https://www.specialistspeakers.com/?page_id=12588&video=756266

I have enjoyed these, I think you will as well

Books

Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense By Rory Sutherland

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall

Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

Dancing by The Light of The Moon: Over to 250 poems, to read, relish and recite By Gyles Brandreth

The Inequality Paradox: How Capitalism Can Work for Everyone

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

 

It has been a few years since I have shared a stage with Rory Sutherland. He is a legend in advertising circles (He is Deputy Chairman of Ogilvy), a best selling author,a columnist at The Spectator and his TED talks have over 7 million hits! So its a great pleasure to have him involved in this next Decision Event. It will be huge fun and extremely informative.
Full information and booking details here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-science-magic-of-making-better-decisions-tickets-83603804229

This is a fascinating short film looking at how through co-operation and by learning from repeated mistakes “agents” gradually create sophisticated strategies from very simple rules.
It is a useful way to think about evolution, how humans have and will continue to develop.

If you don’t know Gene Kranz’s Dictum – print this off, keep it and re-read from time to time
“Tough and Competent”

“Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, “Dammit, stop!” I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.

From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: “Tough” and “Competent”. Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.”

It’s time for some reading suggestions for the summer months. Here are five that I think are very worthwhile.

Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense. By Rory Sutherland

The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy. By Richard Shotton

The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. By Ben MacIntyre

Eat Your Greens. By Wiemer Snijders

Diary of a Fund Manager. By David Miller

Tickets are now available below at:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-science-magic-of-making-better-decisions-tickets-62788588358

Places on this course are strictly limited and will go on general sale in 3 to 4 weeks time.
Contact the Event Co-ordinator Karen Davies at kdavies@appliedlearning.com if you would like to receive advance course information and the opportunity to book before general ticket sales.

I’m very excited to be joining Richard Shotton & Paul Craven, two of the leading lights on human behaviour & decision making, in this one day course/workshop on improving decision making and risk taking.

So mark the date
Tuesday 29th October 2019 in London.

The day will be fun, interesting, relevant and engaging.
We will offer:
Important insights on how to improve most aspects of business – from decision-making to ethical sales and persuasion.
How you can improve your connection and communication with clients and prospects.
How to be better at challenging your own assumptions, to make better decisions.
How to be a better buyer and seller, whether of product, investments or ideas.

Full details will be published in about two weeks.

Places are strictly limited -So if you want to receive early notification of how to book and the full course details please e-mail the event organiser Karen Davies of Applied Learning at kdavies@applied-learning.com

I look forward to seeing some of you on the 29th October – Im sure it will be a fascinating day.

Richard Shotton is the best selling author of The Choice Factory, which won a major business book award this year and has been ranked #1 in Amazon’s business books. He has a vast knowledge how we influence and are influenced, and brings a wealth of practical ideas all based on real life examples. See here

Paul Craven has a distinguished career in international finance, is a noted magician (He is a member of The Magic Circle) and now is a leading authority on how we think about risk and why we do what we do; which is not always the same as what we say we will do! See here

When facing the future, the Japanese have a nice proverb Issun saki wa yami – One inch ahead is darkness.
With this in mind I think there are three factors that we need to consider when addressing the future and having to make decisions. Conveniently they all begin with A, namely Aggregation, Approximation and Abstraction.

Aggregation
We live in a world of truly titanic aggregation of data, so called “Big Data” is being accumulated at an amazing rate. Forbes magazine in May 2018 estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is currently being created every day, and in the last two years alone 90 percent of all data was generated. All this data is seductive – think how we can slice and dice it, analyse it and make better decisions. But there are traps as well. Over a century ago the distinguished French mathematician, Henri Poincare observed “Science is built of facts in the way a house is built of bricks; but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house!” This is an important warning, just collecting data doesn’t give us insight automatically, of course we need the data but we have to develop insight as well.

Approximation
Parallel to the explosion in data collection and storage, there has been a huge rise in modelling data and looking to draw ever more sophisticated conclusions about the future. Again a note of caution is required, and here the famous quote by economist John Maynard Keynes is instructive “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong”. The age old problem of curve fitting past data until you find a “perfect version” of the past is a very big trap. The rise of cheap data processing allows us to undertake very intensive analysis and develop complex models – but we risk assuming the past will always be a good guide to the future. Precision can be mistaken for the probability of correct future predictions, and it is critical we understand both the data, and the assumptions in any models of the future. Gigantic data optimisation exercises, risk polishing the rear view mirror at the expense of looking forward out of the windscreen.

Abstraction
Perhaps one of the key attributes that makes us human is our highly developed skill at creating abstract ideas and seeing things in a non-linear (dare one say “creative”?) manner. We are able to develop and understand ideas as well as just reacting to data and events. This is an immensely valuable skill, but once again there are downsides. As excellent pattern hunting machines, we are often able to see through problems and come up with new insights, but unfortunately sometimes we draw the wrong conclusions. We seem particularly prone to visual errors, classic examples include “seeing” the image of Jesus on a piece of burnt toast, or believing the rocks on Mars are in shape of a human face. So abstraction also needs to tempered along with the other two previous A’s.

The human desire for knowing what comes next and what is just around the corner is an absolute mainspring of the human condition. But if we are to become better decision makers we need to always consider “The Three A’s” when assessing risks and uncertainties; and to be respectful of their limitations and potential pitfalls.
So the lesson remains the same, decision making is simple in theory, but hard in practice.