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I expect the term psychological warfare interests you because you are wondering which kind I would be writing about. Would it be about China, the US Election or state border restrictions in Australia? None of those. It’s about needing to operate in a culture where psychological safety is not just lacking, it’s non-existent.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but I have been blogging about measurement, data, and statistics for the past 19 weeks. All to defeat quantifornication – the act of pulling numbers out of thin air for decision making. Numbers that are seemingly reliable but are not.

This week, Tuesday 10th November at 15:00hrs AEDT, I am presenting with my colleague Dr Andrew Pratley. Our presentation is Statistics 101 Applied to Controls – How to test and measure control resilience. Our presentation is part of

People mostly don’t like to be restrained. We also don’t like some constraints but we like others. For example, we like choice when buying but we don’t like too many choices.

Restraints on the other hand are an attack on our freedom.

Take seat belts for example. They were first invented the century before last! The modern retractable 3-point seat belt was invented in the 1950s. However, seat belt wearing was not compulsory and it took government legislation, regulation and enforcement to get more

Senior leaders love to be challenged, when you prove them right!

Unfair? Yes. There are plenty of great leaders who truly want their staff to speak up. However, even some of these may suffer from measurement blindness.

When it comes to numbers and decision making there are three positions people take.

Believers

These people believe measurement enhances decisions. They will ask for measurement and readily listen to the numbers being presented, they will look to see if there are any abnormalities and

VUCA relates to threats that people and enterprises often encounter.  The acronym reflects the constant, dramatically-transforming, and unpredictable world.  The concept originated in 1987, based on the theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus.  The term was first used by U.S. Army War College to describe the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous general conditions globally.

The acronym found traction after 2002, when it was considered an emerging idea to be discussed among the strategic le

According to Michael Henderson, Corporate Anthropologist on Oscar Trimboli’s Deep Listening Podcast, people in the western world like threes because we like balance.

We like Low, Medium and High. We like the Three Little Pigs and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

We also like it when a salesperson stops at three when telling us about the wonders of their product. Trust and desire builds to three and starts to wane above three. As in, “Why does she need to keep listing stuff? Is there something not g

Bedtime data stories are telling stories about data with data.

Have you ever asked yourself, “Why bedtime stories?”. Maybe you grew up with them and you have kept up the tradition. Maybe you understand they are good for your child’s development, in particular their vocabulary, comprehension and the development of their creative brains. If so, you would be right as evidenced in this research published in the journal Pediatrics.

However, there is more to it than their personal development. You are a

Those of you that know your maths know that an S-Curve can have an exponential portion to its curve but it can’t BE an exponential curve. However, I recently came across a diagram showing a series of S-curves overlaying an exponential curve which to me portrayed something very different to seeing either in isolation. It was in this post by Tim Urban The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence.

There are data miners and then there is data mindset. The former are the people and/or their tools that do the digging through the numbers. The latter is about a whole lot more. 

Last week I blogged about how to help people believe the numbers. This week I am going a big step further talking about four different types of data mindsets and the implications for decision making in an organisation (see figure).   

                                                                                 Data Mi

Decisions are all about emotion, however, numbers are so very important. At the end of the day if the bank balance is zero, no amount of emotion is going to change that. 
When it comes to numbers and decision making there are essentially three positions people take. 

One of the most soul-destroying events that can happen to a company is for a bean counter to be appointed as CEO with a vision that involves cost cutting and not much else. While I am one of the first to hold true to “In God we trust, all others bring data”, I have seen too many companies damaged from a CEO overly focused on cost cutting. A CEO that is dumped within a few years. 

Don’t get me wrong. A focus on costs is important and sometimes dramatic cost cutting is essential, however, as with a

A strategy is of itself a hypothesis. Something that is proved true or false over time.  For more on this, read one of my most popular blogs here: A strategy is but a hypothesis.

In proving your hypothesis, you eventually find out if you are spending on a failed strategy or if you are investing in a successful one.

The key to shifting from spending to investing is to set up your strategy, from the start, so you can measure your spend and your return on your investment each step of the way. This al

We need data we can trust so that we can build trust using data. However, it is not as easy as it sounds.