Don’t Let Your (Technology) Tools Use You
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it …
Herbert Simon
The History of Cognitive Overload
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, a book by Daniel Levitin, has an interesting section on cognitive overload. Each day we are confronted with hundreds, probably …
The Impoverishment of Attention
“While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish.” *** Focus matters enormously for success in …
Why You Should Stop Reading News
Our obsession with being informed makes it hard to think long-term. We spend hours consuming news because we want to be informed. The problem is, the news doesn’t make us informed – quite …
The Principle of Incomplete Knowledge
“All models are wrong, but some are useful” — George Box *** If you think of the complicated world we live in you quickly realize that we need to sort the inessential from the essential …
Daniel Kahneman and Herbert Simon on Intuition
Why do experts seem to have better intuition than the rest of us when operating within their Circle of Competence? Are they doing something the rest of us are not? Or is there another explanation that …
The Simple Principles of Good Management
Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize laureate and polymath, offered many contributions to the world in fields such as computer science/artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, economics, and management. …
Herbert Simon on the Distinction Between What is Legal and What We Will Tolerate
You’d break the law. In fact most of us would. How can I say this with near certainty? Because if you were put in a position where the ends justified the means, the means would become …
Herbert Simon: On Experts and Intuition
We’re not as adept at seeing reality as we’d like to be. We are pattern matching machines. We see them where they exist and where they don’t exist. We fit what we see to what we …
3 Things Everyone Should Know About the Availability Heuristic
There are 3 things you should know about the availability heuristic: We often misjudge the frequency and magnitude of events that have happened recently. This happens, in part, because of the …
The Inevitable Failure of Organizational Planning
A beautiful excerpt from Herbert Simon’s Strategy and Organizational Evolution: Anticipating the future means detecting, preferably prospectively,novel features in the environment that may …
Herbert Simon: Scientific Research has much in Common with Successful Stock-Market Investment
This is a fascinating expert from “How Managers Express Their Creativity” by Herbert Simon that deals with information flow within grounds and organizations. Simon compares successful …
Choice Under Uncertainty
We use heuristics – rules of thumb – to make judgments. These can lead to certain predictable biases. These can lead to certain predictable biases. For instance, we classify situations …
Solution By Recognition
Herbert Simon describes the difference between experienced decision makers and novices in his autobiography Models of My Life. In so doing, he highlights the value of mental models and collecting a …