All is flux, and increasingly we find ourselves in new situations, or new combinations of circumstances, where our people are required to use their judgement on the best way forward in complex, often uncertain, situations where they cannot practically know all of the facts.
As a result they have to lean more on their intuition, and find new ways to arrive at an answer.
This type of ‘work as discovery’ is known as Heuristic work, and McKinsey estimates that about 70 percent of the job growth in the US comes from such heuristic work.
Heuristics are practical time-saving methods used to arrive at decisions or conclusions in complex situations. They include analogies, principles, models, stories, and rules of thumb.
We use heuristics all the time without really recognising that we are, particularly when trying to make sense of new situations by trial and error. Because of this, they are increasingly essential to making progress, but they can also be flawed, and reflect bias. See the blog item Tuning Our Intuition.
Just as algorithms have become outdated as the environment has changed, heuristics themselves can become increasingly inaccurate over time. This can lead to errors, and more often inefficiency, conflict, and disconnection.
As a result, our heuristic frameworks need to be continuously refined and improved.
In stable environments, much of this happens naturally over time. However, in fast changing environments the resulting lag can prove very costly, and so there is great advantage in accelerating this process.
But heuristics tend to be personal, sometimes unconscious, strategies – so how does this happen?
Culturistics’ approach is inherent in practically everything we do …
How can we help you:
Decision making process: Our Meetings Toolchest contains a wealth of participative decision tools which are designed to make individual and collective heuristics more visible, and which use the collective decision making process to naturally recalibrate and refine people’s understanding of their own heuristics.
Facilitation Training: Our facilitation courses equip people with the understanding of how to design and lead meetings which utilise participative and explicit decision making processes, and to facilitate shifts in understanding within that. For more information, contact us.