Abstract:

There are distinctive patterns in the errors that all of us make. Systematic mistakes known as biases, along with impressions and thoughts, form within our conscious experience. This occurs naturally without us knowing they are even there or how they came about. The mental work that produces these impressions, intuitions, and decisions takes place silently within our mind. However, mistakes recur predictably under particular circumstances. Those circumstances are what we’ll focus on in this talk. Heuristics, (or mental shortcuts), are an intuitive judgements based on experiences and impressions from our past. We rely on those heuristics to approach problem solving, and especially within the context of decision making under uncertainty. Such as dealing with service disruptions or some other incident related to availability. Reliance on those heuristics often cause predictable errors in our reasoning, decision making, predictions and any common puzzle. We are often extremely confident even when we are blatantly wrong. When the constraints and pressures of “Time To Repair” influence our cognitive efforts, systematic errors are introduced into our judgements and choices. Our minds are easily susceptible to bias, and considerations of efficiency over thoroughness can amplify these errors even more. The goal of this talk is to improve the ability to identify and understand errors in judgement and choice. Through a deeper understanding of heuristics and of the biases to which they lead, improvements in judgement and decision-making under situations of uncertainty, such as a system-wide outage should be gained.

Speaker: Jason Hand