The Power of Personal Experiments

Imagine two aspiring writers, both with the idea of establishing an online writing presence. The first writer, Alex, sets a fixed goal: they aim to grow their newsletter to 1000 subscribers by the end of the month. Alex has heard that consistency is key, so they choose a topic, decide on a format, block time … Read More

The science of decision-making: why smart people do dumb things

Chocolate or vanilla? Trello or Jira? Atom or VS Code? Stay in or go out? Should I click on this link or not? We make thousands of choices everyday, often automatically, using mental models we have created over years of experience. Decision-making is the process we use to identify and choose alternatives, producing a final … Read More

Groupthink: when collective decisions go wrong

Despite the best intentions, a group of people make unwise decisions because of a collective desire to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions. In striving for conformity, there can be a loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. This phenomenon is called “groupthink”. Here is a personal example. When arranging to meet up … Read More

Mindware: A Theory of Learnable Intelligence

For decades, the metaphor that the brain is a machine has caused some confusion. However, even if the metaphor is incorrect from a biological standpoint, viewing the mind as a machine can be useful as a heuristic for everyday decision-making. Created by a cognitive scientist at Harvard University, the concept of “mindware” builds upon the … Read More

The Abilene paradox: When not rocking the boat may sink the boat

Have you ever found yourself in a brainstorming session at work, where everyone ends up agreeing on a less-than-ideal course of action? The Abilene paradox describes this unfortunately common situation where a group of people agree to an idea, despite most of them not fully believing that it is the best decision. Although it may … Read More