Think Like a Military Commander: The Red Team First published on realreturns.blog “One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis, is draw up a list of thing that would never occur to him” – Thomas Selway The commander had a serious problem. It was October 2010…

How to build an awesome presence on LinkedIn First published on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/so-you-want-do-linkedin-better-dan-mikulskis “I really want to start doing more on Linkedin these days …. but …” If you have said, or thought this at any point, then this article is for you, I’m going to get you started with…

First published on realreturns.blog 1. Disagreeing well: it’s easy to disagree badly (and agree badly), and we all know the truism that different viewpoints is good, but harnessing dissenting views in practice is so much harder than you think 2. Managing meetings effectively: many companies would baulk at an expense…

The evidence is undeniable. We all have brains that are set-up to make consistently bad choices when it comes to domains that are complex, ambiguous and unpredictable — like investing. We overestimate our own ability, screen out information that conflicts with our pre-conceived views, we fear losses, and anchor to…

December at work. Now I know what you’re thinking: a few nice lunches, plenty of chocolate and perhaps an early drink or two. …

Authors Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie have put together an excellent and readable taxonomy of the “bugs” that can afflict group decision making and cause groups to blunder in their book Wiser. In the first part of this blog I discussed their dissection of the causes of group decision making…

I’m sure you can picture the scene. A group sits down to make a critically important decision. Much discussion follows. One person after another lays out their views, lots of points are made. There are some clear areas of agreement. Nods all round. The answer starts to become clear. With…

Could it be that human attention is the most scarce resource of our time? We are surrounded by distraction, inside and outside of work. But for today’s knowledge workers that can be particularly damaging to productivity. In this short blog I review some of the most interesting thoughts I’ve read…

How to get past “I am right you are wrong” So this is about strategies and tactics to understand and get past I am right you are wrong type situations and get to better outcomes. Specifically I am going to address this through three vignettes. But before we start I’d…