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Sir Basil Henry Liddell-Hart (31 October 1895 – 29 January 1970) was an influential British strategist, historian, and military theorist.  The prolific author B. H. Liddell-Hart authored numerous works on military strategy and tactics.

Liddell-Hart's "Strategy" is considered one of the most influential works on military strategy published in the 20th century.  This book examines the art of warfare and provides a comprehensive analysis of the strategies and tactics used by great military commander

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

Sometimes you need to go beyond nudging decision makers. However, the personal risk you take when challenging a decision depends on culture.

Last week I was given cause to reflect on my time at HIH Insurance and the causes of its demise in 2001. While there were many, and people with different lenses could easily come to different conclusions, my view is that the culture did not allow sufficient leaders to speak their mind.

The CEO, Ray Williams, was a powerful personality. One of the most caring,

Can you make a difference with measurement if the culture of your organisation is one that does not respect, let alone crave data? In my experience it is tough to go hard against the grain of an organisation’s culture. The better way is to nudge it.

How might you nudge it? Culture change can start from outside the executive team but ultimately it has to be adopted by a key executive and then the whole executive. So no better place to start than with the strategic risks of your organisation.

How do

Back in 2015, McKinsey published a paper on the future of risk management in the banking sector. At the time I sent it to many of my clients in other sectors because of its very important messages, including this one in their summary:

Where should your lead indicators (KRIs or Key Risk Indicators in the field of risk) come from?

A few years ago my colleague Andrew Prately and I toured the country to speak at Chartered Accountants Business Forums. We spoke on KPIs – Key Performance Indicators. We talked about lead and lag indicators and we talked about limiting the number of KPIs, as having too many creates its own industry of measurement and reporting with very little influence on decision making. Because more often than not o

My colleague Dr Andrew Pratley and I are on a mission to defeat quantifornication. Last week we ran the first of two free interactive webinars we are running to explore the topic. We had attendees from a range of industries including banking, emergency services, energy, insurance, health, policy agencies and regulators from federal and state governments, local government, engineering consultants, risk and cyber risk consultants, IT service providers and many more.

Everyone was there for the same

My stats guru colleague Dr Andrew Pratley and I are on the move to tackle Quantifornication, the plucking of numbers out of thin air. Last week was supposed to be our final blog we are co-writing but we couldn’t resist sneaking in another one after the great response from our last one.

Last week we wrote about the concept of directionality, taking what you know having applied the three-question framework and testing with more data to gain even more certainty of your decisions. We defined directio

My stats guru colleague Dr Andrew Pratley and I are on the move to tackle Quantifornication, the plucking of numbers out of thin air. Here is the seventh in a series we are co-writing.

Nothing is certain. Not even death and taxes. Because the only certainty is uncertainty, there’s no foolproof way to make the right decision. Most organisations deal with this by putting in a time constraint. Forcing a decision, however imperfect it may be.

While keeping the organisation moving by forcing decisions

My stats guru colleague Dr Andrew Pratley and I are on the move to tackle Quantifornication, the plucking of numbers out of thin air. Here is the sixth in a series we are co-writing.

Relationships are the branch of statistics that describe how one thing influences another. We know these as regression analysis, x-y plots or scatter plots. The classic regression plot involves a line of best fit. We tend to think that the better the line of fit, the better the statistical relationship. That’s true,

My stats guru colleague Dr Andrew Pratley and I are on the move to tackle Quantifornication, the plucking of numbers out of thin air. Here is the fifth in a series we are co-writing.

My stats guru colleague Dr Andrew Pratley and I are on the move to tackle Quantifornication, the plucking of numbers out of thin air. Here is the fourth in a series we are co-writing.

We all have a tendency to overestimate our knowledge. And as a result, we believe that we know things which we don't. Our understanding of what is random is even worse – hence Nassim Taleb’s book Fooled by Randomness. It's the overconfidence that is the problem. It causes us to jump to the wrong answer and believe i

My stats guru colleague Dr Andrew Pratley and I are on the move to tackle Quantifornication, the plucking of numbers out of thin air. Here is the third in a series we are co-writing.

Why do so many educators in statistics consistently fail to translate these ideas into something that people can both remember and use? The problem is the language, not the numbers. Part of the problem with statistics, as is the case with most technical subjects, is the unique terminology. The COVID-19 pandemic has s

My stats guru colleague Dr Andrew Pratley and I are on the move to tackle Quantifornication, the plucking of numbers out of thin air. Here is the first in a series co-written together.

We’re far better at identifying good and bad writing than we are identifying good and bad numbers. The premise of this idea almost doesn’t seem logical. How can a language like English, with all of its oddities, be easier to separate the good from the bad?

Our education in English has a substantial amount of time de

My stats guru colleague Dr Andrew Pratley and I are on the move to tackle Quantifornication, the plucking of numbers out of thin air. Here is the first in a series co-written together.

WARNING – If you are a vegetarian, vegan or an animal lover you may be offended by the story in this blog post.

When you're presented with numbers you don't know if they are buckshot or accurate. You often assume the later when it is often the former.

You must often witness people plucking out of thin air, numbers such as budget estimates, estimates of probability and estimates of impact. It is very common because it takes time to get accurate. We often prefer the buckshot approach because we hit

One of my readers reached out to me after I introduced the strategy funnel last week which made me decide to prepare an example of how the approach works for a prolonged crisis, like COVID-19. One of my sons co-manages the bars in a three-level restaurant offering a variety of dining experiences. It is located in Manly here in Sydney, which is a tourist area. I have been thinking a lot about the restaurants and hence his future. So I thought I would use the restaurant’s owners as an example.

A la

I’ve taken a sales and marketing tool and turned it into a strategy tool that you might find very helpful right now. The concept works like this:

There are a range of possible futures playing out for each of us. None we can be certain about. The further out in time we look the more uncertain the view. Nothing new here. What is our response? Generally, scenario planning and forecasting. The questions you should be asking yourself now is how many scenarios should I be considering and how can I move