In the know: 1. 25 practical tools to get your organisation’s mojo back | 2. Stay calibrated to debias decision-making
1. 25 practical tools to get your organisation’s mojo back
RealKM Cooperative’s Stephen Bounds invites your thoughts and feedback on a very valuable new initiative. He writes:
A number of years back, I wrote about the need for a more clinical approach1 to knowledge management, and the dearth of organisational diagnostic tools to unlock a systematic and professional capability for preserving and repairing organisational health.
I haven’t personally seen a lot of progress in this area, and it continues to be something I am passionate about. So this year, I’m challenging myself to put my money where my mouth is.
I have an outline of topics that I intend to turn into a book: 25 practical tools to get your organisation’s mojo back. Rather than disappearing into a den for a couple of years, I have decided that it would be more interesting to write the book in public. To that end, I have set up a Substack2 and am aiming to post 1-2 new items per week. The first two posts are already live:
- Introduction (an expanded version of the above)
- System and organisation essentials
Even though I want the tools to be usable without an academic pedigree, I also want their grounding and justification to be robust and accessible for those who are interested. As such, I expect that posts will be a mix of supporting material and content for the tools themselves.
As I work through each topic, I’m very keen to hear your thoughts and feedback. Feel free to comment on the posts online or reach out directly!
2. Stay calibrated: a practical guide to debiasing decision-making
There is now 50 years of research documenting how cognitive biases distort human judgement and lead to worse decisions. The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) contends that behavioural science needs a simple, outcome-focused benchmark that can be used to measure the impact of interventions to debias and improve decision-making. Their new report3 Stay calibrated: a practical guide to debiasing decision-making proposes one: calibration. To be well-calibrated means your confidence in your judgement aligns with accuracy.
The goal of calibration isn’t to eliminate cognitive bias, but to enable good decisions despite it. The BIT report offers:
- A clear framework for understanding and measuring calibration.
- Practical tips for individuals, teams and leaders to achieve it.
- Design principles for building calibration into organisational systems.
Key insights:
- Overconfidence is rampant in many domains from surgery to strategy – people are more sure in their judgement than they should be and this leads to bad outcomes.
- Well-calibrated thinkers are rare but superforecasters, bridge players, and weather forecasters show that it’s possible, and give us hints about what types of environments foster and reward it.
- Calibration is trainable. Like physical fitness, it can be built through habit, feedback and repetition.
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