130,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Despite uncertainty, people are born to act. Faced with environmental aggression and upheaval, inaction is more stressful than action. What choices, strategies or methods need to be implemented so that action is as effective as possible in terms of the objectives to be achieved? We should not delude ourselves about the term "good decision", which does not have much meaning when we act in an uncertain environment and when we know the weakness of forecasts. However, we must know how to act and be capable of taking the most appropriate action. Action in Uncertainty is a real guide to taking effective action when nothing is certain. According to the different types of uncertainty, what are the respective good uses of expertise and intuition? How do we motivate teams and avoid cognitive bias and manipulation? These themes are dealt with in clear and accessible terms to help decision-makers make the right choices in a world that is more uncertain than ever.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 251
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
1 Born to Act
1.1. It’s hard not to act
1.2. What is the result of the action taken?
1.3. To act or not to act
1.4. Synopsis
2 Two Kinds of Actions: Immediate or with Reasoning
2.1. To depend on us or to not depend on us
2.2. Action triggered by recognition
2.3. Human decision-making
2.4. Reasoning before action
2.5. Between recognition and reasoning, learning
2.6. Conclusion
3 Anticipation and Planning
3.1. A more desirable state of the world
3.2. Anticipations
3.3. Individual planning
3.4. Organizational planning
3.5. Conclusion
4 Act Anyway!
4.1. Rationality of the action
4.2. Dying of hunger or dying of thirst?
4.3. Individual obstacles
4.4. Organizational barriers to change and action
4.5. Speed of action, heuristics and probabilities
4.6. Conclusion
5 The Conduct of Action and Leadership
5.1. On the implementation of decisions
5.2. Teaming up
5.3. The leader and leadership
5.4. Conclusion
6 Intuition, Expertise and Decision-making
6.1. Intuition and “natural decision-making”
6.2. Expertise, experts and decision-making
6.3. Expertise, environment and uncertainty
6.4. Conclusion
Conclusion
Index of Proper Names
Index of Terms
Other titles from ISTE in Information Systems, Web and Pervasive Computing
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1 Decision matrix
Table 2.2 The two modes of decision and action
List of Illustrations
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 The Pareto boundary
Guide
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Index of Proper Names
Index of Terms
Other titles from ISTE in Information Systems, Web and Pervasive Computing
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Pages
iii
iv
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
147
148
149
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
Action in Uncertainty
Expertise, Decision and Crisis Management
Jean-Charles Pomerol
First published 2023 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
27-37 St George’s Road
111 River Street
London SW19 4EU
Hoboken, NJ 07030
UK
USA
www.iste.co.uk
www.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2023The rights of Jean-Charles Pomerol to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023931214
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 978-1-78630-877-1
1Born to Act
We are born to act.
Michel de Montaigne1
1.1. It’s hard not to act
This book is devoted to action: what is action, what are its modalities and virtues, its pitfalls and excesses. As Montaigne said so well: “We are born to act.” And as Pascal says, no less pertinently, in a well-known statement2, we are incapable of remaining quiet: “I have discovered that all the misfortune of men comes from one thing only, which is not knowing how to remain at rest, in a room.” In the developments on entertainment that follow this quote, Pascal develops the idea that human action is the means they have found to forget the misery of their condition. “They [humans] do not know that it is only the hunt, and not the catch, that they seek.”3 It is indeed quite difficult to remain without a project, without hope and without action. Action often imposes itself in the face of the discomfort of a state or situation. As the experiments on rats have shown, not being able to, even if only to flee from an aggression, generates very great stress4. Action is therefore in itself a remedy: “I do not claim any other fruit in acting, than to act, and do not attach to it long suits and proposals, each action is particularly his game: carry if it can!”5 In summary, as Pascal said, the hunt counts more than the catch, many hunters will agree, the action has its own virtue.
What is it that drives us to act? The vertigo that seizes a person alone in their room, confronted with their condition and the inanity of everything? We know, as Stalin said, that in the end, it is death that wins, but before this term, life pushes to action. In fact, the vision of Ecclesiastes can lead to doing nothing. Indeed, why act if everything is equal? But the argument can be turned around: why not act, even if everything is vanity, we might as well be busy! Montaigne’s observation and Pascal’s lament can be better understood in this way: in the end, Man needs to be busy! Like an ant that cannot stop foraging, a bee that flies from flower to flower, a rat or a chimpanzee that scours its territory in search of food, humans are naturally active because they are alive6. In the end, “Work hard and take great pains with this”7; it is better than doing nothing, especially since, as the teachers of the past wrote on the blackboard: “He who does nothing is very close to doing badly” or “Idleness is the mother of all vices!”.
1.2. What is the result of the action taken?
How can we direct our action if we are part of the active? We admit that dissatisfaction guides action, because, if it is necessary to act, what is there to act on if everything is perfect? Indeed, in this case, why bother to change anything? There is therefore the awareness at the beginning of the action of a situation that we would like to see differently in the future8. Let us call the “problem” the difference between the current state of the world and the desired state. The difference between the two states must be reduced. But one of them is virtual, it is in the future and therefore uncertain (the future belongs to nobody!). Consequently, no one can affirm that they know with certainty the way to reach the desired state.
As a result, there are very generally several possible paths and events which will tell us what the result will be depending on the path chosen. But we will never know what would have been the result of a different choice. Indeed, we never follow more than one path. If we could follow all of them in our minds and know the events, it would be easy to choose the path leading to the best result. Unfortunately, this is an absurd hypothesis, because in life, events never go backwards to the starting point and allow for a second go! So, before acting, we must choose one of the paths – this choice is called a decision. The choice is not always conscious, nor personal, but when it is, it represents the decision at the beginning of the action. We will observe that the choice can be unconscious, but that the decision to act, i.e. the first step, is always conscious. If the choice is possible, we consciously choose to engage in one path rather than another. In this spirit, non-decision is also a decision and non-action is also an action.
1.3. To act or not to act
The decision can be defined as the mental process that leads to the initiation of an action, or, as we have just seen, a non-action. The mental process that leads to the triggering of an action is not completely elucidated and will not be treated in this book. We will simply note that after deliberation, or in an instinctive way, at a certain moment, the subject begins to implement their decision. As Hannah Arendt points out9, acting comes from the Greek archein, which originally means “to begin”, “to lead” and finally “to command”, which are in the Greek view that “[...] the qualities of the free man [which] testifies to an experience in which the fact of being free and the capacity to begin something new coincide”10.
This feeling of being free and of being able to “start doing something” is very strong and often the action weighs less on the individual than inaction would do. However, undertaking to “do something” engages the responsibility of the individual more than doing nothing11. This is why, in certain contexts, “doing nothing” prevails. This is often the case in administration or politics: “There is no problem that a non-decision will not eventually solve.”12 The question implicitly raised by the adage of little father Queuille is that of responsibility or rather irresponsibility in certain types of hierarchical organizations. Indeed, in a hierarchy, failure slows down or even prevents progress to the next rank, and since the failure of a decision is more visible and leads to more opprobrium than the consequences of a non-decision, everything is said, there is more risk in acting than in doing nothing. In many situations, especially in administration and politics, the person who has not undertaken anything significant and has spent their time weaving in and out of pitfalls is more likely to see their career follow a peaceful course than the person who has ventured into reform. In these political–administrative contexts, removing barriers to action is a matter of changing the culture by devaluing the status quo, valuing initiatives, publishing and learning from failures that need to be analyzed (for more on this, see Chapter 4, section 4.4).
Action and decision are inseparable, we decide to act or not to act. In the first case, everything starts, the brain and the body move. In fact, the brain is already in motion, since it is the brain that makes the decision. In this book, we will not talk about the biology of decision, i.e. the way neurons transmit and process information, we refer, for example, to the works of Philippe Damier13, Thomas Boraud14 and Mathias Pessiglione15. We will start from the moment when a group of neurons is potentialized on a decision, the other possibilities being inhibited. We will therefore limit ourselves to processing conscious information as perceived by the decision-maker.
1.4. Synopsis
In Chapter 2, we will discuss the different types of decision-making, from “animal decision-making” to human decision-making. In Chapter 3, we will examine what happens before action, anticipation, planning and dreaming. Chapter 4 will be devoted to the decision and especially to action and to what hinders action, either from a personal point of view or in connection with the exercise of responsibilities in organizations. Chapter 5 focuses on the conduct of action and leadership. Chapter 6 is devoted to intuition, expertise and the ecology of decision-making, i.e. the role of the environment in the different ways of deciding.
Notes
1
Montaigne, M. (ed.) (1962). Les Essais, Book 1, Chapter XX. In
Œuvres complètes
. Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, Paris, 87. The complete quote is: “We are born to act:
cum moriar medium solvar et inter opus
. I want us to act and to lengthen the offices of life and that death finds me planting my cabbages, but nonchalant of her and even more of my imperfect garden”; it contains the quotation from Ovid: “When I die, may I in full work leave.”
2
Pascal, B. (ed.) (1954). Les Pensées. In
Œuvres complètes
. Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, Paris, 1139.
3
Pascal, B. (ed.) (1954). Les Pensées. In
Œuvres complètes
. Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, Paris, 1141.
4
See the pioneering work in this field by Henri Laborit and Hans Selye. In particular, Henri Laborit carried out numerous experiments, often renewed since then, which have shown that rats, when subjected to an announced electric discharge and deprived of the opportunity to escape or to fight, stress and somatize. They even undertake completely inappropriate actions before sinking into prostration.
5
Montaigne, M. (ed.) (1962). Les Essais, Book 3, Chapter I. In
Œuvres complètes
. Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, Paris, 769.
6
We are not unaware that a certain number of human beings choose the path of contemplation and that some are afflicted with melancholy, as we used to say in the olden days, but these remain a very small minority and their inaction is only a form, if not of action, at least of choice, therefore a form of decision.
7
La Fontaine, J. (2021). OSR - The Fables of La Fontaine / The Ploughman and his Children.
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (OSR)
[Online]. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRUgau-WaFA
.
8
This is even true for the actions of nihilists, whose dissatisfaction is so great that it sometimes pushes them to extreme actions.
9
Arendt, H. (2006).
Between Past and Future
. Penguin Classics.
10
Ibid.
11
Simon already noted: “We feel greater responsibility for our action than for our inaction”. – Simon, H.A. (1990). Prediction and prescription in system modeling.
Operations Research
, 38(10).
12
Attributed to the “little father” Queuille, Henri of his first name, President of the Council under the French Fourth Republic, known for his immobilism.
13
Damier, P. (2014).
Décider en toute connaissance de soi
. Odile Jacob, Paris.
14
Boraud, T. (2015).
Matière à décision
. CNRS Éditions, Paris.
15
Pessiglione, M. (2021).
Les Vacances de Momo Sapiens : notre cerveau entre raison et déraison
. Odile Jacob, Paris.
2Two Kinds of Actions: Immediate or with Reasoning
Of things, some are in our power, and others not.
Epictetus1
In this chapter, we will first ask ourselves the question of the object of the action and we will then see that there are in fact two ways of acting: the reflexive or encoded action which does not require any prior reasoning, and the reflected decision followed by actions. We will also see that there is an intermediate state in which the choice is exercised without the mobilization of a reasoning.
2.1. To depend on us or to not depend on us
Action depends on us, because it would not make sense to try to act on what we cannot change. This raises the question of what we can change. It is clear that we are not going to change the course of the planets, but what about the climate or the behavior of others? Decision-making specialists therefore distinguish between acts, i.e. what is within the power of the decision-maker2, and everything else, which are called “events”. The latter are the acts of “nature”, a very general term used to designate nature of course, as well as all the possible reactions of animals and other humans. We do not command events! Let us also beware of believing that the reactions of others are under control; this is an illusion that leads to serious misfortune (see section 3.2). In many cases, it is better to consider the actions of others as events.
The decision can be thought of as a game in which the decision-maker plays and nature plays; then, the result is the outcome of these two moves. The result is therefore a function of your action and the events that will follow. Let us take a very simple example. You are getting ready to go out on your bike and you have the choice between taking a waterproof jacket (w) or not taking one (nw). The events are: it is raining or it is not raining. Four cases are possible, which you will find in each of the cells of the (actions x events) matrix in Table 2.1. This matrix is called the decision matrix. In each of the cells is a number that represents your satisfaction, sometimes called your utility, i.e. the result of your action. You prefer not wearing a waterproof jacket and not getting rained on (+2) and you hate forgetting your waterproof jacket and getting soaked (-2); the other cases are intermediate.
Table 2.1Decision matrix
Events
Rain
No rain
Actions
w
-1
+1
nw
-2
+2
We will not go into the mathematical formalism any further, except to point out a very important point for the rest of this chapter, namely that a good decision can lead to a disastrous result if you are unlucky, i.e. if the events are against you. Thus, in our example, if the weather forecast is 95% good, it is a good decision not to take your waterproof jacket (line 2 of the matrix), but if it rains, you get the worst result (-2). It is not the result that allows us to judge the quality of a decision. To go further in the theory, we would have to introduce probabilities to compare decisions between them, which would be beyond the scope of this book3.
With this distinction between actions and events having been made in theory, it remains that in practice, the perception of what we can do is dependent on the subject. The one who dances or who processes to make the rain fall thinks that their action, mediated or not by God or a great manitou, will serve. This is the whole question of magical thinking and rationality. Are we rational only when we have absolute proof that the action we take will change what we want to change, for example, “make it rain”? We will return to this question in Chapter 4.
2.2. Action triggered by recognition
When you lower your head to avoid a ball or snowball that is coming towards you, you react in a fraction of a second and you do not need to think. Just seeing the trajectory of the ball coming towards you triggers the action of putting your head down. It is a reflex action triggered by perception. There are many actions of this type, such as removing your hand from a hot surface, keeping your path on a bicycle, running away from an imminent danger. In all cases, there is recognition of a situation and an immediate reaction, which is why we speak of a “recognition-primed decision”, an expression coined by Gary Klein4. In fact, it would be better to speak of “action triggered by recognition”. What do we recognize? In our examples, of course, a dangerous situation.
What we recognize can be something as simple as the smell of gas, but it can also be a whole set of attributes, such as when we avoid a person showing signs of drunkenness, which cannot be summed up in a single characteristic, but in a set of clues. Whether the recognized situation is simple or complex, the same word is used in decision and artificial intelligence, “pattern” or “decisional pattern”. A decisional pattern is a set of characteristics that, in the brain, evokes something known, hence the term recognition. This evocation of something already experienced, in real life or in our imagination, triggers images and emotions in the brain that will be involved in the decision.
Obviously, this type of decision based on recognition is the way animals decide, if we can speak of decision-making in this case, because, as we have already pointed out, it would be better to speak of action or reaction. From the earthworm that avoids a drop of acid, to the sheep that flees from a shadow on the ground that could be that of a bird of prey, the same process is occurring: stimulus (tactile, auditory, visual, etc.) evoking a known, and therefore recognized, or genetically programmed pattern, and reaction. In all cases, there is no conscious decision, but this type of “decision”, or rather action, has the immense advantage of being very fast, a fraction of a second.
We have already mentioned riding a bicycle and we will move on to the car! It is clear that when you drive, you do not think about most of the maneuvers, such as changing gears, avoiding an obstacle, braking, etc. Fortunately so, because quick reaction is essential! We are thus in the recognition and immediate reaction loop. But you are not born programmed to drive cars, so how is this possible? It turns out that you have learned to drive. It is a question of training, when you learn, you make an effort to register a response in your brain adapted to new situations or new patterns, which are the object of the learning. This learning is conscious; it requires effort and time. By repeating the situations and subsequent actions, neural circuits in your brain will strengthen and automatically trigger when the situation arises again.
So, we go from the conscious decision to the automatic reaction by learning and repetition of this learning, i.e. training.
The same thing happens in sports: a competitive skier skis like they walk. With training, they no longer need to think about the position of their skis. Thus, through training, we can move from a thoughtful decision to an automatic decision. In section 2.3, we will return to the second type of decision-making, reflective or human.
Experience is a lantern that you carry on your back and that only lights up the path you have traveled (Confucius).
Before moving on to human decision-making, it is worth mentioning that recognition-based decision-making is essentially conservative, since it relies on past experiences, on what is conserved in your brain, memories with related emotions. For example, if you had a problem with a dog, you would be afraid of it for a long time. Even if you are confronted with a nice dog, your first reaction will be to be wary of it.
Recognition-based decision-making is extremely problematic when the environment is fast changing or complicated and poorly structured5,6. We see many managers leading their companies to bankruptcy by reproducing the same reactions over and over again, even though the environment has changed completely.
We will now see how specific human decision-making works and we will thus understand why it ensures, compared to the decision based on recognition, a decisive evolutionary advantage in uncertain and/or unstable environments. Let us add that with the future being by nature uncertain, the expansion of homo sapiens has surely been greatly facilitated.
2.3. Human decision-making
Decision making is, in fact, as defining a human trait as language (Damasio et al.)
7
.
To decide is to establish a delicate balance between the power of emotion and the strength of cognition (Berthoz)
8
.
Thinking before acting is a characteristic of the human species, or at least of hominoids. The discoveries of Damasio and of the many researchers who have studied the question since the 1990s show, without any doubt, that the introduction of reasoning into the decision, prior to action, is linked to the development of the cortex.
We even know that it is the prefrontal cortex, medioventral, which specifically intervenes in the decision by integrating the reasoning part with the emotions and the other information coming from the ganglia of the base, in particular from the striatum and the amygdala, the latter managing the emotional memory and, among others, fear.
The reasoning is obviously about the future; it is about anticipating what will happen if we take path a rather than path b. Other parts of the prefrontal cortex are responsible for the development of scenarios that support reasoning of the “what if” analysis type. A scenario is therefore a sequence of imagined actions and possible events. For example, if we move to x (action), we will have to borrow money, but interest rates may rise (event), then we will ask for a raise or change employer (action), but if there is a crisis, we will not find a better paid job (event), etc. We can look at one or more of these scenarios to see what happens if we move to x (action). We can also look at one or more alternative scenarios in which we do not move, or we move without buying. Everyone has experienced scenario thinking dozens of times and is familiar with this process. It is the basis of human anticipation and decision-making. Each scenario evokes emotions in the old9 part of the brain, in particular the amygdala and the insula10. These emotions go back to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex through the connection provided by the fronto-striatal cortex, which plays an essential role in the decision. It is in this ventromedial prefrontal cortex that emotions and reasoning are mixed for the evaluation of scenarios11 by integrating the information coming from the striatum and the basal ganglia, conveyed by the dopaminergic neurons12. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is in charge of evaluation, while the lateral prefrontal cortex plays a role in controlling the coherence of choices in the medium or long term.
What characterizes human decision-making is therefore the ability to develop scenarios and link actions and events together. The ability to manage chains is given to us by the prefrontal cortex and, as human speech also arises from the ability to string together sounds and sentences, it is likely that both functions evolved concomitantly with the development of our cortex13. A scenario is also a story that we tell ourselves and others. When managing a team, the role of storytelling is very important, so much so that one author introduced the notion of “nar-action”14 to insist on this capacity to develop stories to maintain motivation in team management.
Playing the scenario of an action in your head and performing that action in real life are like two sides of the same coin. Studies on mirror neurons15 have shown that the same neurons are activated when you complete an action in your head and when you do it “for real”. Even before EEG studies, or more recently MEG16 and fMRI17 studies, listening to athletes and people who have excelled in difficult contexts teaches us that their actions and difficult sequences were thought out and, even if they did not take place exactly as they did in their heads, they had already been, in part or in fragments, scripted. The general plays out a future battle dozens of times in their head, to win of course, even if the next day, a thousand unforeseen events make them lose. It is exactly the same for the ten thousand-meter runner before a championship and for many other activities. In skiing, Jean-Claude Killy18 said that he had already done his winning run dozens of times in his head, imagining his movements, before actually doing it.
Mirror neurons have also been demonstrated in primates. It has even been observed that the same neurons are activated when a chimpanzee observes a fellow chimpanzee completing an action and when it does it itself. In other words, when you observe the person teaching you a gesture or an action during a learning process, the neurons that are active are the same in the person showing you and in yourself. Moreover, it has been shown that your own motor system is actually involved in observing the gestures of others. It is mobilized so that, if you observe a novice making a movement and at the same time try to evaluate if they will hit their target, your own performance will be degraded, because your motor system has involuntarily imprinted itself on the imperfect gesture of the novice19. Hence, the importance of having good masters in learning! It is the good gesture observed, then tirelessly repeated that will become automatic, making you an expert.
