Lots of good stuff in this McK Quarterly interview with Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein and interviews on strategic decision making.
- The premortem: we’re in the future looking back, why did this project fail so badly?
- Avoid correlation errors: get people to vote on an issue before the meeting starts. Or maybe use the balance sheet approach.There is lots more detail on avoiding bias.
- Check that information is coming from multiple sources, not the same repackaged.
- Force choices: try three people for a new job, use a portfolio approach for projects
Needs further digesting, but this looks like a slightly more solid approach than the PwC one from 2009.
Lots to digest in the new speech by Gordon Brown on the digital economy. Helen isn’t sure that there is much new there. Neither does Michael Cross. I remember one of the e-Envoy’s team telling me with delight that the last conservative government’s flagship digital project was called gov.direct. Plus ça change, etc.
The total place pilots have reported: here’s a useful collection of them all. They are worth reading alongside the NLGN recommendations on how Whitehall and local government should work together.
There still appear to be procurement savings available: the IoD estimates £15bn. Procurement is always the first port of call for savings as it appears to be about lowering prices and therefore spend. I’m not sure £15bn in the procurement process makes sense, though: this is something like 150,000 FTEs, which feels very, very high.
Not much good to say about this “interactive” history of the Treasury. The initial diagonal view is designed to make the information difficult to read, and the sizing of balls is clearly pointless. There is some interesting information in there, but I don’t think it is well presented and may even obfuscate versus a well organised html site. I have a feeling someone demoed it really well to some relatively non-tech savvy people.
Published on
March 17, 2010 in
Health.
While innovation might look like step change development from the outside, it is often driven by incremental improvements in the fields concerned. Is it possible to filter out / focus on the areas where step change innovations could be designed and thus bypass the time-consuming incremental steps? I’m not sure we’ll end up prescribing exercise to patients, but this article made me think, for which I am always grateful.
Very interesting to see who is on and who is not on the new £4bn management consultancy framework for government. No McKinsey, for example and Accenture only for HR consultancy. Also no Oakleigh / Dbi who I was talking to last year.
Valuable counsel: the simple presence of data can cause you take or not take action based on invalid assumptions. The question here is how to ensure that there are checks and balances on data presentation so that you can rely on your decision-making?
Are case studies and benchmarking moribund? If Chip Heath is right about bright spots, then trying to be like another company could well be a waste of time. You should be more like you at your best.