Week 5 Reading and Blog Questions

Action Learning
Out of all 6 steps, Determining causes of the problem is the most important step in organizational problem solving. The blog questions state that there are “2 new steps before determining the cause” I’m not quite sure if that’s a reference to presenting the problem and reframing the problem. However presentation of the problem and reframing the problem certainly makes a lot of sense. It’s important to present the problem and then to look at the problem from a different angle in order to properly define the problem. Once a problem is properly defined only then can you attack it’s root cause.

Understanding & Supporting Decision Making
The underlying idea of naturalistic decision making is the notion that “how people make decisions begins with observation, and not testing hypothesis drawn from mathematical and statistical theories.” Essentially naturalistic decision-making deals with intuition and how that shapes the decision making process. According to the research provided naturlisitc decision-making rarely compares options (less than 5% of the time actually). The Naturilistic decision-making camp looks at the traditional model of decision making (hypothesis-expirement-theory etc) is too narrow of a way to describe true scientific thinking.

What data mining can’t do
The “more is not better” has to do with the fundamental idea of data mining: and that is that data mining is based upon understanding the “radomness” of human behavior by using fairly basic probability distributions. So, when it comes to data warehousing more is not necessarily better because sometimes all of that additional data can be a bit of a red herring and can capture more of the random idiosyncrasies of human behavior which can then make the data too muddied and much more difficult to draw conclusions.

Reflection questions:
“Is there a difference between decision making and problem solving?”
I believe yes there very much is a difference between decision making and problem solving. Decision making, as seen in the naturalistic article, often times can be based on intuition and quick thinking. While this has many positivies, it also has many negatives when it comes to problem solving. As we saw in the action learning article there are many steps involved in adequately solving a problem, with defining the root cause as the most important. Often times in decision making processes defining, framing, and finding root cause isn’t determined nor are they often thought about.

True or False:
There are good decisions, and there are bad decisions: Kinda true, kinda false
There are simply decisions. It’s context that makes them good or bad.
Better information yields better decision making: True
Absolutely.
Better knowledge yields better decision making:True