite of initiation for physicians. In an effort to improve patient care and reduce harmful errors, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education changed the maximum shift length for interns from 30 hours to 16 in 2011. It seems like common sense. No one wants a sleep-deprived resident making life or death decisions. You don’t need to be smarter than a fifth grader to come to that conclusion.

Two recent studies at Johns Hopkins and the University of Michigan Medical School tracked the results of this implemented shift change. The findings were shocking. The shorter shifts actually did more harm than good. The reduced hours did not improve doctors’ rates of depression or increase the number of hours they slept. What’s more, harmful medical errors increased by 15-20%. Some say this is likely due to the fact that the interns’ workloads didn’t decrease, and the number of patient hand-offs, where many errors occur, increased significantly.

While the original assumptions were false, we can consider the research a success. Imagine the lives that could have been lost had hospitals not tested the assumptions behind such a “common sense” solution.

Which begs the question: How often do we make changes or implement new processes in our organizations based on faulty assumptions? How often do we let majority opinion make the decision for us? How often do we make decisions based on our experience, even when that experience may not be applicable to the given situation? It happens far more frequently than we want to admit. Sure, you will have your fair share of successes by doing these things. But you also leave your organization open to a lot of costly risk and rework.

The key to success is in asking the right questions. As you approach your next big organizational initiative, ask the following questions to minimize your risk and improve your chance of success.

1. What assumptions are we making?
2. How can we test these assumptions?
3. Where can we find evidence to contradict our majority opinion?
4. Who else will be responsible for the success of this initiative, and how can we obtain their insights?
5. What alternative conclusions exist?

Organizations benefit greatly from asking contrary questions in advance to a big implementation. Of course, it takes time, but the knowledge gained from the experience prevents costly rework and results in more comprehensive solutions.
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Action Management and Associates

Collect Information, NOT Data

September 3, 2013 by Lou Quinto Leave a Comment

You can’t solve a problem without good quality information. If you recall the reports of unintended acceleration that Toyota experienced a couple years ago, you know that one of their challenges was the inability to duplicate the problem. Therefore, their best source of information was from a driver who was collecting information as they were hurtling down the road trying unsuccessfully to bring their car to a stop. Obviously, not the best frame of mind for information gathering.

The challenge that many people encounter is that they engage in “activity-centered fallacies” of gathering too much data in the hopes that the cause of the problem will emerge. Such was the case in this example where an airline collected mountains of data in an effort to solve a problem. Instead, the cause of the problem was something quite simple and they already possessed the information they needed to solve it. So where does one stop their information gathering efforts when trying to understand a problem? I’ve found that targeting your efforts to answer a few critical questions will provide a good definition of the problem that will often allow the cause of the problem to emerge from all the data. Here are the questions:

◾ What is the item (or person) with the problem? \ What similar item might also be experiencing the problem but is not?
◾ Where is the specific problem occurring? Where other problem(s)can be occurring but is not?
◾ When was the problem first observed? When might the problem have first been observed but was not?
◾ How often is the problem occurring? How often could the problem be occurring but is not?

Answers to these questions provide an excellent description of your problem. When you can answer these questions with reliable data, usually the cause of the problem will quickly become evident.
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Action Management and Associates

When Decision Making Bogs Down

September 3, 2013 by Lou Quinto Leave a Comment

In the past week clients from two very large companies asked me how to address painfully slow decision making that is occurring in their organization. In fact, one was an oil & gas industry giant whose employee surveys from the last 5 years have listed slow decisions as the #1 employee complaint. There are two issues that drive the speed of a decision: The desire for accuracy and the allowance for risk.

Accuracy (making the best decision)
There is a correlation between speed and accuracy (correctness) of a decision. While there are exceptions to the rule, experience has taught us that decisions made quickly don’t work out as well as decisions made after taking our time to evaluate options thoroughly. If you have an inefficient or non-existent process to ensure the accuracy of a decision, the speed of the decision will suffer. This is the problem that the aforementioned oil & gas organization is experiencing.

Allowance for Risk
Likewise, there is a correlation between the allowance for risk and our desire for accuracy in a decision. The less risk that we perceive is allowed, the more time we will take to ensure our decision is as accurate as possible and the speed of the decision diminishes. The organizational issues that drive an individual’s perception of allowable risk will ultimately affect the speed of the decisions. Specifically, the risk-averse culture that one of our clients noted has likewise resulted in very slow decisions in critical areas.

To address the speed of decisions in your organization, you must first understand whether the allowance of risk or the efficiency of the process is driving the slow decisions because the treatment is very different.

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” – Theodore Roosevelt
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Action Management and Associates

Drowning in a Sea of Data

September 3, 2013 by Lou Quinto Leave a Comment

By Lou Quinto
Executive Coach and Speaker

One of the advantages of the information age we live in is that data is relatively easy to obtain. (Thank you Google, Bing and the corps of other popular search engines!) This is good, right? Of course it is… Unless you’re trying to solve problems, make decisions or create business strategies. The problem is there is so much data that it clouds our abilities to efficiently resolve these tasks and we find ourselves drowning in a sea of data. Then we have a dilemma; Which data is the best data to use?

I come across this problem a lot when I’m working with clients and facilitating them through the tasks of solving problems, making decisions and developing strategy. As soon as a problem is identified we begin a scavenger hunt of sorts by collecting data. Now, if you’re the type of person that I fondly refer to as a “data bather,” you can spend an extraordinary amount of time gathering data — both relevant and irrelevant. But how do you know which is the best data to help you in your pursuit of a solution to the problem? Simple, apply a “data sieve” called the “Hierarchy of Information.”

Like a prospector mining for gold on the bank of a river, you can apply the Hierarchy of Information to retain the “gold nuggets” of information to help you achieve the maximum level of accuracy in your solution, decision or strategy.

There are four levels in the Hierarchy of Information. They are:

Facts
Facts are truths. This is information that can be proven. If you use 100% facts in your problem solving, decision making or strategizing you will be as accurate as possible. Seldom do we use 100% facts.

Inferences
Inferences are conclusions that you arrive at using a mixture of some facts that interfaces with your personal experience and knowledge – business acumen. Inferences, unfortunately, can be misleading as we sometimes draw a wrong conclusion. For instance, if a man shows up in your office and he is wearing a raincoat, carrying an umbrella and is wet, what might you infer? It’s raining! From just three facts (raincoat, umbrella and wet) and your past experiences, your inference might be spot on. On the other hand, you might also be dead wrong. Think about it. What else could have happened to that man which caused him to be wet? Perhaps a sprinkler system kicked on as he was walking from his car to the building… Or a landscaper was watering some new plantings and accidently soaked him. The opportunity for error by using inferences increases because we may seize upon the most likely inference and run with it, thus, jeopardizing our accuracy.

Assumptions
We all know the old adage about when we assume… Let me just say, it makes you and me… look bad. There is a reason why this saying rings true. When we don’t have facts available we have a tendency to just use our past experiences and knowledge about similar problems, decision or strategies. This is the basis for most assumptions and we feel comfortable using them because somewhere in our life we saw success in this type of situation. However, what worked last month might not work this month because the circumstances surrounding this situation have changed and we have not considered the new data. When using assumptions we are quickly approaching the bottom level of our accuracy potential.

Guesses
By using guesses we have now hit the basement level in our quest to be accurate in our problem solving, decision making and strategizing. So why do we use guesses? Easy…. No, that’s the answer, it’s easy! It saves time by not having to go look up facts. And, in almost every business environment today time is precious. Because of this, I have seen guesses used by smart people more times than not. For example, how many times have you pared down a list of ideas from a brainstorming session by asking the question of each idea, “Will this work?” Immediately someone shouts out; “No, it will cost too much,” or, “It will take too much time!” Without any facts at all, the facilitator then crosses the idea off the list and moves on to the next idea, “Will this work?” In short, someone guessed the idea would not work and without anyone asking, “Do we know exactly how much will it cost?” the idea is DOA (dead on arrival.) We use guesses more than we might want to admit because it’s easy or we believe someone else knows the facts. Actually they don’t, however their corner office or long title leads us to believe they do know.

So next time you are involved in solving a problem, making a decision or creating a strategy, review your data and verify; “Is this a fact, inference, assumption or guess?” You will be surprised at how many assumptions and guesses you use, and how few facts and inferences you actually employ.

Lou Quinto has been working with companies and their associates internationally for over the past 25 years primarily in the area of critical thinking and communication skills. He is a Master Coach and Keynote Speaker for Action Management Associates in Plano, TX and a Senior Consultant on the Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness team for Executive Development Associates in Oklahoma City, OK. You can read more of his insights on his blog Metacognition or you can contact him at louquinto@gmail.com. Originally from New Jersey, today Lou resides in Indianapolis, IN.