Decision making

Improve your decision making. Your future depends on it.

Improve your decision making.
Your future depends on it.

Time to read: 6 minutes.

Our choices, at least the ones we bind to our futures like promises, demand a great deal from us; our lives depend on the decisions we make and the outcomes they influence. And yet, even when our lives hang in the balance, we often pay attention to our decisions only at the scene of the outcome, dubiously taking the credit, or much more likely wondering where it all went wrong.

We’re always in the middle of things, or so it seems. No beginnings or ends, no discrete cause and effect, just constantly thrown into middles that surge with information, deadlines, and commitments, all pushing and pulling like a current, pressing us to prioritise, prefer one thing over another, predict and plan. Being in-between requires us to make decisions.

From the moment we wake our attention is hostage to a multitude of clamouring demands and distractions, we direct our thoughts where we believe we require them – often with little success, and so we stutter on our way, tacking between the competing influences of our immediate experience, until exhausted we surrender our thinking to further distractions, and finally sleep and repeat.

If this isn’t our “everyday” experience, it happens frequently enough for us to recognise the quiet desperation that haunts our seemingly futile attempts to orient ourselves, find solid ground under our feet, and take a stand in determining how we will make our own way in the world.

So, are we condemned to live each day in a relentless bewildering confusion of distractions? Or can we hope to learn enough from our daily experience to stage an intervention, and attune our cognitive lives towards the care and attention required to make better decisions?

If we are to believe much of what is written in the self-help literature, we can set about conquering our less than optimal selves by applying more direction via self-discipline, will-power, meditation, mindfulness, greater focus or any number of schemes, naturalistic, pharmacological or scientific. But can we really do anything about our cognitive limitations, and just how limited are we?

Our capacity for information processing, that is, our sensory data of the world that we perceive, already looks to be under significant pressure just trying to make sense of any one thing among many. Our conscious minds have a processing “bandwidth” of around 50 bits per second, our subconscious by comparison weighs in at around 10 million bits per second, that’s about 200,000 times greater than our conscious mind – 50 bits per second is roughly equivalent to the information we process at our normal reading pace¹.

It’s looking pretty bleak for our chances as agents of freewill, our sensory and perceptive information is co-opted by a superior sub-conscious “intelligence”, our worldly experience exploited by an engine of discrimination which denies us direct access and understanding of pretty much everything, and the incompleteness of the information we possess means that there are far more opportunities to get things wrong than right; so can we, or ought we, trust ourselves or anything we think we know?

In the meantime, we‘ll start our fightback using the only weapon we have, we will spend our 50 bits per second re-writing our understanding of experience, the economics of paying for attention, and the making of decisions and mistakes.

Our need to know is a fundamental driving force for the human race, at its most basic a practical understanding of the world, and our place in it, better prepares us for survival. Lived experience is essential in creating the potential for understanding, so clearly just “turning up and clocking on” for another shift at life, can’t possibly generate the insights necessary to move ourselves towards informed choices. To make a claim on the experience of understanding we need to start by directing our attention sufficiently to allow us to reflect on all our experience.

If we choose to take a touristic journey through our life, we look for, and find only what we have come to see as we drift along incurious and blinded by our pre-conceptions. To travel on the other hand makes a call on us that pulls away from the familiar confirmations of what we believe we already know, creating a distance that provokes an openness and better orients us towards the unknown; our attention is compelled, and we see what we see.

In this account we’ve limited our brief enquiry to the transformational gulf between raw data and wisdom; the life altering potential of attending to what we see rather than affirming our pre-conceptions; we’ve hinted at the revelatory power of directing our attention and the art of knowing along with the wealth of potential we have embedded in our lived experience, and there’s much more to come.

Making better decisions is an enlightening and creative practice which places considerable demands and disciplines upon us, however, this effort generates great dividends in a new economy of wisdom that compounds insight, understanding, and action in a virtuous circle.

Perhaps the greatest promise in improving our decision making, is that staking a claim on our future and making a commitment to fully attend to our lived experience is open to us all. There’s no barrier to entry and each of us can gain from insight into the choices in our lives, improving our understanding and judgement, and realising more of our lifelong possibility and potential. Our lives depend on it.

David Noble is the creator of Axios³, a unique programme dedicated to improving decision making.

If you’re interested in any of the themes or concepts introduced in this article, sign up for Generating Insight our newsletter dedicated to decision making. Alternatively, why not participate in the discussion by attending one of the Axios³ workshops.

David is also the author of two books scheduled to be published later this year and next; Worthy of Question – Towards a New Economy of Wisdom; and Our Tribal Selves.

1: The Half Second Delay: https://doi.org/10.1080/14681360500487470

by david

Fortune’s Fools. How better decisions make you un-lucky.

Fortune’s Fools.
How better decisions make you un-lucky.

Time to read: 8 minutes.

Ours is a tale of woe and wisdom, and in the telling I hope you will decide that being “un” lucky may be among the most fortunate of outcomes. We’re all fools of Fortuna, seduced by the goddess of luck, and subject to her whim; but it’s high time we loaded the devotional dice towards wisdom.

In living, we wager our futures in a high stakes game that’s always been beyond our control. Each day we are thrown “all-in” to our individual lives, we strive, plan and prospect for our uncertain futures, all the while knowing that our fortunes are hostage to a range of infinitely complex forces beyond our control or comprehension.

The question isn’t so much why we continue to endure; risking everything day after day in our “winner takes all” game of life, it’s more that we ought to be asking why we are such willing allies of luck and chance, when wisdom always holds a better hand.

How many of us factor “luck” into our planning and decision making, or for that matter even have a view on how luck, for good or ill, fits into our perceptual scheme at all? Luck is a uniquely human imposition on the world, our beliefs, language and history are woven through with our reliance on Chance, Fate and Fortune as a way of coming to terms with the limitations of our predictive and controlling reach.

Our experience of the world has always been empirical, we are compulsive story tellers who craft narratives filled with over-simplified reasoning to bridge “outcome gaps”, impelled to attribute cause to effect, in part at least, because our success in the world hinges on our making sense of it.

Few of us today would rely on a prayer to lady luck to tilt matters in our favour, we’re much more likely to stake a claim to self-determination, in that our actions and decisions drive outcomes, or that we “make” our own luck – whatever that really means.

Luck, or chance, as we conceive it, has always been a great disruptor of human affairs. It remains a pervasive property of life for good or ill, and we continue to try and tame or contain it to this day within another belief system - probability theory. But are we, or can we become, wiser as individuals as a consequence of the new ruling orthodoxy of science?

For the French philosopher Voltaire (see quote above), who made his life’s fortune by winning the state lottery several times, he found that his good-luck was in the small print, unfortunately for the designer of the lottery, his bad-luck rested there also¹. The outcome wasn’t so much a question of chance, but more of Fate, and the resulting fortunes of both men diverged as a consequence.

Voltaire and a mathematician friend used a new science of the day, the “calculus of chance”, to determine that the structure of the lottery allowed for chance to be almost entirely excluded, and in doing so they tipped the scales in favour of expectation – the nemesis of all forms of luck, good and bad.

Almost every judgement, decision and action we undertake is a prediction of a beneficial outcome that we believe has a higher value than the alternatives available to us; and if we are sufficiently convinced of the reasoning behind our predictions, we develop reasonable expectations.

We talk of the “weight of expectation“ for good reason, we perceive it as a measure of the burden we “feel” able to carry, the greater the expectation placed upon us, the more we strain to support it. However, expectation also has value, both within probability theory and to us as individuals, and in decision making we measure value in terms of worth not weight.

How we judge, or weigh, alternatives in making decisions is concerned with comparing values; in evaluating alternative courses of action we develop a range of expectations, outcomes, and commitments to them. Value, or worth, is a tricky topic which I will deal with more fully in another article, but for now, I’d ask that you accept that we construct our expectations in terms of their attributes and usefulness to us in a multitude of ways.

Voltaire had sufficient reason to develop a profoundly strong expectation of being able to repeatedly claim his winnings in the name of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. He secured victory over chance by removing almost all the possible influences of luck, good or bad. His innovation led to his horizon of expectation becoming so all-encompassing that the disruptions of luck could not prevail.

Most of us go through life squeezed between hope and apprehension, a tension that tempts us to see our own case as an exception, and in turn perhaps deserving of the benefits of good fortune. Luck, if it has an operating principle, adheres to one of utter indifference to human affairs, but we persist and “push our luck” in the delusion that fortune will favour us, while in truth, as long as chance holds sway in our decision making, we will forever remain Fortune’s Fools.

There are few of us who could, like Voltaire, lay a claim to “make” our own un-luck, but if we harbour the desire to improve our decision making, and wish to narrow the gap between our expectations and outcomes – the un-luckier we are, the better our decisions will be. We can’t control luck, good or bad, but we can limit the risk of our exposure to it interfering with our plans and determining outcomes.

Even Voltaire, however, couldn’t make his scheme work without others, he made a decision to syndicate his expectation of winning in order to secure his desired outcome. Without the involvement of others too much would have been left to luck, and as a consequence the outcome expectation would have suffered considerably, and his project would likely have collapsed into failure.

Good decision making is a capacity already within us, an evolutionary capability that we all possess, enabling us to survive and more recently thrive, in an infinitely complex world filled with uncertainty. These worldmaking tools and skills require sharpening by familiarity and practice, but when we apply them to their potential, as individuals or in groups, we have the possibility and power to share far more than an expectation of an improved future, we can choose to build it – but first we have to decide.

David Noble is the creator of Axios³, a unique programme dedicated to improving decision making.

If you’re interested in any of the themes or concepts introduced in this article, sign up for Generating Insight our newsletter dedicated to decision making. Alternatively, why not participate in the discussion by attending one of the Axios³ workshops.

David is also the author of two books scheduled to be published later this year and next; Worthy of Question – Towards a New Economy of Wisdom; and Our Tribal Selves.

1: Voltaire Almighty: A life in Pursuit of Freedom, by Roger Pearson

by david

Is it better to be vaguely right, or exactly wrong?

Is it better to be vaguely right, or exactly wrong?

Time to read: 10 minutes.

Loss is central to our lives. Some losses quickly acquire celebrity status, such as death and taxes, others are merely familiar like the ever-present threat of loss through failure. Many more, however, slip through the gaps in our awareness and steal our possibilities, leaving us to suffer the greater hidden loss of our potential futures denied.

In answering our title question, it’s worth considering the fighting forces present at our weigh-in between the contenders. In the “Vaguely” camp we have the Empirical “Come-Back” Kid, who previously lost in a points decision in a mid 17^th century bout, after holding the title unchallenged for millennia. In the blue corner we have N Lightning the undefeated champ’ for “Exactly”, since taking the world title around four hundred years ago, albeit amid allegations of suspicious betting activity.

Rule changes since the famous “Enlightenment” clash, have been controversial, with some claiming they give an unfair advantage to the world title holder, even though a re-match is not likely; ever.

Respectively then, in the red corner Team Vague; survivors of the school of “hard knocks” in our limitless and very physical world of matter, objects, events and contexts, their motto - “Shit Happens”. Opposing, we have Team Exactly, all graduates from the college of concepts, an exclusive long-standing world of scientific problems, theories, objectivity of enquiry, their motto - “P(A/B)”.

Our modern day “Rumble in the Jungle” has similarities to the original Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman fight, in that the third person in the ring was paid by both camps to “keep it fair”¹. And, sad to say, we now arrive at the already stretched limits of our analogy, taking its leave with a reminder that the two combatants, and the referee, require an environment within which to stage the contest – the ring.

Our tournament requires all four elements as active participants, our “referee”, less an enforcer of the rules and more of an interpreter of our own internal world of perceptions, thoughts, context, and our dispositions to act. The ring – the environment that our tussle will take place in, will determine the “boundaries” of the fight, and ultimately bias the outcome by favouring the speed and immediacy of jabbing, or the slow promise of predictive future power.

You will, of course, recognise yourself as Referee; standing in a “situation" between the physical world of objects, and the conceptual world of human generated theory and abstraction. On one hand hard cosmic reality, and on the other an abstract world of ideas concerned with understanding that reality; and action is demanded by the crowd.

Without us, as actor - referee, there can be no interaction between our physical, and abstract conceptual world, we can’t apply and test our theories of how the “real world works” without actions, and as a consequence our acquisition of knowledge would stall.

So, our “title” question will forever remain unresolved without us standing in the ring alongside the heavyweights and making a judgement, which in the domain of a significant decision making event could result in life-changing consequences. Within the limits of our understanding, we must try to reconcile the idealised world of language, symbols and probabilities; to the uncertainties, complexities and imperfections of our comprehension.

It’s frequently tempting to “throw in the towel” in significant decision making deliberations, we’ve all stared into the abyss and felt threatened by an anxious force that presses us to “take a swing at it”, if only to relieve the tension of inaction and create movement, to do something, anything, that might give us some insight into what to do next.

In our darkest moments it is worth reflecting on just how much help we have in the heavy lifting of decision making. Our sub-conscious is firmly in our corner, it interprets the unending blast of sensory data all around us, and from that “noise” constitutes a credible signal to present a consistent version of reality that we can “make sense” of, which is, in itself a feat bordering on the miraculous.

We have to remember to believe only two impossible things (not six) before breakfast: that our shared reality is true enough for us to act within it; and that we can affect a future version of it by our actions in prior moments. To achieve the goals of our actions we create and furnish our perceived world with values, biases, pre-judgements, pre-conceptions and more, in short, we discriminate probabilistically based on our interpretation of prior information and experience.

Our conscious experience is of a world that reveals itself to us as a flickering projection of where our attention is directed in any particular moment, this means that awareness of our situation depends on our discriminating between the minority of information that we attend to, and the majority which we overlook. Given the relative processing power of our sub-conscious, it will be no surprise to learn that there’s a growing body of research suggesting our conscious mind is not in the driving seat much of the time, if at all².

This really matters to our decision making because the meaning we assign to information determines our beliefs, which in turn influences our decisions and subsequent actions. So, if we are misinformed, by design (commission) or perhaps through an oversight (omission) then our decision making will be significantly distorted, leading to substantial errors of judgement and losses.

In living our lives we continually seek our best future prospects, it’s only the time span that alters the scope and range. To achieve our objectives, we must balance our disposition to the world through our actions. Too much reliance on exactitude results in loss by the omission of opportunities that play out in short time frames, conversely, we can also pay a high price for committing to “jabbing” at a decision that requires time and accuracy over speed.

We have no choice but to make mistakes, living requires that we act and action demands error. The lack of our willing acceptance of the finite error filled lives we lead, often blinds us to the incredible potential for future gain that lived experience gifts us, and in turn the many ways that we can influence the type and magnitude of the errors that we make, and limit our losses.

Regarding the lingering question of our “title”, a small wager on a “split decision” would pay out under a closer inspection of the question when held in context. We are, it appears, being unfairly asked to compare two separate conceptions of the qualities of right and wrong. A fast and Vague determination from our physical world of experience; and a slow but Exactly detailed deductive analytical enquiry, and so our only rational answer is “it depends”.

So it appears that the inevitability of loss is central to our lives, as is gain which follows closely in its wake, hidden in the turbulent guise of opportunity, and much of it wasted. Science has illuminated the many ways in which our thinking can be flawed or fooled in certain situations, making us prone to errors that create loss. As it turns out, however, science also demonstrates that we can compensate to a great extent by learning from experience and applying those gains to create an improved future response.

The booing and chanting from the crowd should not deflect the Referee from calling the fight. The reality, as is often the case, is that we are deceived us into believing we have some “skin” in a game being played out before us, while the game we ought to be paying attention to remains just out of view, hidden in a lifelong struggle for the survival of one of our many possible futures.

David Noble is the creator of Axios³, a unique programme dedicated to improving decision making.

If you’re interested in any of the themes or concepts introduced in this article, sign up for Generating Insight our newsletter dedicated to decision making. Alternatively, why not participate in the discussion by attending one of the Axios³ workshops.

David is also the author of two books scheduled to be published later this year and next: Worthy of Question – Towards a New Economy of Wisdom; and Our Tribal Selves.

1: https://www.sportscasting.com/boxing/

2: See our article “Improve your decision making” for further discussion and external reference.

Title attribution: "It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong", Carveth Reath

by david

Direction finding, drawing the line somewhere.

Direction finding, drawing the line somewhere. 

Time to read: 5 minutes.

Master your navigation skills by developing reliance on your decisions rather than your devices. Like all our decision making skills, finding our way requires practice.

Decisions and their outcomes are not created equal, some can be fragile creations requiring a constant guiding and encouraging touch, others brutally binary in “what’s done is done” and we simply await the hammer of success or failure. The reality of course is that decision making events rarely present themselves without a disguise, and frequently come bearing the promise of gifts.

Decision making events appear to have at least two solid points of reference; where we are and where we want to end up. So, we can just fire up our decision making GPS and map our way to the announcement of “your destination is on your right”. We know this is an over-simplification, and we also know that if we navigate this way and by chance locate our desired destination in “decision making land”, it has much more to do with luck than our judgement. Why then do we persist in frequently following the same routes hoping for a better quality of destination?

Ease, that’s why. Another over-simplification perhaps? The truth is we’re all more than a little seduced by ease, we’re biased to choose ease over price and quality, all other things being equal. Even in crucial decision making, we are simple consumers who tend to follow the economics of basic behavioural rules - value and utility amongst other influencing factors, and many of these are often cultural and ecological.

How many of us choose information over instruction? In other words, read a map when we have a GPS available, we must deliberate and choose our route from a map and the information we can glean from it, or we could effortlessly follow the bread-crumb instructions doled out to us “just in time”.

Imagine you’re plotting a route you’ve never travelled previously; you have no prior information regarding the particulars of this journey, just the generalisations from previous travel. Do you painstakingly plan and plot your way to your destination, or do you relieve yourself of the effort by outsourcing your thinking? Deliberation and decisions from information; or a go-to destination from instruction? Unsurprisingly our reflex is to choose instruction almost every time, for the sake of ease.

Destinations, or put another way the outcomes we desire, reasonably demand more from us than ease; we have to work for them in part at least because we’re unable to recognise them without it. Decision making is a fundamental direction finding skill, without decisions our journey cannot start, even choosing not to choose, to just drift with time and tide, is something we choose to do – it’s true.

The first step, a decision to act towards obtaining your chosen outcome is the most important of the journey. You’ve made a choice to reject all other potential outcomes and alternative routes to them, though some decisions will allow you back-track with relative ease, others will ask too high a price for even a single step backwards.

Perhaps a little surprisingly most of us frequently take our commitment to the first step far too lightly in our impatience and eagerness to create movement. We can visualise good decision making and direction finding by thinking of ourselves rowing a small boat, we’re facing backwards towards a familiar point we’ve just left, and are moving towards an unseen and unknowable speculation, our outcome is to our backs and over the horizon.

It would seem reasonable then to pay more attention to what has brought us to our fixed point of departure, we’re setting out from what we believe we know rather than venturing into the unknown. Perhaps we ought to deliberate at least long enough to familiarise ourselves with the tides, currents, and the basic skills and tools for navigation.

Our Axios³ journey starts with a little humility in the face of our reality, caught as we are in-between the ends and means of our decisions, the outcomes we choose and how best to get there. The Direction Finding of our title is a skill that requires practice and a destination, in an outcome that we choose; and having chosen we must find the means to get there.

Axios³ is a decision making programme that generates insight and understanding by applying the cognitive tools and skills we all possess, informing and guiding your actions in securing improved outcomes in your life and business.

If you’re interested in any of the themes or concepts introduced in this article, sign up for Generating Insight our newsletter dedicated to decision making. Alternatively, why not participate in the discussion by attending one of the Axios³ workshops.

David Noble is the creator of Axios³, a unique programme dedicated to improving decision making. He is also the author of two books scheduled to be published later this year and next: Worthy of Question – Towards a New Economy of Wisdom; and Our Tribal Selves.

by david

Expert intuition and our known unknowns.

Expert intuition and our known unknowns.

Time to read: 6 minutes.

Start asking the right questions and improve your decision making, learn how to create new fields of expertise by finding relevance and new sources of value.

Any discussion about intuition should probably start with a definition, as most of us probably have an instinct as to what it means. Anything from American presidents perhaps infamously decision making from their “gut” like George W Bush, to half the population of the planet possessing more of it than the other.

Most would probably be willing to accept that intuition reveals itself to us as a kind of unconscious or unguided intelligence; one we’ve all experienced in our lives from time to time as an uninvited presence that veers from a sense of vague unease, to a fully resolved moment of complete knowing.

Intuition appears to work on the principle that the answers are “out there” and we’re just not asking the right questions, or for that matter asking any questions at all. Intuition performs as our “innovator within”, labouring with us as we stumble from bemusement to comprehension and back again; or answering questions that we didn’t know we were even asking, prompting in turn yet more questioning.

There is a growing body of neurological evidence that supports a view of intuition as an unconscious intelligence, but for the purposes of this article we are mainly interested in how we experience intuition, and if we can utilise what appears to be an innovative cognitive capacity to enhance our situational awareness, and aid our learning and decision making.

Why would we be interested in a concept that may appear at first glance to be more of a contradiction than a unique perspective on how we can make better decisions? In answering we need to look toward thinking, or to be more precise thought, both ordinary and intuitive.

Thought, the garden variety of conscious thought that is, we’ll split in two, effortless and effortful. In turn they represent the passive effortless wanderings of our mind when free from our influence, live-streaming images, sensory data, imaginative flights of fancy et al; and our effortful directed thinking when we set our minds deliberately to a task, goal oriented consciously directed mental activity, instrumental means – ends thinking.

There is, as you would expect, a substantial area of overlap between the two, and cognitive processes that exploit the fuzzy boundary, but for our simplified example we’ll consider effortless thought as automatic or habitual, as it’s quick and concerned with ease more than accuracy, it also governs much of our behaviour. Effortful thinking is concerned with problem solving and analysis, it’s slow, deliberate and requires labour on our part to meet our selected goals.

If we created a sliding scale of thought, with effortless-undirected at one end and effortful-directed at the other, we’d probably (intuitively?) place intuition on the scale alongside effortless. Intuition, however, like our thinking comes in varieties, and can often be a slow “process” that reveals itself only after a deliberate and conscious effort to uncover meaning; or in cycles of ignorance and illumination; or as a supplement to our conscious thinking, etc.

So, it would appear that intuition depending on its particular attributes, comfortably slides along our scale of thought. All of which leads us to ponder on the potential of deliberately seeking to combine intuition, as unconscious thinking, with conscious thought. What could the further benefits be for us to combine this with our unconscious - tacit learning, and conscious – explicit learning?

Intuition is an asset that we acquire through experience, a kind of personal capital that gives unpredictably poor returns for most of us, most of the time. In decision making we constantly tack between what is local and distant to us in a “search” pattern formed around the event or object of our focus, our seeking activity requires us to integrate many interdependent elements, and to optimise our outcomes we need more than our conscious thinking or casual unconscious interventions.

The expert intuition of our title refers to a form of specialised knowing, an attribute that is fundamental to expertise, it is far more than simply transmissible knowledge of possible answers, it’s nearer a form of wisdom in knowing what to ignore and a sense of what are the right questions to ask.

We’re probably familiar with “mastery” requiring ten thousand hours to acquire, and we can immediately tell the difference between novice and expert piano players, in one we hear the notes and the other we feel the music. If we created a similar sliding scale of intuition in decision making, the gap between the two would be measured by the quality of our judgement and the improvements we feel in the outcomes of our decision making.

Axios³ is a decision making programme that generates insight and understanding by applying the cognitive tools and skills we all possess, informing and guiding your actions in securing improved outcomes in your life and business.

If you’re interested in any of the themes or concepts introduced in this article, sign up for Generating Insight our newsletter dedicated to decision making. Alternatively, why not participate in the discussion by attending one of the Axios³ workshops.

David Noble is the creator of Axios³, a unique programme dedicated to improving decision making. He is also the author of two books scheduled to be published later this year and next: Worthy of Question – Towards a New Economy of Wisdom; and Our Tribal Selves.

by david

Insight to innovation and back again.

Insight to innovation and back again.

Time to read: 6 minutes.

From insight to innovation and back again, learn how to generate the insights that inspire and propel us towards discovery and innovation in our lives and businesses.

If you think that finding insight is problematic (see our Expert Intuition article), then you’re going to find generating insight interesting. We proposed in Expert Intuition that insight was a significant force in creating unprompted moments of discovery, or events of extended inventive clarity and understanding.

Innovation is everywhere, from ideas to economics, the sciences to public policy, but it has one over-riding connotation to most of us today, big budget tech’ corporations and the commercialisation of technological innovation. Few of us have a place in that world as anything other than consumers of the technological products of their innovation.

In this article we look towards generation rather than discovery or invention, at how we direct our thinking and seek to cultivate our journey from insight to innovation and back again in two different perspectives, cultural and personal. This is a short and greatly simplified introduction to our premise that innovation and insight are entangled in such a way that each stimulates the gains from the other.

Innovation as a concept was abducted and abused throughout the 20^th century, virtually emptied of meaning by mis-use it has since become a buzzword that has long since ceased to buzz. Somewhat ironically reversing two and half thousand years of meaning, and returning innovation to its roots in classical Greek politics, where innovation was widely distrusted, in some cases prohibited, and where practitioners could be punished for practicing their art.

We’re all serial innovators; on one level it’s how each of us gets through the day, we act to combine and apply our own skills as individuals; or co-operate and combine our skills with those of another. We are by nature biased towards co-operation, our disposition is to combine and include others in our endeavours to progress, and this inclusive form of innovation is among the most valuable of human activities.

Our technologically constrained view of us as innovators has harmed our prospects, we appear to have lost faith in our judgement and now reflexively look to technology to solve our problems, many of which we are better suited to deal with on our own terms. Each of us carries within us a toolkit of sophisticated skills and tools, a cognitive potential that evolved to interpret the world and generate the insights necessary to create new possibilities, or put another way, to innovate.

A by-product of our age of information and technological progress is that it excludes, setting a high barrier to entry at the digital frontier of a promised future, while the vast majority of us will continue to live and work in a world of people, objects and events. We’ve become accustomed to associating acts of insight, invention and innovation with academic intelligence, and along with it a tightly defined definition of innovation as hostage to an economic ideology.

In reality intelligence plays only an occasional cameo appearance, the starring role will always go to decision making at the sharp ends of innovation in the analogue world that we live and operate our businesses in. We need to generate insight, imagination and good judgement far more than academic intelligence.

Don’t believe me, then do a little research, and from Einstein to Jobs you’ll find old school innovators who relied on much more than intelligence to grasp the outcomes they had seen within their possibilities. The common attributes you will find in them are within you too; the capacity to generate insight along with the will to act and innovate, but at the core underpinning it all, is a single determining trait - good decision making.

Axios³ is a decision making programme that generates insight and understanding by applying the cognitive tools and skills we all possess, informing and guiding your actions in securing improved outcomes in your life and business.

If you’re interested in any of the themes or concepts introduced in this article, sign up for Generating Insight our newsletter dedicated to decision making. Alternatively, why not participate in the discussion by attending one of the Axios³ workshops.

David Noble is the creator of Axios³, a unique programme dedicated to improving decision making. He is also the author of two books scheduled to be published later this year and next: Worthy of Question – Towards a New Economy of Wisdom; and Our Tribal Selves.

by david