"Companies won’t experiment to find
evidence of the right way forward."--Dan Ariely, from his blog Predictably Irrational.
Dan is a Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight--he knows what he is talking about.
Have you ever been in a meeting where there are two or three strong opinions with little to no evidence to support any of them? Have you been guilty (like me) of picking one out of frustration, convenience, or fatigue?
Dan goes on to share this:
"Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies."
The equivalent of focus groups in my ministry is what we have done or what some other ministry has done in the past. This is a great place to start but unfortunately most of the time teams make small adjustments on what's been done before instead of using it as a launch-pad for thinking creatively.
...final quote from Dan:
"We tend to value answers over questions because answers allow us to take action, while questions mean that we need to keep thinking. Never mind that asking good questions and gathering evidence usually guides us to better answers."
How are you doing at asking good questions and gathering hard evidence? I could use some work!
photo courtesy of mgdtgd
