Thinking in public

Humans produce incomprehensible amounts of data and information all the time. If the amount of data produced in a single day were a film, it’d take two million years to watch. That’s a two-million-year-long video, every day. It’s the length of two trillion Harry Potter books.

To call this a deluge would be an understatement, and that’s before we even consider the quality of this information. How are decision-makers meant to make good decisions when they’re bombarded with information, on top of all the other pressures they face?

My Strategic Insight and Foresight team at the British Red Cross has been supporting decision-making and problem-solving by producing, curating, synthesising, and sharing publicly as much of our work as we can.

We’ve published scenarios and other anticipatory analyses on the Ukraine conflict (more on this in my next post) and the Omicron Covid-19 variant; insight packs about food insecurity and broader economic insecurity, lockdowns, mental health, vaccinations, and vaccine hesitancy; our Resilience Index, mapping risks of disasters and health crises in the UK; and web apps that explore NHS capacity, visualise NHS winter situation reports, map potential vaccine hesitancy, and forecast destitution among people seeking asylum.

But we’ve realised that we need to do more to turn insight into action.

Fraser Battye from the NHS’s Strategy Unit has written that “decision-making is undervalued,” and I think he’s right. We need to embrace the complexity of decision-making and do it in a more conscious and conscientious manner, grappling with uncertainties and planning for longer-term futures. But how?

We don’t have the answers yet. This is a conversation I’m keen to have in public — and I’m keen to share our thinking publicly. Humans only become truly intelligent when we put our minds together. So if you’re also keen to turn insights and knowledge into action and improve how we make decisions, let’s chat.