Navigating the Knowledge Funnel
- Escaping Heuristics -
Heuristics and Design Thinking
Without a mature enterprise architecture capability, your knowledge is likely to be unstructured, stored in a number of business silos and hard to access. Making the correct decision seems impossible, which leads to frustration, guess work and experimentation. New business initiatives seem to stop before they even start. Many companies go to great lengths to hire individuals who have vast amounts of experience and knowledge. They use this past experience and knowledge to make decisions for the better, however we are only human and heuristics take over leading to “Mental Short Cuts”, "Rules of Thumb" & "Educated Guesses". Your new business initiatives are a lot better, but probably still a bit hit-and-miss.
While studying the concept of “Heuristics” to find out why so many business strategies and projects fail, I came across the notion of the "Knowledge Funnel". I traced the knowledge funnel notion back to Roger Martin's discussions on Design thinking. In summary, knowledge travels down the funnel from "Mystery", where little is known about the problem and how to solve it, to "Heuristic", where problems can be solved with "rules of thumb", to "Algorithm", where there is a precise process for replicating the solution to your problem. Furthermore, "Imagination" is always necessary for advancing to the next stage of the knowledge funnel.
I agree with this concept. However, in reality, when trying to create the ultimate Strategic Plan and then set the Strategy Execution in motion, companies hardly ever seem to advance to the algorithm layer. Generally they are stuck in the "Heuristics" layer. Strategic Plans and strategy execution are always a bit hit-and-miss. The precise algorithmic process for decision making and success is missing.
Solving the Problem
Before we can solve this problem we must first really understand it, Knowledge funnel 101.
The first issue seems to be "Think Time".
To progress down the Knowledge Funnel, imagination is required. Imagination requires "Think Time" and in the fast paced world in which we live, we are programmed to keep busy and report on what we have achieved. Think time is often overlooked and not seen as a productive activity or even an activity at all.
The Heuristic layer seems to be the other issue.
Heuristics are mental short cuts humans use for solving complex problems. Heuristics can serve us well as they allow people to make judgements and decisions quickly, without stopping to really think and spend too much time researching the problem.
One could say the lack of "Think Time" leads to more heuristics. This seems great on the surface as we need less time to solve complex problems. Unfortunately heuristics can also lead us astray in many different ways as well as its closely related cousins "biases, fallacies and effects".
To help you grasp the ideas of heuristics, biases, fallacies and effects, here are a few common examples:
- Availability Heuristic - A mental short cut that has the tendency to make recent events seem more frequent or more likely to happen, as opposed to an event that happened further in the past.
- Confirmation Bias - where one naturally looks for evidence to support their own statements and ignores evidence that contradicts them.
- Sunken Cost Fallacy - The tendency to irrationally follow through on an activity that is not meeting expected outcomes because of the time and effort already spent on it.
- Bandwagon Effect - The tendency to believe something because many other people believe the same.
So how do we make the jump to the algorithm layer if heuristics both helps and hinders us, not to mention how time poor we are to make use of our imaginations?
In summary, the first thing you require is a decision making platform. Your decision making process needs to advance to the algorithm layer. So whether you're stuck at the top of the knowledge funnel in the mystery layer or spinning in the heuristic layer, DCO Enterprise can help.
The “DCO Enterprise Methodology” is an algorithmic process used to structure knowledge into a decision making platform.
At DCO Enterprise our vision is to take the guess work out of making the correct decisions. Our Mission is to structure knowledge in the form of enterprise architecture to create a decision making platform so business innovation may flourish and evolve with the agility it needs to stay competitive in an ever changing market place.
For more information on the "DCO Enterprise methodology". Check-out the Blog article here.