Framing thinking
In Don’t Think of an Elephant, George Lakoff provides a practical guide to the way that our mental frameworks shape the way we see the world, in turn shaping the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we behave and how we interpret good and bad outcomes in life. These mental frameworks are often ‘invisible’ to us (he calls them the ‘cognitive unconscious’), consisting of structures in our brains which we are not able to access, although we can see their consequences in the way we reason, the decisions we take and our personal values (what we see as ‘common sense’). We also see them in the language we use, as our words are defined relative to these frameworks, and the stimulus of a word, triggers frames which are activated in the brain. Read more »
“All models are wrong, some models are useful.” - George Box
The flaw of averages
Market research reports are generally packed full of average scores and comparisons of means, and not often enough with distributions and extremes. In the real (business) world this is a mistake as, in the words of Sam Savage’s (f)law of averages, ‘plans based on average assumptions are wrong on average’. To put this another way, errors occur in the real world when we replace uncertain numbers by single (or simple) averages. Read more »
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” - Herbert Simon
Do you need more information?
How much can information can the world use? It can certainly create a great deal of information according to a study by Martin Hilbert at the University of Southern California, but the ability to create and even store more and more information is not the same as the ability to understand, synthesise and communicate the information. I believe this is one of the most important issues we face today, both as content producers and as content consumers with increasing competition for our limited attention. Read more »
“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.” - Aaron Levenstein Read more »
Insight or foresight?
We have written previously about the important role of seeing the future in evaluating the value of insights, and about Prometheus as a role model for foresight with a name and values who embodies the best characteristics of market researchers. So should we replace the word insight with foresight? And apart from insight, what more is needed to inspire truly breakthrough ideas and innovations? Read more »
“Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.” - Denis Diderot Read more »
5 questions every innovative researcher needs to ask …. and the one answer they need to give
by Mike Sherman, Neil Gains and Linda Collard Read more »
“When all think alike, no one thinks very much.” - Albert Einstein Read more »
“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog only knows one big thing.” - Archilochus (7th Century BC)
Are you a fox or a hedgehog? Read more »
“In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.” - David Hume
Read more »
