article thumbnail

The Surprising Power of Business Experiments

Skip Prichard

If you want to learn how to develop an experimentation organization, read on. Daniel Kahneman. The employee was forbidden to work on the project. The behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman once noted that “if you follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic.

Power 95
article thumbnail

The Hidden Indicators of a Failing Project

Harvard Business Review

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow , recounts a bit of a planning pickle he and his Israeli Ministry of Education colleagues encountered when estimating how long it would take to complete a high school textbook on judgment and decision making. Eight long years later, the book was completed. government! all of these things!),

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

The Planning Fallacy and the Innovator's Dilemma

Harvard Business Review

The basic concept , first presented by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his partner Amos Tversky in an influential 1979 paper, is that human beings are astonishingly bad at estimating how long it will take to complete tasks. To get through the corporate approval gauntlet you have to project big numbers. The average actual cost?

article thumbnail

The F-35 and the Tradeoff Fallacy

Harvard Business Review

Most predictably, cost overruns; this is, after all, a government project. Concurrency was supposed to speed up the F-35's development. With "the world's most expensive fighter jet" now coming under additional budget scrutiny, National Public Radio highlighted the hurdles that the program has run into. Then there's the testing.

article thumbnail

Why New Leaders Should Be Wary of Quick Wins

Harvard Business Review

His projects redesigned the supply chain for significant cost and time savings, created a new structure to quicken decision making and increase flexibility, and improved the new-product process. Instead, he was told that the CEO would stay until the CFO developed the capabilities to succeed him, and Greg would be allowed to resign.

article thumbnail

Why Companies Are Betting Against Big Ideas

Harvard Business Review

This idea of prospect theory, developed by Tversky and Kahneman and reported in a classic 1979 article (for which the Nobel prize was awarded) demonstrated that individuals do not make decisions rationally by selecting options with the highest expected value, because they are risk-averse and 'losses loom larger than gains.'.

article thumbnail

Instinct Can Beat Analytical Thinking

Harvard Business Review

This popular triumph of the “ heuristics and biases ” literature pioneered by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has made us aware of flaws that economics long glossed over, and led to interesting innovations in retirement planning and government policy. It is not, however, the only lens through which to view decision-making.