Hi all,
A couple of weeks ago, I posted some comments about Tim Harford's Messy. I usually try to cover ideas from the book in those write-ups but, in the case of Messy, all I really did was act as the cheerleader for the book.
So, here are ten specific ideas I took either directly from the book or came up with myself upon reflection.
Thanks for reading. See you all again on Wednesday.
Tim
1. Scientists who constantly change topics tend to publish more papers. This is perhaps because the slight difference in environment spur their creative juices.
2. A pain in the foot will go away if someone slaps you in the face.
3. Smooth conversations in a group are sometimes a concern. People who worry about group harmony are less likely to optimize performance if they suspect it could disrupt the team dynamic.
4. Working with patients in their own world requires caregivers join them in that space and validate their feelings and experience.
5. Synchronizing too much will reduce the pace of the group to the pace of its slowest member.
6. Easy to measure scores oversimplify the complex and leave open the temptation that metric-relevant portions of a problem are focused on at the expense of the unmeasured.
7. A computer ten thousand times faster than a human will make ten thousand times as many mistakes.
8. The Basel rules established their own measure of risk despite the market doing so organically via the interest rate. Therefore, banks simply chose the riskiest assets among the class of 'safe' assets, thus heightening the volatility of the system due to the similarity of investment portfolios.
9. Many automated systems ask the human to monitor the machine. This reverses the roles of a setup that takes advantage of each party's strengths. The human is asked to apply constant attention, the computer tasked with response to the novel.
10. Diverse skill sets prove more resilient over time. A country that produces in greater variety ultimately produces in greater quality.
And a bonus:
Weekly or monthly planning beats daily planning. Daily planning makes it difficult to adjust to opportunities and takes too much admin time for each unit of work
