Choosing under uncertainty
Decision methods, consequences and complexity.
Around four hours on choosing under uncertainty: valuing options with cost benefit analysis, the evidence base for decisions, unintended consequences, sensemaking with data and acting safely in the complex domain.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 4 hours
- Where
- Complexity, decisions and innovation
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Managers, policy and programme leads and board members making decisions in public services
Overview
Leaders rarely get to choose with full information. This course is one strand of From data to decisions and opens with valuing options, from Jules Dupuit's cost benefit method to social cost benefit analysis and the 6W customer analysis model. It then examines the evidence base through Deming's standard and the 2020 A Level grading algorithm. Unintended consequences follow, with Robert Merton, Goodhart's and Campbell's laws and a Welsh home care example from Cartrefi Cymru. It closes with sensemaking, drawing on Karl Weick, Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework and Jonathan Rosenhead's trumpet of uncertainty, and with safe-to-fail probes in the NHS vanguard sites.
Aims
The aim is to help leaders weigh options honestly, recognise when a confident answer rests on weak evidence, design measures for learning rather than control, and run small, safe experiments when the answer cannot be known in advance, keeping good options open.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Identify common failures in a cost benefit analysis, including convenient omission, false precision and uncounted distribution.
- Explain why measures change behaviour, and recognise ratchet effects, threshold effects and the fixes that fail pattern.
- Apply Rosenhead's trumpet of uncertainty and Snowden's probe, sense, respond to favour options that keep good choices open.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Describe the steps of a cost benefit analysis and how social cost benefit analysis adapts them for public decisions.
- Apply Deming's four tests of accurate, valid, precise and reliable to a figure you use in your own work.
- Explain why measures change behaviour, using Merton's causes of unintended consequences and Goodhart's and Campbell's laws.
- Distinguish prediction problems from sensemaking problems, and explain how sensemaking differs from the gather, analyse, decide model.
- Explain how Weick's sensemaking reverses the conventional analyse, decide, act sequence, and identify when careful analysis still fits better.
- Explain why best practice and good practice fail in the Complex domain, and distinguish probe, sense, respond from the act, sense, respond needed in chaos.
- Identify common failures in a cost benefit analysis, including convenient omission, false precision and uncounted distribution.
- Distinguish the major types of data and identify which calculations, such as averaging, each can honestly support.
Built from 3 parts.
4 hours of learning.
- 01Weighing the optionsCost benefit analysis and data for decisionsBitesize · Solving Complex Problems and Decision Making2 modules
- 02Consequences and uncertaintyUnintended consequences and sensemaking with dataBitesize · Understanding Data and Data Analysis2 modules
- 03Probe, sense, respondSensemaking in complex systems with CynefinBitesize · VUCA, Uncertainty and Complexity2 modules