Week 3: How do people decide?

Posted 3rd May, 2010 by gsiemens

Week 3 is our final detour week before we resume the discussion of futures thinking.

In week 2, critical and creative thinking generated great discussion! The forum will remain open, so please share your thoughts and reactions to topics already presented (or add your own).

In week 3, we're going to explore how people decide. Why this topic? Decision making is an ongoing, daily process. Sometimes it's insignificant like "what colour socks should I wear". Other times it's personally significant: "should I diet? exercise?". And at other times, it's nationally significant: "Should we raise taxes? How do we protect our borders". And in still other situations, the decisions have international consequences: "Are carbon offsets effective? Or should we reduce, rather than compensate for, emissions? How do we clean up a large oil spill?"

In futures thinking, we encounter many decision points. Have a look at this thread in week 1. How would *you* go about deciding which trends are important and will likely have a future impact on education? Do you look for data? Trend lines? Do you rely on the opinion of experts? In spaces of abundant information, how can you make sense of what's important? (As P. W. Anderson has stated, More is different .pdf - the same metrics for making sense of slow information flow don't necessarily work when the flow is abundant).

Readings:

Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster (.pdf) - Gary Klein

Literature review of critical and naturalistic decision making (.pdf)

Activities for the week

1. Research (and reflect on) the traditional structured hierarchical models of decision making. Why do structured models of thinking/deciding have such appeal? (share your views via blog post, video, podcast, your choice).

2. Visit the discussion forums for week 3 - share illustrations of decision making errors (such as cognitive bias, groupthink) and processes to aid decision making (intuition, pattern recognition, analogy). Keep in mind, this week's topic will prepare us for the decisions we'll start making next week about likely/prospective/ridiculous future(s) in education!