This is the extraordinary story of the two men whose ideas changed the world. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky met in war-torn 1960s Israel. Both were gifted young psychology professors: Kahneman, a rootless son of Holocaust survivors who saw the world as a problem to be solved, and Tversky, a voluble, instinctual blur of energy.
In this breathtaking new book, Michael Lewis tells the extraordinary story of a relationship that became a shared mind: one which created the field of behavioural economics, revolutionising everything from Big Data to medicine, from how we are governed to how we spend, from high finance to football.
To understand what is happening, make sense of the publications (from different sciences and schools), interpret the frameworks and translate the myriad of languages related to public governance of value and risk, it is wise to reduce the dictionary with concepts as are starting points of our organisation and for our members and network.
It serves as a compass in diagnosis, design, and decision-making. These tools are theoretical concepts and practical aids that help to get not lost in translation. Especially the dictionary of risk is a thick one with hundreds of interpretations. Many pretend to be or want to be the standard.
What can the world of public governance learn from archery? Archery is a mature sport that has developed dramatically since its inception. Because of this, the sport itself has undergone many changes and improvements.
De Lieksa-vlag (Lieksa lippu) is de officiële vlag van de Finse stad Lieksa (bron: Wikipedia)
In governance and public administration, we may learn from the archery world to select and curate the basic skills perceived as essential by professional archers. After all, governance is a form of archery, metaphorically spoken.
There are parallels: a good governor has the skills of a good archer in effectively reaching the target. After all, both professions are about precision. Here, we focus on the archer. I collected some skills from the archery world. I leave it to the reader to find similarities with the governance world.
A summary of skills
Archery is a broad set of fundamental skills necessary to be an experienced archer. Among the skills and abilities archers need are mental strength, aerobic endurance, balance and coordination, reaction time, motivation & self-confidence, skill/technique, agility, flexibility, strength & power.
The most obvious is the need for a high level of upper body strength and flexibility. An archer needs to be able to shoot arrows accurately and repeat that action without suffering fatigue. We elaborate on some of the skills.
Anyone who watches the television news has seen images of firefighters rescuing people from burning buildings and paramedics treating bombing victims. How do these individuals make the split-second decisions that save lives? Most studies of decision-making based on artificial tasks assigned in laboratory settings view people as biased and unskilled.
Gary Klein is one of the developers of the naturalistic decision-making approach, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced. It documents human strengths and capabilities that have been downplayed or ignored so far.
According to Klein (2007), “Projects fail at a spectacular rate. One reason is that too many people are reluctant to speak up about their reservations during the all-important planning phase. By making it safe for dissenters who are knowledgeable about the undertaking and worried about its weaknesses to speak up, you can improve a project’s chances of success.”
The Harvard Business Review article: “In a premortem, team members assume that the project they are planning has just failed—as so many do—and then generate plausible reasons for its demise. Those with reservations may speak freely at the outset, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied.”
Deborah J. Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, Nancy Pennington | March 1989
Prospective hindsight involves generating an explanation for a future event as if it had already happened; i.e., one goes forward in time, and then looks back. This research found that “imagining that an event has already occurred, increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%” (Klein, 2007)
In order to examine how shifts in perspective might influence people’s perceptions of events, we investigated two possible factors: temporal perspective (whether an event is set in the future or past) and uncertainty (whether the event’s occurrence is certain or uncertain).
This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgments under uncertainty: (i) representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; (ii) availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and (iii) adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available.
These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and the biases they lead to could improve judgments and decisions in situations of uncertainty.
