For those of you not yet in the know, an open space meeting is essentially a gathering, spanning one day or several, around a common topic, where there is no preset agenda. The participants create the agenda on the day by putting up topics for small group discussion. The facilitators provide a grid of time slots and meeting spaces, and people put up the ideas or problems they would like to discuss. At the appropriate times, people vote with their feet and go to the small group gathering that interests them most. They can stay at one group, or flit between groups. Meeting notes are captured, and then published in a wiki or some other format.

The quality of the conversations depends on the participants, the topics, and the energy of the space. It’s a different way of having a professional conference. You are responsible for creating your own experience. Ok, I buy into that. But still, I find myself wanting more. What’s missing for me?

For me it’s the difference between formal and informal learning, where structured conferences are the former, and unconferences are the latter. There is a place for both. One is about learning in a designed path, in a structured way, to a particular outcome. The other is about exploring a topic.  So it depends what I need at that time. Am I exploring or wanting to get somewhere?

What I love most about the open space meetings is going places where I never thought I’d go. What I don’t like is when I’m looking to plunge deeply into a topic, and be taken to place I didn’t know I could go, by someone who has explored and thought about it in depth — when I need a guide.

Now that I’ve written this it seems obvious, but it’s not so obvious in the moment when you’re having great conversations and still find yourself looking around for the sage. I want both. I want to dive deep with a guide, and then explore, with others, and find my own way. Like improvisational jazz — structure and unstructure within the same experience.

Can’t we design a middle way?

What shape might this take?

• Learning as search

  • I have an immediate learning need and I search for something that will help me.
  • Text search  is limited — there is too much noise that comes from searching. Search engines may improve their algorithms, but there’s too much data out there.
  • Company channels - I go to my company’s learning channel (most likely an app) I look up a word and see a set of linked concepts – something like this:
  • Rating systems – I have the option to add layers or re-sort the data so I can see popularity, rating, recommendations by the Learning Group; recommendations by the CEO; or how they link to being a part of a learning series (aka curriculum). It also recommends others who may want to be taking the course at the same time and suggests them as learning buddies.
  • Learning solo or in groups: I also have the option of learning on my own, learning with a group, or with my team where we learn parts of a complex set of information (distributed cognition), or just learning with others who are taking this or have taken this recently.
  • Choosing & Follow-up  – I choose the learning chunk I want. This is followed-up by an email that asks me to  rate it, whether I want it put towards my performance goals and also send me related links for more learning. Maybe I take advantage of this, maybe I don’t.
  • If I don’t find what I need, I tweet internally. Hopefully someone in the Learning Group responds and sends me a link to the relevant information. I smile, they’re just like ComcastCares.

• Learning as part of Business/Talent Management

  • My company has set strategic goals. This translates into competencies. This eventually turns into learning goals at the group and individual level. Or maybe it’s just that my manager has set learning goals for the group.
  • The business management/talent management system sends me reminders on expected courses.
  • I take courses online/in-person. Or maybe I test out of them. Only successfully completed courses go on the record.
  • For bonus points I create learning modules and advertise internally. This goes towards my learning points. I check my learning points against those as colleagues on the leaderboard. Learning as gaming.
  • My learning points come up as part of my review process.

In 2015 we will still be recovering from this economic downturn. Whether companies will be able to invest in an infrastructure that brings together all the pieces of their business so that there can be a coherent learning plan remains to be seen. Or whether the management of this infrastructure goes to the cloud and software as  service can step in to fulfill this role remains to be seen.

I imagine workplace learning technology that is not that much different from today — I imagine it better integrated and linked to my personal objectives and my company’s strategic business objectives.

Workplace learning technology in 2015 will help me customize my learning experience to my needs and my company’s strategic goals.

Whatever happens — people will still need help separating the signal from the noise.

If you’re like me your first reaction is — NO WAY.  You’re skeptical, you may get this feeling in your gut that makes you cringe. You’re thinking — love does not belong in the workplace, it’s personal, it belongs at home. You have a vision of people in loose, flowing clothes running around hugging each other. With flowers. And other stuff. (Ok, maybe that’s just me.)

But something made my critical mind pause.

The Pygmalion Effect

The Pygmalion Effect describes how people act in accordance to the expectations you have of them — whether these expectations are conscious or unconscious. If you think people are stupid, guess what? — they can read your mind and act that way. This effect has been demonstrated in the classroom, at home, and at work. (Related effect — the Galatea effect > the expectations we have of ourselves.) Furthermore, a positive mindset from a leader can produce powerful behavioral effects, even in the absence of auditory or visual contact (references below). Whether you are leading employees or students — your mindset matters. Call it good will, call it focusing on the positive — or simply call it love.

Appreciative Processes

Ever heard of Appreciative Inquiry? It’s a type of inquiry that envisions a future that focuses positive relationships and collaboration, building organizations based on what works rather than trying to fix what doesn’t. Appreciative Processes improve systems by amplifying what’s working — identifying what people do best.

Think about how we approach most work — FIX THE PROBLEM. Do a gap analysis. Figure out what people need to learn, figure out what mindsets we need to change, usually ending up with the question — how do we fix our PEOPLE?

Appreciative Processes combine the Demming approach with Appreciative Inquiry — figure out what processes  make a difference and use an appreciative mindset to bring out the best in people. Use Appreciative Leadership to create a culture of systemic change and continuous improvement.

Back to LOVE

Ok, so here we are — back at the idea of love in organizations. When we think about creating an environment that:

• Focuses on what people and organizations do well
• Focuses on strengths,
• Allows people to do their best everyday
• A place where people enjoy being and where they enjoy each other

That’s a organization that uses love.

If it makes you feel better to call it something else, go ahead do so. But just remember, you’re losing the energy of a very powerful word.

Just try this — go about your work constantly thinking — “I love this place, my work, and the people I work with.” Try it for just ONE day. See what difference it makes.

Learn More…

• If you’re interested in learning more — come to a workshop on “Releasing the Power of Love in the Workplace”, by Roger Harrision sponsored by BAodn on June 9, 2010 in San Francisco. [Link to workshop]
• Accessing the Power of Love in the Workplace, by Roger Harrision, Ph.D. [Download PDF document here]
• The Appreciative Leader and Appreciative Change Processes by Gervase R. Bushe, Ph.D. [Download PDF document "aplc" here]. Or visit www.clearlearning.ca
• Pygmalion & Galatea effects

• Why the heck am in a meeting with a bunch of OD folks when I think of myself as an Instructional Designer?
• What’s is organizational development? How is it different from organizational learning?
• What the difference between development and learning?

Flash Mob Dance - Informal Group Learning?

I realized that  really liked the folks at this meeting — it was the first meeting I’ve been to in the Bay Area where I felt “Ah, I’ve found my people.” Since I want to keep going, I had to figure out a WHY I was there — what was the connection?

Development vs. Learning

Why not start with the basics?

• Development – stages that one goes through in one’s life or one’s life or one’s career, often thought of as change in roles (becoming a mother or becoming a manager). These stages in development can be biological (aging); psychological (maturing, identity); or sociocultural (change in roles, life or career events/problems/trajectory). In addition, there are variables such as race, gender, and sexual orientation and the impact and influence on that person’s development.
• Learning – knowledge, skills and attitudes required to master a subject, attain performance, or understand a domain, or innovate. Learning, like development, is about change and growth. Or sometimes just about “running to stand still” — keeping up with change to maintain one’s position. There is formal and informal learning; online, face-to-face, and blended; there is the technology of learning from CMS/LMS/Performance Management systems to Webinars to games and virtual worlds. Learning is a part of development. Learning integrated with development leads to “teachable moments” — learning appropriate to developmental stages. There’s much much more but I’ll stop here.

Organizational development vs. learning

Continuing from the explanation above, then organizational development is about the stages of an organization. It has an action orientation — it’s about evaluating and creating an intervention. Examples below:

• What an organization need when moving from start-up to mature organization
• Using diagnostic tools to understand what “life event” an organization is facing and creating an intervention, such as:
  • Using organizational 360 or SLCQ (Strategy Leadership Culture Questionnaire)
  • Using something like the Periodic Table of Strategy (Mercer-Delta) to determine the challenge and potential strategic moves for an organization
  • Gap  of where an organization is, where they want to go, and what it will take to get there.
  • SWOT analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
• Based on Senge’s five disciplines to create the learning organization:
  • personal mastery
  • mental models
  • shared visions
  • team learning
  • systems thinking
• Using coaching, mentoring, other tools to improve organizational performance

Organizational Learning

Quite simply, organizational learning is the collection of stuff involved in individual and collective learning inside an organization. It is also about the analysis and support of learning processes, formal and informal.

• Courses and curriculum
• Informal learning – social media, water-cooler learning, blogs, wikis, enabling conversations, mentoring, etc.
• Technology that support the above
• Design that supports the above
• Understanding of the cognitive and social processes that support learning
• Understanding the organizational processes that support or impeded learning
• Design of learning that supports organizational strategy
• Senge’s five disciplines

It’s in the last four that we cross-over into the realm of organizational development. There is clearly a link between the two — when things aren’t working on an organizational level, often we often turn to learning and development. However, much less often, do we turn to learning and development when things ARE working – or when we want to make things better when they are already good.

Why an Instructional Designer meets with OD folks

Instructional design (ID) is too narrowly focused on creating learning — instead of being more broadly focused on creating learning specific to organizational strategy — specific enough to measure impact. Because of the narrow focus of ID, I’m am pulled to people and groups asking bigger questions, with an organizational focus.

I love thinking about how people learn, but I also need (for my sanity) to think about how organizations learn, and how individual learning is relevant in this bigger picture.

That’s why I joined BAodn.

References for this Learning vs. Development article:

• Learning in Adulthood: A comprehensive guide by Merriam, Caffarella, Baumgartner
• Infed website: http://www.infed.org/biblio/learning-organization.htm
• Organizational Learning vs. the Learning Organization by Carol Gorelick (Google Books)

How I motivated my spouse to clean the living room

Last week while trying to get my husband to clean his stuff out of the living room, I tried to influence him with the idea of a more organized house, with the idea of him as a more organized person, and also with idea of my help. But because it felt wrong — dishonest really — to attempt influence him without him knowing, I decided to be more direct and started my campaign with the words “I want to influence you.” That was about as far as I got. He so loved the idea that I was trying to influence him, that he came over and gave me a hug, and the rest was relatively easy.

I’d like to take the credit for this magic trick, but let’s be honest, there was another motivating factor: we had a new couch arriving. The email of the impending arrival came the same week I was trying to get the cleaning done. That was the real motivation. My influence just helped get it done in a more timely manner. The arrival of the couch meant the completion of the living room, one of the last rooms to be completed in our long renovation saga. It was also about the completion of his idea of home. This was the underlying motivation.

Drive: the book about motivation

Daniel Pink’s new book Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us, is actually not that surprising for many of us who have worked in the field of education. The work of Deci & Ryan (intrinsic & extrinsic motivations); Carol Dweck (how our beliefs in intelligence affect our view of ourselves as learners); and of course, Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi (the idea of flow.) What Pink does it put it all together in a compelling package and relates it to the world of work. Because of this, I found his book useful in thinking about motivation — and summarize the key components below.

Beyond carrots and sticks – the 3 components of motivation

Here is the twitter version of the book that the author provides (in the Toolkit section – yes, did I mention it was well-packaged?):

Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose.

That’s it. You don’t have to read the book – it’s about intrinsic motivation – or autonomy, mastery & purpose. Understanding these 3 components will help motivate people for most types of work, he argues, especially work in the “new economy” of the “21st century”. With some types of repetitive work, apparently sticks and carrots still are good motivators (the post office comes to mind.) But for “knowledge workers”, he argues, it’s different — assuming that you compensate people fairly.

• Autonomy – people need autonomy over what they do (task), when they do it (time), who they do it with (team), and how they do it (technique) – (derived from Deci/Ryan plus others)
• Mastery – begins with flow (Csikszenmihalyi) – optimal experiences when the task  is neither too easy or too hard, but just above our level, pushing us to get better. Mastery is a mindset where one sees abilities not as finite or set (Dweck), but as infinite – the anything is possible mindset. However, mastery is painful, requiring grit and deliberate practice (Schon plus others). Mastery is impossible to fully realize – one can always get better.
• Purpose – people need purpose – goals that use profit to reach purpose (social innovations); when we need more than self- interest (hello, non-profit world); the idea of purpose maximization, as opposed to profit maximization.

My questions – But do we always know what we want and need? Will it get us to where we want to go? Or take us to unexpected places? When I’ve been placed on teams that are with people that I don’t like and know is when I’ve learned the most about how to work with people different from myself. It is then when I’ve grown. And sometimes these teams create the most innovative ideas — when we step outside our usual ways of being.

And, let’s be honest: extrinsic motivation matters. I wanted to do my Masters — I choose it as my purpose/task. But if I didn’t have a deadline (i.e. spouse threatening insanity if I didn’t finish), then no, I would not have completed it and graduated. If I didn’t start a blog called the Unfinished Masters, and asked all my friends to read it and keep me on track — then no, I would not have finished.

Yes – autonomy, mastery, and purpose make sense — but do people always know what they want and need? Can everyone function on intrinsic motivation alone? This is where influence comes to play, in defining purpose, in setting deadlines or other forms of extrinsic motivation.

How to motivate

• Understand people’s purpose, or help them shape their purpose and goals.
  Many educators do this at the start of class (see Learning Cycle blog)
• Can you structure the interaction so they can achieve mastery? Achieve a level of performance above what they currently have? (Think how video games are constantly challenging players just above their level. Hard to do sometimes for a mixed group.)
• Give them autonomy on how they reach their goals.

So these ideas are very general, let me try to apply to a couple situations.

Motivating my spouse

• Purpose: My spouse wants an organized, functional and beautiful house. Therefore, position the work on tasks that will make the house more functional, and not just because I’m asking him to clean.
• Autonomy: Within the purpose of organizing/increasing functionality let him choose his task; let him do it his way (technique), on his time (with deadlines of course – the couch was the extrinsic motivation part). And does he get to choose his team? Well, he choose to marry me – so yes.
• Mastery: Will the task have flow? Maybe if it’s a challenge of how quickly we can get it done. Can he believe he can do it — yes; although it won’t require practice, it will require grit.

In writing this outline of motivating my husband, I think it’s more for me than for him.

Motivating my own learning — about wine

• Ever since moving to the Bay Area I’ve wanted to learn more about wine. The grape varieties, the vintners, the regions, etc. My purpose is simple – to become a better Californian and learn about wine.
• Autonomy:I choose to learn about wine by creating a learning module (task). I’d like to try out a new Instructional Design model that I’ve been reading about (technique). I’d like to put it online. My team is myself, and perhaps a couple friends I can cajole into advising as needed. My technique will also involve sampling said wines The time – that’s the hard part — that where I need extrinsic motivation. That’s why I’m writing about this – I’d like to get YOU to help motivate me to complete this by mid-April.
• Mastery: I believe that I am capable of learning about wine; I also believe that I am capable of mastering the domain of wine — and be able to choose wines to go with food, wines to drink at parties, wines as gifts — and maybe more. This will require grit, deliberate practice, and refining my palette for wine. It will also require a drinking buddy.

In the process of writing these points, it becomes clear to me that my challenge is always, will always be the deadline. I love to read and research, but without the extrinsic motivation of the deadline, I would accomplish very little. This essential point is what Pink only touches on — that we need that external structure of deadlines, office spaces where we do our work, the exercise classes — to motivate us to keep focused and keep us going. We often need others to create expectations that we then fulfill. We need that social connection, and sometimes social pressure, to motivate us.

This one is created by Marcus Buckingham, the Gallup genius who helped create and market First, Break All the Rules, and Now, Discover Your Strengths. These books respectively say – each one of us is an individual and different, and managers should realize that and treat us differently; and people who do best focus on their strengths. The Strong Life Test for Women is a take-off on the latter.

First I took the online assessment, then I went to the bookstore and read the related book in about 2.5 hours (after reading academic papers, most business books are an easy read.)

Is is useful?

Well, it depends. If you’re looking for work, or a new life path, no one test is going to provide you the answer. What it may give you, is some insights into yourself, not because the test reveals your true self, but because you reveal your true self  when you react/interact with the test.

So I took this test. It told me the following:

• Strongest Role: Advisor. I like to ask the question – What’s the best thing to do?
• Supporting Role: Creator. I like to ask the question – What do I understand?

To be honest, I didn’t like that Creator was a supporting role. I’m an artist damn it! Ok, know that we’ve got that straight, we can move on, eh? I read my complete role descriptions and noted my reactions to the descriptions — yes, I like figuring out the answers and the best way to do things — I like being the expert (Advisor). Yes, I like starting with my own insights and finding the pattern underneath life’s craziness (Creator). Yes, I like tests that reconfirm how I think about myself, and make me remember what’s important to me.

The interesting difference

What’s different about this test, is not so much the test itself, but the accompanying literature that asks one important question:

• What are your strongest moments? In your working life, family, marriage, etc.?
• At what points do you feel you are at your best?
• What is is about those particular moments?
• How can you deliberately create those moments?
• Investigate those moments – what is it about them that you like?
• Celebrate and acknowledge those moments?

It is this difference – focusing on strong moments in your life, and the specifics of those moments — that makes this interesting. The most important exercise you can do is find the words to describe those moments.

The test is just a starting point.

Just an FYI – a list of roles as outlined in the book:

1. Advisor
2. Caretaker
3. Creator
4. Equalizer
5. Influencer
6. Motivator
7. Pioneer
8. Teacher
9. Weaver

This is a good read. I loved learning about the inner workings of Wall Street from one person’s perspective — and it just that — a biased perspective. He does not hide this fact but that’s in part what makes the book so entertaining. I learned more about how high finance works from reading this book than I have from any financial textbook. McDonald describes from his perspective why Lehman failed, what was done to try save it, and fully lays the blame at the feet of two people: Dick Fuld, CEO and Joe Gregory, COO.

One begins to understand the complexity of the financial instruments involved, the delusional activities of large group of people, and the sheer calamity brought upon this country and the world as a result of these activities. The collapse of Lehman was at the crux of the financial meltdown. Reading this book you realize how much of our financial system runs on faith and trust, and how important it is to have checks and regulations in place that keep that trust and faith in place. Dismantling the Glass-Stegall act was at the root of the most recent chaos — and that blame lies with the Congress at that time. And there is the easy access to credit thanks to the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates low after the 2001 bubble. (Sorry, can’t mention the name of the demi-god Alan Greenspan.)

The book is well-named: A Colossal Failure of Common Sense. However it’s just not the top two Lehman that suffered from this failure, it’s most of the heavy hitters in the system that did. And they should be ashamed of the havoc they wrought.

But we all had a piece of it, however small. I hope our awareness these failures leads to change. We’ll see.

Good book, albeit biased — worth the read.

Full disclosure: Lehman Brothers was a client I worked with and I knew some of the people at the firm.

Here’s a story ..it happened to me…

Several years ago I was traveling to an client event in another country. I had been in my new position a couple of months at most. My boss was meeting me there, and  was to brief me on the details. I arrived a couple days early to visit with family — a good thing because on Day 1, the client called asking me to come. Boss was still in New York. So in I went.

Upon arrival I was told that a critical video that we created was stuck at the border.  I was to get it released ASAP. I smiled and said “yes, I’ll take care of it.” I had no idea what they were talking about. Couldn’t find my boss. Panic began to eat at the edges of my brain. I called everyone I knew to get the cell number of the one guy who could release the tape. He was eating dinner.  He apologized, and said he would take care of it as soon as the border customs office opened. Whew!

And then the real whammy happened on Day 1 @ 2 am (ok, technically Day 2). My boss called. She missed her connecting flight. She managed to get a flight to a city that was actually further away. Clearly geography was not her strong suite. But crazier still, they threatened to deport her because of something she said when she crossed the border: “work”. Never, ever, say you’re coming in to work in another country unless you have a work visa. I gave her this advice. Repeated it. To sum up, she would not arrive until much later on Day 2 — if she arrived at all. Me alone with the client (that’s plural client not singular) for another day. Didn’t really sleep.

Got up, put a smile on my face, and explained the crazy situation. Then volunteered to do whatever work they needed — and sure enough, they put to work. The tape arrived. Boss arrived. The rest of the event went swimmingly. We all survived.

When I got back, I was treated as a hero — if they could have given me the consultant equivalent of the purple heart they would have.

END OF STORY.

I can’t help think I could have been better prepared.

Is it possible to train for the unexpected?

YES, YES, YES!!!! Except I wouldn’t call it training…

• Step 1: Tell people the unexpected will happen.
• Teach them the power of negative thinking (book I read once). Have a team brainstorm about all the things that could go wrong and how you could prepare for them. What are the backup plans? This lesson I learned in radio — some technology will fail, some tape will break (yup, good ol’ analog days), some interviewee will *not* show up. Be prepared. Have a plan. Rehearse your plan.
• Who will answer the “red” phone at 3 am? The hardest thing is feeling that you are alone in a situation. The one thing that made a difference to me was connecting with one person who was still at the office at 7pm. Hearing a friendly voice tell me that she would do “everything she could to help me” made all the difference. Thank you team mate!
• Focus on the work that needs doing. I did my best to stay focused on the work that needed doing (get video, get boss, help client) It helped keep most of the anxiety at bay.
• Stay positive & stay focused on the needs of your client. It would have been very easy to fall into victim mode (“I’m not good enough”, “I can’t deal with this”, “I’m an impostor”, “it’s his/her/their fault”, “it’s not my job!”). Look it’s not about you, it’s about the client. So get over it. Put your “game-face” on, and as trite as it sounds, go out there with a positive attitude. What can you do to help?

Ambiguity, complexity, and the distributed expertise of teams creates “black swan” events. How can we deal with the unexpected, emergent behavior of systems? I think there’s a  game to be created here (or maybe several already exist?)

This isn’t training — it’s strategy.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

• In extremely complex situations checklists can solve many problems
• The working world is deep expertise in based in teams
• The volume of knowledge exceeds what one expert can provide
• Don’t turn complex situations into cookbooks, focus in on crucial items
• Create pause points where you can check in
• Allow people to create scripts to follow and share, not recipes
• Have people think about ways things go wrong, and are they prepared for them
• In fields where we think expertise and experience are enough, running up against limits of what we can do (example of lawyers) large volumes of knowledge and we’re making basic mistakes
• We are fundamentally fallible and make mistakes
• In situations of complexity, understand where power should lie – it’s not command and control
• In situations of complexity (i.e., Hurricane Katrina) give power to the peripheries and focus on communication from peripheries to HQ and out again to quickly spread good protocols and ideas (example of Walmart in Katrina)
• Example of VCs and how they make their decisions – different styles of decision making – gut decisions vs. analytical VCs (used checklists). Checklists VCs have higher success rate.
• Goes against our idea of what expertise is suppose to be.

Can’t wait to get it so I can review it in fuller detail.

I’ve recently decided to deepen my understanding of analytics, in part to think about my website and how to better promote it, and secondarily to better understand this new way of thinking about business decisions. So I thought I’d start with this book and a broad introduction to this field.

The Deciding Factor is just that — a broad introduction written for executives by two guys from the Fair Issac corporation (the group that invented the credit score.) The essential gist of this book is that we can use analysis of the tons of data collected about customers/consumers to better understand how to not just make, but to automate decisions. If you’ve ever read the book The Numerati by Stephen Baker, it is the more detailed dive into the new world of data mining and decision making that is governing many business and political decisions.

Quoting Lowell Bryan, managing partner at McKinsey & Gary Hamel author of The Future of Management, the authors bring to our attention that “increasingly the work of managers won’t be done by managers. Instead it will be pushed out to the periphery. It will be embedded in systems.”

The greatest benefit will be seen in retail operations (credit cards, banks, retail stores) — where there is a lot of data on consumer behavior, and where the primary business decisions are being made on the front-lines by retail employees or call-center folks. One of the most interesting examples the authors give is about Best Buy and how they used analytics to better understand the types of customers coming into the store, created personas for each of these behavior types: Barry, the affluent techy enthusiast; “Jill”, the busy suburban mom; “Ray” the price-conscious family man; “”Buzz”, the young gadget fiend. Best Buy then rearranged the layout of the some of its stores to better serve these types. In addition, they trained their front-line employees to ask life-style questions to uncover the needs of each of these types (“how are you going to use this product?”, “Is it for you or someone else?”.)

The three essential components of using analytics is:

1. Developing a Rules-Based System – automating high-volume operations decisions to make the decisions more consistent and increase control (such creating and understanding personas, and creating a set of questions to ask the types.)
2. Using Predictive Analytics Models – creating decision models and frameworks to mathematically evaluate the trade-offs among conflicting objectives then execute decisions; using adaptive control (the process of making the best possible decision to control a complex system based on current knowledge and learn more about how the system behaves.)
3. Connecting Decisions Across Multiple Dimensions - also known in part as cross-selling.

The use of both descriptive analytics – the process of finding relationships/patterns among data (i.e. figuring out the personas as described in the Best Buy example); and of predticive analytics – using what you do know to make informed decisions aobut what you don’t know to predict what might happen in the future – it expresses the future in terms of odds and probabilities.

The descriptions of how to make business decisions using analytics sounds similar to the way one imagines business decisions are currently made. However, there is a difference of degree and of control. In expert-driven decision making, one uses the experts and their experience. In data-informed decision-making, the experts interpret the information into a report and it informs the decisions. In data-guided, a predictive model replaces the unproven assumptions with objective information, and the model provides advisory decisions (methinks this is what happened in the investment banks). Finally in data-driven decision making, the running of analytic models and execution of decision are completely automated. The control is in the rules created to describe the system, whether that be a bank, a electronic store, or credit card business. The problems come in when the system is described incompletely and something unexpected happens.

The gist of this book is that decisions based on analytics are the way of the future. Decisions on how much credit-card increase to give people, whether to approve them for a loan, or what kind of other products can be sold to them are all automated. The rules are set by the business and math people, who interpret the data and create rules based on this interpretation. This feels very much like game-design.

To effectively use analytics you need organizations that have tons of data, and that collect the right kind of data. From this you can derive patterns and understand how to better make decisions, make suggestions based on these analytics. But you have to have good data, and thoughtful people making the rules, otherwise you may end up creating a system that controls you, rather than informs you. It’s a new way of thinking of understanding the world.

This book is a basic introduction to this world — at this point, I feel I need more in-depth thoughtful exploration of how it works best in the web world. Onto the next read.