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> Often people demand more decisive decisions, of 'yes'/'no' or concrete action, not shades of grey and fiddling at the margins. And working with these people
by wiz21c 2y ago
> Often people demand more decisive decisions, of 'yes'/'no' or concrete action, not shades of grey and fiddling at the margins.
And working with these people is so painful.
- eru 2y agoYes. I also found that in many cases being able to turn problems that require discrete decisions into problems that admit continuous decisions, eg by re-arranging how the business works etc, can unlock a lot of business value. In my concrete cases I mostly saw that in the direct sense of being able to deploy more mathematics and operations research, eg for netting out (partially) offsetting financial instruments for a bank. But by introspection you can come up with more example. Eg that's a common selling point for running your servers on AWS instead of building your own hardware.
- harperlee 2y agoI often make fun of McKinsey- style four quadrants when overused, but they really boil down to something that makes a lot of sense in communicating a problem space: a) carefully choose the two most important dimensions of concern (as Alan Kay said: the correct point of view is worth 80 Iq points) b) make them binary: are we happy here or do we need to change? In a way similar to the pareto ratio, you keep a surprising amount of value in something “so simple it cant be possibly so useful”.
- eru 2y agoOf course, you can also weaponise the choice of axes for your (office) politics: pick the two axes right, and the policy outcome you want to pick might already be baked into the whole process from the start.