Use your illusion

Progress by the current school of thought of evidence based/informed decision making is slow, but steady. That's the good news. One thing I've learned so far, is that evidence does not speak for itself. Contrary to evidence based medicine, random control tests (the golden standard in research) in management situations are difficult if not impossible. Achieving the highest level of evidence in general has to be ruled out. Evidence has to be appraised, which makes it subjective. It is all about the context, interpretation and the quality of the data. Bob Sutton was also musing on this in his posting on intuition vs. data driven decision making: some rough ideas. Our brains are primed on previous experiences. (That's why we don't need all the syllables in a sentence before we interpret what is being conveyed). We humans are pattern seeking animals. This has all kinds of evolutionary benefits (hence intuition, gut feeling, etc.), but also some major drawbacks. To put it mildly, we suck at judging facts. That's the bad news. This raises all kinds of philosophical issues on knowledge, epistemology and ontology, but I don't want to discuss that right now. To illustrate how bad we are at appraising information, you can read books like Fooled by randomess and Black Swan by Nassim Nicolas Taleb or the Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig. But, it is easier to watch this clip of a speech by Beau Lotto called Optical illusions show which he recently gave at TED.