False positive and false negative Lots of us are paid to make decisions: Maybe you decide how to treat a patient Maybe you decide if a prisoner is guilty Maybe you decide how much soup to prepare Maybe you decide if a payment is fraudulent Maybe, maybe, maybe. There are plenty of decisions to be […]
Medieval Plumbing
Delayed feedback When I was a child I lived in a farm house in North Yorkshire. I’d like to tell you that I was part of the county set and owned a Range Rover and a horse, but it wasn’t that sort of farm house. It had stone walls that were three feet thick in […]
How to Turn a Supertanker
Leverage There is a management metaphor that changing the direction of an organisation is a bit like changing the direction of a supertanker. It can be done, but organisations are big, cumbersome and it takes a lot of time to push them onto another course. A flawed analogy It is a nice analogy, but a […]
Pointless Conversations
Defining the metric People get very excited about metrics; they spend hours debating exceptions and accuracy. The definition becomes everything. Imagine the conversation: My Boss: You take too long to get to work in the morning; we must measure performance. What should the target be? Me: I’m not sure; there are several things we should […]
Short Breaks Will Kill You
Quantitative or Qualitative Analysis? An apocryphal tale… A statistician working for a large organisation was asked to explain why sick pay was increasing. The business had an ageing workforce and sickness levels were rising. He gathered lots of data on lots of things: Working patterns Demographics Employment related illnesses Commuting times Office locations… The list […]
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