Do you question and judge yourself continuously?
Noise
I recently bought the book Noise from Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony and Cass Sunstein. The Dutch title is called Ruis. Kahneman is world-famous for his books Thinking Fast and Slow and Nudge. If you want to know more about this book, click this link for a short video on the concepts of his book Thinking Fast and Slow.
It is a book with many insights on how communication often gets diffused. A few examples: Imagine that two different doctors from the same city give separate diagnoses to identical patients – or that two judges in the same court of law give other sentences to people who have committed matching crimes. Now imagine that the same doctor and the same judge make different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday, or that they had breakfast or not. These are examples of Noise: inconsistency decisions that should be identical. They continue with many models on hiring new employees, estimations on any topic, and group pressure.
A2E
It is a fascinating book that showcases the individual human being with his flaws. It also reminded me of a McKinsey training program called A2e (Ability to Execute), which I attended a few years ago. In this training program, we used an issue tree to solve problems. This issue tree is based on the five WHY’s from Taiichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System and lean manufacturing. If you would like to know more about this, follow this link.
So what is the answer?
The true answer in the book Noise is not given; there is no honest answer. Kahneman et al. provide a checklist at the end of his book, although he says it should only be used as inspiration. My personal view is that the two thinkers, Kahneman and Ohno, combine the best answer to solve Noise. Judge and question yourself continuously.
