A columnist (Simon London, Fin. Times, Jan. 11, 2006 at 10) draws from a classic book by Edgar Schein (Process Consultation Revisited, Addison-Wesley 1998) the following six methods to make decisions. I have translated them to law departments and listed them in declining order of frequency: 1. “Decision by formal…
A letter to the editor sent by a British business school professor offered this teasing bit: “Several recent software developments, mostly from philosophy and computing groups, support the use of argument diagramming as one means to develop critical thinking,” in Harvard Bus. Rev., Vol. 84, Feb. 2006 at 160. Argument…
Three points caught my attention in a recent article by Luda Kopeikina, MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 47, No. 2, Winter 2006 at 19. First, she writes: “Effective leaders focus on three components that they can control: the quality of the decision-making process, the quality of data involved in the…
Lawyers, like all humans, are much less rational than they think they are. Blame it on our neural circuitry. Sights and sounds enter the brain at its primitive stem and travel through the limbic system before they reach the more recently-evolved frontal lobes. There we make sense of our world…
My fascination with words overcomes my good judgment, sometimes. (See, for example, my posts of May 20, 2005 on schadenfreud, Oct. 18, 2005 on scheissenbedaurn, Oct. 14, 2005 on “technology,” and Dec. 21, 2005 on spruiking.). In the realms dear to law department managers, what differences are there between the…
When leadership groups of law departments convene to decide something, “there is a tendency to seek confirmation of what everyone already knows.” [Open no windows!] There is also a tendency for people to go along with what they perceive to be the evolving consensus – even though they disagree. [Break…
Prejudice and stereotyping rear ugly heads when people talk about demographic diversity: race, gender, age, national orientation, religion, sexual preference. Diversity measured and promoted that way may completely overlook and even homogenize diversity of how people think. In law departments, how people think makes far more of a difference in…
While the best-known statistics come from large numbers of data points, “normal” distributions (See my post of Oct. 24, 2005 on bell curves.), standard deviations and other tools related to frequency, the branch of statistics known as Bayesian reasoning has application to law departments (Economist, Jan. 7, 2006 at 70).…
A decision tree is a graphical representation of the sequence of decisions that must or might be made and each decision’s associated level of uncertainty. “We will decide to move for summary judgment: yes – 70%; no – 30%. We prevail completely on the motion: yes – 40%; no –…
Research has shown that humans tend to be overoptimistic on the infrequent, huge decisions we make, and overly loss-averse on our smaller, more routine decisions. This finding comes from an intriguing post by Bruce MacEwen, author of the blog — Adam Smith, Esq. — who comments on an article by…