Numbers you can trust
Complexity, risk, targets and fair data.
A half day on numbers you can trust: sensemaking and safe-to-fail action in complexity, thinking in probabilities, opportunity as well as threat, dashboards, public data, data ethics and four real cases.
- Level
- Explore
- Learning time
- 5 hours
- Where
- Complexity, decisions and innovation
- Price
- £129
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
Board members, senior leaders and performance and data leads in public services
Overview
Public services are judged by their numbers, so leaders need to know when a figure deserves trust. The second half of From data to decisions begins in complex conditions, with Karl Weick's sensemaking, Dave Snowden's probe, sense, respond, the Flash Crash and the NHS vanguard sites. It then turns to probability, through Kahneman and Tversky and Feynman's analysis of the Challenger disaster, and a risk matrix that captures opportunity. Dashboards follow, with Mark Friedman's Results-Based Accountability and the producers of public data in Wales and the UK. The course ends with data culture and algorithmic fairness, and a capstone on Horizon, Mid Staffordshire and the Covid R number.
Aims
This programme aims to help leaders act safely when analysis runs out, challenge probability judgements before they reach a register, give boards dashboards built for decisions rather than display, and ask whether the data and automated systems they rely on treat people fairly.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Design a safe-to-fail experiment that is small, reversible and instrumented, with an exit point agreed in advance.
- Identify availability, small number and anchoring biases in risk discussions, and apply debiasing tools such as reference class forecasting.
- Assess any dashboard for purpose, signal, gaps and gaming, and apply the Data and AI Ethics Framework to automated decisions.
What you'll develop
Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:
- 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 the availability heuristic, the law of small numbers and authority anchoring in live risk discussions.
- Apply a two sided risk matrix that assesses opportunity with the same rigour as threat.
- Design or review a dashboard backward from the decisions it must inform, balancing lag and lead indicators and Friedman's three questions.
- Identify the main producers of public data in Wales and the UK, and use labels such as accredited official statistics to judge how far to trust a figure.
- Describe how organisational culture shapes what data is allowed to say, and identify the features of a healthy data culture.
- Explain how the same data was read differently in the Challenger, Horizon, Mid Staffordshire and Covid-19 cases, and why some readings prevailed.
Built from 8 modules.
5 hours of learning.
- 01Sensemaking in Complex SystemsVUCA, Uncertainty and Complexity39 min
- 02Probe-Sense-Respond: Acting in the Complex DomainVUCA, Uncertainty and Complexity38 min
- 03Risk and Statistics: Thinking in ProbabilitiesStrategic Risk38 min
- 04The Risk-Opportunity Matrix: The Upside of UncertaintyStrategic Risk36 min
- 05Measures, Targets and DashboardsUnderstanding Data and Data Analysis38 min
- 06Public Data in Wales and the UKUnderstanding Data and Data Analysis40 min
- 07Data Culture, Ethics and Algorithmic FairnessUnderstanding Data and Data Analysis39 min
- 08Capstone: Applied Case StudiesUnderstanding Data and Data Analysis42 min