Please answer three questions: 

1. Is someone in the US more likely to die from lung cancer or from a road accident? 
2. Is a person more likely to die from tuberculosis or from fire? 
3. Does the English language have more words that begin with the letter k or more words that have k in the third position?

These questions come from the classic article, Judgment Under Uncertainty, by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. In the 1970’s, I took a graduate seminar that Amos led and Danny observed. They both had important influences on my thinking. So, what are the answers and why should you care?

The answers. Three times more people die from lung cancer than from road accidents. Twice as many people die from TB than from fires. There are twice as many words with k in the third position than with k in the first.

Most people get these answers wrong, even though the actual rates aren’t even close. Why is that? Tversky and Kahneman used these questions to illuminate a judgment strategy they called the availability heuristic. They showed that the way we judge frequency is to gauge how hard it is to recall examples of each instance. For example, we think of the last few times we’ve heard of someone dying in a car wreck versus from lung cancer. If it’s easier to think of car wrecks, then we guess they happen more often.

The reason most people get the answers to these particular questions wrong is because their data stream—the information they are exposed to daily—doesn’t reflect reality. For example, a typical newspaper has 42 articles about road accidents for every 1 about lung cancer; it also has 24 articles about fire-related deaths and none dealing with death due to TB.

The Big Point. Your data stream determines your mental agenda.

If people don’t receive information about a problem daily, then they won’t realize it’s happening—or they’ll grossly underestimate how often it happens.

Here’s an example from our study Silence Fails. In surveys and interviews, senior leaders told us project managers were occasionally given impossible plans. But they thought this rarely occurred. When it did happen, they said the situation was almost always quickly resolved. So they didn’t believe this “fact free planning” was a big problem in their organizations.

However, 85 percent of project managers said they routinely faced these “fact free plans” and only 17 percent said they could discuss and resolve them.

How can the senior leaders be so far off? It turns out project managers don’t think it’s politically safe to confront their managers about these impossible plans. Consequently, senior leaders don’t hear about it, and grossly underestimate how often it occurs.

Applications. If you want to change the mental agenda of your organization, change the data that routinely crosses people’s desks. If you want to change your own mental agenda, change what you measure and track every day.

• Improve Customer Satisfaction. Pat Ryan at OGE Energy wanted to make their utility more “responsive” and “customer driven.” A survey found that customers judged OGE’s performance based on how quickly they repaired broken streetlights. So Ryan created a report for each manager listing streetlights in his or her area that had been dark for more than five days. After two weeks, only two areas had any problem streetlights remaining.

• Improve Retention. The US Coast Guard discovered that officers had a huge impact on whether enlisted personnel serving under them stayed in or got out when their time was up. So they calculated the average retention rates for each officer and added it to their fitness reports. Even without specific targets, retention improved.

• Improve Patient Safety. One of the most powerful interventions for improving patient safety is to provide physicians with specific, confidential data comparing their patient outcomes to the norms within the hospital and the US.

• Lose Weight. Write down everything you eat each day. This technique is proven, and works as well as any diet out there. People who consistently track what they eat lose twice as much as people who don’t track or who track inconsistently.

• Get Fit. Track how far you run, walk, or bicycle each day. A recent Stanford School of Medicine study found that people who wear a pedometer, set a goal, and track their number of steps, lose weight, lower their blood pressure, and improve their fitness.

Responses[4]

Posted by David Maxfield on December 19, 2007 3:29:00 PM MST #