Want to Make Better Decisions? Know the Difference between Engineering a...

source: Big Think    2016年10月6日
There comes a point when you can no longer rely on the Magic 8 ball to provide the best path for major life decisions. Stanford University lecturer Dave Evans has a better idea. Dave Evan's is the co-author of "Designing Your Life" (https://goo.gl/zwbj4J).
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/dave-evans...

Transcript - There are lots of ways to think. And what you want is you want a toolkit of ways to think and you want ways to think to be aligned with the problems you're thinking about. So we talk about sort of four examples of ways of thinking. There's engineering thinking, which is very prevalent in modern society because we're a technical society and engineers solve pain problems to which there are clear repeatable solutions. Once I figure out how to build the Brooklyn Bridge I can build it again and again; it will work every time. That's a hard problem but it's a tame problem. It's well behaved. It will act tomorrow just like it acted today.
Business problems you use optimization thinking. There's no right answer to your branding, no right answer to your market share, but you can optimize and that's a different kind of thinking. Researchers do analytic thinking. They thought with a premise. They think thin slice it down. They've got a questioning the process. Those are ways of thinking. What we call wicked problems, that's a technical term developed by some urban planners at Berkeley back in the '70s, a wicked problem is one where the criteria for success are unclear, constantly changing; you won't know you got the right answer until you find it; and once you found it you can't reuse it again. You can't rebuild New York City somewhere else. You can't be Dave Evans again. You can't be somebody else again. So wicked problems are inherently human problems and they're messy problems and they're trying to intersect a future that none of us knows enough about. Read Full Transcript Here: https://goo.gl/hqtXDR.