Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition

Avoid inertia. Periodically revisit your processes and ask whether they are serving their purpose. Organizations sometimes adopt routines and structures that become crystallized, impeding positive change. Efforts to reform education in the United States, for example, have been met with resistance from teachers and administrators who prefer the stat

the ideal is to get cost-effective exposure to positive events and to insure against negative events.

Carefully consider the sample size.

These contrasting points of view reveal our first mistake, a tendency to favor the inside view over the outside view.6 An inside view considers a problem by focusing on the specific task and by using information that is close at hand, and makes predictions based on that narrow and unique set of inputs.

In situations with limited information or uncertainty, anchors can strongly influence the outcome. For instance, studies show that the party that makes the first offer can benefit from a strong anchoring effect in ambiguous situations. Developing and recognizing a full range of outcomes is the best protection against the anchoring effect if you are

it’s hard to make good decisions during emotional upheaval, it’s also hard to make good decisions in the absence of emotion.

This leads us to the third common mistake, a tendency to extrapolate inappropriately from past results.

collectives are typically more valuable than experts when the problem is complex and specifiable rules cannot solve it.

As networks harness the wisdom of crowds and computing power grows, the ability of experts to add value in their predictions is steadily declining. I call this the expert squeeze, and