O papel da intuição (parte II)

Parte I.
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Um comentário à parte I conclui:

"Se os governos não podem tomar boas decisões com base nesta diferença, ninguém pode."

Ao ler isto, vindo de um estatista empedernido, pensei logo:
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- Q.E.D.
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Mas é claro que governos e privados, de boa fé, não estão isentos de cometerem erros. Qual é a grande diferença entre os erros dos privados e dos governos?
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Quando um privado comete um erro paga por ele, ponto. E recordo Taleb em "Antifragile", o sistema precisa dessa capacidade de agentes individuais perderem, para que o todo avance e progrida.
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Quando um governo comete um erro, pagamos todos e pela medida grande.
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Claro que num país socialista como o nosso, e não só, Estado e oligarcas conluiados, criam as tais empresas "To Big To Fail".

"the art of focusing on what’s important and ignoring the rest"

Quando comecei a ler/ouvir "Gut feelings: the intelligence of the unconscious" de Gerd Gigerenzer, apesar do autor estar constantemente a repetir que "Less is More", nunca pensei na relação directa entre o trabalho do autor e as reflexões que faço sobre o meu trabalho de intervenção nas empresas.
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Contudo, comecei a juntar as peças quando ouvi:
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"Common sense suggests that forgetting stands in the way of good judgment. Earlier in this book, however, we met the Russian mnemonist Shereshevsky, whose memory was so perfect that it was flooded with details, making it difficult for him to get the gist of a story."
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E relacionei com os casos que Gigerenzer conta, uma e outra vez, em como os ignorantes, em n testes, conseguem bater os especialistas, em previsões desportivas ou concursos sobre geografia.
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Estou sempre a chamar a atenção para:

• Concentrar uma empresa no que é essencial;
• Responder à pergunta quem são os clientes-alvo e trabalhar paranoicamente para os servir;
• Ao modelar o funcionamento de empresas, não sejam como os franceses, não tentem incluir, não tentem contemplar tudo;
• Ao cartografar um processo, começar pela sua finalidade, pela sua razão de ser, pelo seu propósito;

Quando se sabe muito sobre um tema, podemos ser prejudicados pelo excesso de conhecimento quando a resposta não é lógica:

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"Imagine you are a contestant in a TV game show. You have outwitted all other competitors and eagerly await the $1 million question. Here it comes: 

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Which city has the larger population, Detroit or Milwaukee?

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Ouch, you have never been good in geography. The clock is ticking away. Except for the odd Trivial Pursuit addict, few people know the answer for sure. There is no way to logically deduce the correct answer; you have to use what you know and make your best guess.

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Daniel Goldstein and I asked a class of American college students, and they were divided—some 40 percent voted for Milwaukee, the others for Detroit. Next we tested an equivalent class of German students. Virtually everyone gave the right answer: Detroit. One might conclude that the Germans were smarter, or at least knew more about American geography. Yet the opposite was the case. They knew very little about Detroit, and many of them had not even heard of Milwaukee. These Germans had to rely on their intuition rather than on good reasons. What is the secret of this striking intuition? The answer is surprisingly simple. The Germans used a rule of thumb known as the recognition heuristic:

• If you recognize the name of one city but not that of the other, then infer that the recognized city has the larger population.

The American students could not use this rule of thumb because they had heard of both cities. They knew too much. Myriad facts muddled their judgment and prevented them from finding the right answer. A beneficial degree of ignorance can be valuable, although relying on name recognition is of course not foolproof."

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O nono capítulo "Less is More in Healthcare", um capítulo que mete medo, ao dissecar o pensamento dos médicos que os leva à sobre-prescrição, à sobre-medicação, e ao sobre-tratamento, termina assim:

• "Truly efficient health care requires mastering the art of focusing on what’s important and ignoring the rest. "

BANG! Aquelas palavras "the art of focusing on what’s important and ignoring the rest"

• "Good intuitions must go beyond the information given, and therefore, beyond logic."

Outro BANG!!! Uma estratégia, ou muitas estratégias bem sucedidas resultam porque não têm uma lógica linear... porque são fundamentadas em... "optimismo não documentado", em intuição.

Satisficers (parte III)

"A solution to a given problem is called optimal if one can prove that no better solution exists. Some skeptics might ask, Why should intuition rely on a rule of thumb instead of the optimal strategy? To solve a problem by optimization—rather than by a rule of thumb—implies both that an optimal solution exists and that a strategy exists to find it. Computers would seem to be the ideal tool for finding the best solution to a problem. Yet paradoxically, the advent of high-speed computers has opened our eyes to the fact that the best strategy often cannot be found."
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Trecho retirado de "Gut Feelings" de Gerd Gigerenzer.
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"Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics because he demonstrated conclusively that people do not function according to the hyper-rational, cold calculating benefit maximizing cost minimizing Homo economicus that traditional economic theory presupposes."

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Trecho retirado de "Kahneman on Well-Being and Domains of Consciousness"

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"Decision makers often have imperfect information. We develop a choice theoretic experiment to explore choice mistakes that result from incomplete search. Our choice process methodology generates data on how choices change with contemplation time, thereby illuminating the search process. We demonstrate that most subjects behave in line with a reservation-based model of sequential search, altering their reservation utilities in response to the size of the choice set and the complexity of the environment. These …ndings support Simon’s model of satis…cing behavior and suggest simple measures of contextual e¤ects on the quality of decisions."

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Trecho retirado de "Search and Satis…cing"

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Tudo o que contribua para a explosão de diversidade é bem vindo... Mongo agradece!!!

Intuição e modelos mentais

E como é alimentada a intuição?

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O que está na base do iceberg de Senge? (aqui e aqui)

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Os modelos mentais!

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"Experts are not just accumulating experiences. People become experts by the lessons they draw from their experiences, and by the sophistication of their mental models about how things work."

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"Mental models are developed through experience—individual experience, organizational
experience, and cultural experience. The richer mental models of experts ... include more knowledge and also enable the experts to see more connections. These are two defining features of complexity.
The mental models of experts are more complex than those of other people."

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"With experience we learn more and more patterns. These patterns let us size up situations quickly and accurately. The experience and the patterns enable us to judge what to pay attention to and what to ignore. That way, we usually reserve our attention for the most important cues and aspects of a situation. However, if the situation is deceptive or is different from what we expect, we may focus our attention on the wrong things and ignore important cues. That’s why the concept of ‘‘mindsets’’ creates so much controversy. Our mindsets frame the cues in front of us and the events that are unfolding so we can make sense of everything.

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Experience and patterns produce mindsets. The more experience we have, the more patterns we have learned, the larger and more varied our mindsets and the more accurate they are. We depend heavily on our mindsets. Yet our mindsets aren’t perfect and can mislead us.
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With more expertise, we may become more confident in our mindsets, and therefore more easily misled. As we saw in the previous chapters, every mechanism has limitations.
The mindsets that reflect our experience and power our expertise can, on occasion, cause our downfall. Mindsets aren’t good or bad. Their value depends on how well they fit the situation in which we find ourselves. Mindsets help us frame situations and provide anchors for making estimates."

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É também por isto que fico com os cabelos em pé quando olho para os curricula dos políticos que nos governam, por exemplo aqui e aqui.

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Que modelos mentais é que esta gente transporta? O que é que as habilita a exercer o poder nos tempos que correm? Como é que vêem o mundo?

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Como escreveu Joaquim Aguiar, somos governados por funcionários.

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Trechos retirados de "Gary Klein retirado de “Streetlights and Shadows - Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making”"

Para lá da razão

“We need to blend systematic analysis and intuition. Neither gives us a direct path to the truth. Each has its own limitations.
Analytical and statistical methods can pick up subtle trends in the data that our intuitions would miss. They can show us when the regularities we think we see are really just chance connections. They can help up appraise the size of different effects so we can take the effects into account more accurately. On the other hand, analytical methods often miss the context of a situation, and they can result in misleading recommendations.
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Intuitive judgments reflect the experiences we’ve had and can help us respond quickly to situations. They are sensitive to context and nuance, letting us read situations and also read other people. We can make successful decisions without using analytical methods, but we cannot make good decisions without drawing on our intuitions. Yet our intuitions aren’t foolproof, and we always have to worry that they are going to mislead us.
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Research showing that a statistical formula can outperform an expert doesn’t mean that the expert is flawed. It just means that the statistics do better in certain types of circumstances. Analytical methods can sometimes outperform experts, particularly if these methods improve on the judgments made by experts, but the methods may not be as valuable as their developers argue.”
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Trecho de Gary Klein retirado de “Streetlights and Shadows - Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making”
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Admitamos que o mundo lá fora existe!
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Os humanos usam os seus sentidos para operarem no mundo. Os humanos usam a razão para operarem no mundo. Contudo a razão, por mais preciosa que seja, e é, não passa de uma ferramenta tosca incapaz de perceber o mundo na sua complexidade.
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Assim, quem confia apenas na razão… vai entrar em contradição, mais tarde ou mais cedo, por que confia numa ferramenta incompleta, vai cair numa teia e perder o pé.

Intuição vs Procedimentação

Assisti em primeira mão, sobretudo durante a década de 1985 a 1995, ao despedimento, com indemnizações e pré-reformas, de muitas pessoas com dezenas de anos de experiência.
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Em muitos casos tal foi acompanhado por processos de re-engenharia e/ou automação ou procedimentação das práticas.
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Em muitos casos tal foi acompanhado com a admissão de caloiro(a)s muito mais barato(a)s.
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Volto a Gary Klein e a "The Power of Intuition" com um trecho que chama a atenção para o papel da intuição e o perigo da procedimentação pura e simples:
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"The pace of change continues to accelerate. Historical ways of doing business are pronounced obsolete, and the experience of seasoned employees is discounted. Tried and true approaches are treated as legacy problems that have to be replaced. The specialists who have mastered these approaches are then part of the legacy problem.
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Many organizations attempt to take refuge in procedures. This happens when supervisors play it safe and reduce the task to procedures even if those procedures don’t really capture all of the nuances and tricks of the trade. Turning a job into a set of procedures makes it easier for new workers to carry out their responsibilities, and it also supports accountability by letting managers more easily verify if the procedures were followed. Unfortunately, this practice can make it even harder to build up intuitions if the procedures eliminate the need for judgment calls. Clearly, we need procedures to help us react quickly to emergencies, or to orient new workers. Once a set of procedures is in place, however, supervisors may not bother teaching the skills workers need to understand or modify the procedures. This is how the expertise that makes a company great gets lost. There is a strong tendency in our culture to proceduralize almost everything, to reduce all types of work to a series of steps. But you cannot reduce intuition to a procedure.
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Organizations may try to reduce decisions and judgments to procedures by defining metrics (i.e., measurable objectives). Metrics are often seen as a way to replace intuitions. They can be useful as a corrective to relying too heavily on impressions, but if managers try to make decisions based on numbers alone they run the risk of eroding their intuitions.
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Finally, information technologies are taking their toll. Too often decision aids and smart systems are reducing their operators to clerks responsible for feeding data into the systems. In the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, nurses are given much more training to operate the monitoring equipment than in how to detect the subtle signs of illness in the infants. Operators come to passively follow what the information technology recommends rather than relying on their intuition.
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We have less time and fewer chances to achieve expertise in our current jobs compared to previous generations. And we are faced with the obstacles listed above that further degrade our intuitions. Diminished experience, rapid turnover, little coaching, increased pace of change, reliance on procedures and metrics, widespread use of information technologies to make decisions—all of these create an unprecedented assault on our intuitions.
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Why do we tolerate all of these barriers? Because people don’t fully understand what intuition is and how it develops. So they’re unaware of these barriers and their cumulative effects. The erosion of intuition will continue until we take active steps to defend ourselves.
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Business leaders rarely have sufficient data for conducting analysis. As time and budgetary pressures increase, we have fewer chances to try options out to test their feasibility, forcing us to make snap judgments. At times like these, intuition must replace guesswork. This is why the loss of intuitive decision-making skills is so detrimental. (Por isso falo e escrevo na importância da experiência de vida)
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The longer we wait to defend our intuitions, the less we will have to defend. We are more than the sum of our software programs and analytical methods, more than the databases we can access, more than the procedures we have been asked to memorize. The choice is whether we are going to shrink into these artifacts or expand beyond them."

Modelos mentais, experiência de vida e tomada de decisões (parte I)

Iniciamos hoje, aqui, mais uma série de reflexões. Na sequência dos postais sobre os 3 amigos, a linguagem de carroceiro e os senhores 5%, viramos a agulha para o papel da intuição, dos modelos mentais e da experiência de vida, na tomada de decisões.
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A nossa base será um interessante livro sobre a intuição, "The Power of Intuition" de Gary Klein, o primeiro extracto é:
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"Remember what you were taught about the right way to make important decisions? You were probably told to analyze a problem thoroughly, list all your different options, evaluate those options based on a common set of criteria, figure out how important each criterion is, rate each option on each criterion, do the math, and compare the options against each other to see which of your options best fit your needs. The decision was simply a matter of selecting the option with the highest score.
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This is the classical model of decision making, and there is something very appealing and reassuring about it. It is based not on whims or hunches, but on solid analysis and logic. It is methodical rather than haphazard. It guarantees that you won’t miss anything important. It leaves nothing to chance. It promises you a good decision if you follow the process properly. It allows you to justify your decision to others. There is something scientific about it.
The whole thing sounds very comforting. Who would not want to be thorough, systematic, rational, and scientific?
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The only problem is that the whole thing is a myth. The reality is that the classical model of decision making doesn’t work very well in practice."
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"Practically anybody who has even limited experience making tough decisions, in practically any field, realizes that formal analytical decision making doesn’t work very well in practice. Most real-life decisions are simply not amenable to this approach. Even when we try to keep an open mind and consider several options, we usually know from the beginning which option we really prefer, so the whole process becomes a charade in comparing what we know we want to two or three other made-up distracters."
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"So how do we make decisions? Well, largely through a process based on intuition."
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"Why is a customer late with a payment? You have a hunch that the customer may be having a cash flow problem. Is a contract going well? The reports and expenditure rates look fine but you aren’t picking up any signs of excitement from the project team. Maybe you should look more deeply into it."
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Continua... e isto vai chegar não só aos senhores 5% mas também às empresas e aos esforços de documentação e procedimentação e de automação

Parte VIII - A experiência de vida.

"Most business people bring a lot of history to the decisions they make. It's not very realistic to expect them to jettison it all just because a bright young man comes along with a good idea."
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Adrian Slywotzky, "The Art of Profitability"

Parte IV - partir pedra e conversas estratégicas

Continuado daqui: Parte I, Parte II e Parte III.
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Neste postal de há quase dois anos A eficácia é mais importante do que a eficiência reflecti sobre a importância de partir pedra.
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Quando uma equipa de gestão discute e discute e parece que não avança, ao formular uma estratégia, está na realidade a criar uma comunhão de interpretações, está na realidade a criar uma rede de sinapses, nos indíviduos e na equipa, que lhe permite modelar uma visão do que é a realidade, de como a organização vai actuar sore a realidade, de qual é a informação relevante para perceber os padrões que emergem da realidade, que simulações estão a ser cumpridas, que hipóteses estão a ser rejeitadas pela realidade ... de tal forma que, quando a realidade não se conjuga com o teórico, rapidamente os indivíduos e a equipa observam-orientam-decidem-actuam, o ciclo OODA.
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E percorrido muito mais rapidamente do que quando a equipa e as pessoas individuais não têm um modelo para descortinar, de entre a avalanche de informação, o que é relevante e o que é ruído.
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Daí também a atribuição de um capítulo, o sétimo ("Using Scorecards to Boost a Strategy-Grounded Dialogue"), no livro “Making Scorecards Actionable” de Nils-Goran Olve, Carl-Johan Petri, Jan Roy e Sofie Roy ao tema das conversas estratégicas.
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"Hence, we argue that the most important dialogue regarding scorecards is when the employees are invited to take part in the creation of the strategy map, when they understand and subscribe to the targets, and when they get to know the results compared with the goals. And, maybe most important, when they can take action if they see that the intended strategy is not materializing.
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Scorecards may be used by management to discuss intentions and results with its superiors, and scorecards may be used to align the units’ efforts with other units in the organization, but if management does not use the scorecards to engage all employees in a continuous discussion on aspirations and achievements, then the scorecards are not likely to yield any significant results."
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“when an outcome deviates from plan in the scorecard, it inevitably boosts a discussion in the group on why this happened and what can be done to correct it. Companies that manage to capture these suggestions and – more importantly – manage to execute them are more competitive than those who do not. Capturing ideas for improvements is not complicated in principle, but still takes some effort in practice.”
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Termino esta série com uma deriva para outros campos, na Parte V: Zapatero e outros.

Parte III – o sistema límbico, os casos amorosos e a agilidade nos ciclos OODA

Continuado daqui: Parte I e Parte II
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Aos burocratas de Bruxelas, aos macroeconomistas e aos gestores profissionais de estufa, com a falta do conhecimento em primeira-mão, algo que advém da experiência, falta o conhecimento intuitivo. O conhecimento intuitivo permite a actuação rápida e a antecipação, ao percorrer os ciclos OODA de forma mais rápida que os outros actores no mercado. Assim, tal como no exemplo do jogo de xadrez da Parte II, é como se fizessem-se duas jogadas consecutivas por cada jogada do concorrente.
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Sem esse conhecimento intuitivo, e trabalhando com modelos matemáticos que não toleram o lado ‘soft’ (não têm casos amorosos com os produtos, serviços e clientes), só são capazes de equacionar manobras de confronto aberto, de ataque frontal, de evolução na continuidade, cortes epistemológicos não são com eles, só linearidade e Lanchester.
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Para ter o conhecimento em primeira mão, o conhecimento que gera a intuição, que permite o golpe de asa e que permite a agilidade há que treinar a experiência de perceber, de identificar, de percepcionar os padrões que emergem da realidade:
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Adrian Slywotzky no seu livro “Thr Art of Profitability” cita o seguinte trecho do livro “ABC of Reading” de Ezra Pound:

“No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:
“A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.
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“Post-Graduate Student: ‘That’s only a sunfish.’
“Agassiz: ‘I know that. Write a description of it.’
“After a few minutes, the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.
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“Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.
“The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks, the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.”
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Depois, na interpretação do texto de Ezra Pound refere:
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““I guess it’s about the importance of observation— about getting beyond what you read in textbooks and learning instead from close, direct, unfiltered study of real things. The way the student in the story learned something meaningful about fish by actually looking at a fish rather than reciting scientific terminology. It’s the difference between knowing something indirectly and knowing it directly.”
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E remata num diálogo com a ponte para os negócios:
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““And how would you observe a business if you wanted to examine it the way the student in the story examined the fish?”
“Look at the P&L? Read the annual report?”
Zhao shook his head. “No, no!” he declared. “Those things are fine in their place, but they’re more like the textbooks that the student in the story had already memorized. If you want to know a business, you’ve got to look at it first-hand like a biologist studying a specimen. You’ve got to visit their stores or their factories or their offices, try their products, test their services, cruise their websites.
“Most important, you’ve got to talk with their customers—or better yet, live with them. Get to know their needs and wants and problems by spending time with them, seeing what they do, what works for them and what doesn’t, what annoys them and what makes their lives easy or productive or fun. Reading about focus groups and survey results is okay. But you’ll learn more by meeting a real, live customer and spending an hour with him than you can learn from fifty research studies or analysts’ reports.”
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Gary Klein no seu livro “The Sources of Power” refere, acerca da intuição:
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“Intuition depends on the use of experience to recognize key patterns that indicate the dynamics of the situation (agora que leio este trecho sinto que Peter Schwartz diz o mesmo quando escreve sobre a preparação pessoal para a criação de cenários). Because patterns can be subtle, people often cannot describe what they noticed, or how they judged a situation as typical or atypical”
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“This is one basis for what we call intuition: recognizing things without knowing how we do the recognizing. … we size the situation up and immediately know how to proceed: which goals to pursue, what to expect, how to respond. We are drawn to certain cues and not others because of the situation awareness.”
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“Many people think of intuition as an inborn trait – something we are born with. I am not aware of any evidence showing that some people are blessed with intuition, and others are not. My claim in this chapter is that intuition grows out of experience.”
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“Because of their experience, experts have learned to see all kinds of things that are invisible to others. That is why they can move freely in their domains while novices must pick their way carefully through the same terrain.”
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“Pattern matching (intuition) refers to the ability of the expert to detect typically and to notice events that did not happen and other anomalies that violate the pattern. Mental simulation covers the ability to see events that happened previously and events that are likely to happen in the future.”
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Gerald Zaltman no livro “How Customers Think” chama também atenção para a intuição:
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“… most human communication (as much as 80%) occurs through nonverbal means.”
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“With so much evolutionary practice, our brains are far better at sensing and interpreting paralanguage than they are at understanding spoken or written language.”
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“As important as it is, consciousness is the end result of a system of neurons processing information in largely unconscious ways. Feelings, the conscious experience of emotions, are only the tip of the iceberg.”
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“… thought occurs when neurons become active. Different groups of neurons – thoughts- communicate back and forth with one another. One thought literally leads to another, which may lead back again to the earlier thought. Sets of connected neuronal groups constitute mental models, or what researchers sometimes call scripts or schema. Mental models help us interpret the flood of stimuli and information that our brains absorb from the world around us. Because we simply can’t process all of the incoming information entering our brains, we need a system to filter it, to group it, and to otherwise render it more understandable.
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For the sake of efficiency, our mental models help us decide which information to attend to and what to do with it. For example, people’s mental models determine their approach to ill-structured problems, their attraction to a particular auto design, their disposition toward snack foods, …
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Moreover, groups of people … share important features of their individual mental models. Called consensus maps, these shared features can yield valuable insights for marketing strategy development.
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As you might imagine, human beings possess an extraordinary number of mental models … We often become aware of our mental models only when an experience dramatically contradicts those models and the expectations that lie at their core.”
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Tudo isto contribui para salientar a importância das 'conversas estratégicas', a importância do 'partir pedra', tema a abordar na Parte IV desta série.