By Philip Mudd
Become a excessive potency Analytic choice maker.
We've all been there: confronted with an important selection, but crushed through the very facts that's presupposed to support us. It’s an all-too-common fight within the electronic age, whilst Google searches produce 1000000 ends up in a break up moment and software program courses offer research swifter than lets ever desire to learn it.
Adapting the geopolitical and ancient classes gleaned from over 20 years in govt intelligence, Philip Mudd―an ex–National safeguard Council employees member and previous senior government on the FBI and the CIA―finally provides us the definitive guidebook for the way to technique advanced judgements at the present time. packed with logical but counterintuitive solutions to boring and notable problems―whether or not it's deciding to buy a brand new domestic or pivoting a failing enterprise model―Mudd’s "HEAD" (High potency Analytic Decision-making) method presents readers with a battle-tested set of guiding rules that promise to convey order to even the main chaotic difficulties, all in 5 functional steps:
• What's the question? Analysts frequently think that questions are self-evident, yet concentrating on higher questions up entrance continually yields higher solutions later.
• What are your "drivers?" The human brain has a difficult time juggling details, so analysts want a procedure to collapse advanced questions into assorted features or “drivers.”
• How will you degree performance? as soon as the query has been solidified and the "drivers" decided, an analyst needs to make a decision what metrics they'll use to appreciate how a problem―and their method to it―is evolving over time.
• What in regards to the data? instead of every bit of knowledge by itself and up entrance, an analyst can simply conquer facts overload via plugging facts into their "driver" different types and excising something that does not fit.
• What are we missing? advanced research is not effortless, so it's relevant to imagine that the method is defective, whereas additionally figuring out how one can fee for attainable gaps and mistakes, akin to availability bias, halo results, and intuitive as opposed to analytic methodologies.
Drawing deeply from his personal harrowing experiences―and mistakes―in the road of responsibility, Mudd has spent years refining and educating his technique to Fortune 500 businesses and govt corporations. Now, within the best-selling culture of Charles Duhigg's The energy of Habit and Oren Klaff's Pitch Anything, Philip Mudd's The HEAD Game can switch how you either reside and work.
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Extra resources for The HEAD Game: High-Efficiency Analytic Decision Making and the Art of Solving Complex Problems Quickly
Example text
Our weather analyst is, consciously or not, factoring other, non-weather-related variables into the decision. The lesson is clear: be conscious about whether you are allowing the people who are analyzing the problem to also slip into the role of decision maker. If they do, their ability to remain disinterested in the outcome becomes questionable. This notion of a divide between analysts and decision makers has direct implications in all sorts of professional arenas. An analyst in an investment firm who has the twin responsibilities of both researching a stock and then participating in conversations about whether to buy or sell the stock faces a challenge you can see anytime a human being stakes his reputation on a judgment.
In this case, then, the analyst is in the position of critiquing his own organization. Self-critiques are part of everyday life, but once that analyst has to present a position outside the CIA—to Congress, the White House, or the American people—the analyst’s view might be colored by an interest in portraying the CIA as successful. This has nothing to do with integrity—it’s not necessarily a case of willfully changing analysis to support a particular judgment—and everything to do with human behavior.
Stop, though. That’s not the only way to read a novel, or to even think of a plot. You don’t have to start at the first page and grind through a few hundred pages before you fully understand where the story will take you. What if you pick up that same novel, skip the initial 95 percent, and instead read the final chapter first? You could then turn around and read the entire book, start to finish, beginning with the first chapter. ) As you know, here’s what would happen if you started at the back of the book: instead of wondering how the threads might eventually come together, you would clearly see, as each page turns, how each fragment of dialogue and each scene contributes to the story and the plot.