1 / 6

Working In Uncertainty

Working In Uncertainty. Improving your performance in uncertainty. The simple idea. You can get an advantage by making incremental changes to the way you work that improve your performance under uncertainty.

gwen
Download Presentation

Working In Uncertainty

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Working In Uncertainty Improving your performance in uncertainty.

  2. The simple idea • You can get an advantage by making incremental changes to the way you work that improve your performance under uncertainty. • This is likely to be worthwhile because of a fairly consistent human bias towards a blinkered view of the future. This is a bias we all seem to have and it’s often impossible to notice. • You can get ideas for improvements by looking at good ideas from various sources and thinking if they would help you, and from looking at where you think you most need to improve.

  3. Origins of Working In Uncertainty • Suggested by Matthew Leitch • Author, educator, consultant, and researcher • Former auditor and consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers • Co-author of the British Standard on Risk Management • Working In Uncertainty was developed as a next stage in the evolution of ‘risk management’, where all traces of a separate activity are removed and simplification and personal value are emphasized.

  4. Mental blinkers • Typical human nature is to: • Make narrow predictions about the future • Be too confident that those predictions are right • Think we can control the future more than in fact we can • Explain surprises so that we still think we are good forecasters! • This is institutionalised in organizations, e.g.: • Working to detailed plans and targets held fixed long after they are obsolete • Starting big bang projects that could have been delivered incrementally, more easily and with less stress • Evaluating performance by comparing results against initial expectations regardless of how conditions differed from those initially anticipated

  5. Typical improvements • Learn to prepare more skilfully for surprises, mistakes, unexpected opportunities, etc even when you don’t know what they will be. • Learn to understand better how people are driven by the limitations of their knowledge. • Get better at making progress despite the usual problems that shouldn’t happen but do. • Value and develop flexibility. • Reduce stress.

  6. Suggested approach • A limited trial • Select an area to look at e.g. • suggestion #1 • suggestion #2 • suggestion #3 • With guidance and support from XXXXXXX (person/document). • Spend XX hours thinking of improvements • And XX hours implementing and rethinking them • Then see if you want to try some more.

More Related