January 16, 2009
Christopher Burns is one of the country's leading minds on modern information management. He has been a news executive and consultant to government and the private sector for thirty years, advising clients on emerging information management technologies and the evolution of the information economy. His previous positions include vice president of the Washington Post Company, senior vice president of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, and executive editor of United Press International.
In this interview with D.J. Grothe, Christopher Burns talks about the biology of the brain, the behavior of groups, and the structure of organizations and how each can lead to people making bad decisions. He discusses the paradox that in the age of information, it may be more difficult to make good decisions. He describes "false knowledge" and how to choose the right information to pay attention to. He emphasizes the value of skepticism in making good decisions, and of trusting ambiguity and uncertainty. He uses the example of the sinking of the Titanic to explain the concept of "information errors." He discusses how groups naturally discourage dissent, and how this harms the information system, citing examples from operating room and airline cockpit. He details ways of organizing that lead to better decision-making. And he talks about the political domain, and how to address challenges to good collective decision-making in a democracy, contrasting the Bush and Obama administrations.
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Comments from the CFI Forums
Christopher Burns had some very interesting examples.
I was fascinated when he told how flight crews and doctors who had learned to use unemotional language saw their the error rates go down dramatically (13m45s).
The other great example was the study on which laboratories were the most innovative: those with a team approach and a more open structure had a lead over hierarchical ones.
So there are applicable lessons that bring real world results.
But I share DJ’s pessimism when I look back at the beginning of the program. Supposedly, people stick with their cultural (and religious/mythological) preconceptions throughout life, and there is little that has the power to free their minds.
This is why I believe that atheists must make more of an effort to influence children and young people to realize that their religious mythology is simply an accident of having been born into this culture rather than another, and that humanist perspectives (derived from negotiating freedom and responsibility) provide superior guidance for human ethics. Let me add that this approach is practiced in Unitarian Universalist churches. (I’m an active member of one, along with many fellow atheists).
But finally also some guarded optimism: there exists now a marvelous set of tools to facilitate discussion, comprehension, decision making. They have not penetrated very deeply yet, but there is hope. Anyone who has had the privilege to attend a meeting facilitated by a professional facilitator can attend to that. Perhaps once public schools start teaching and practicing stuff like that rather than hanging useless, ridiculous ‘motivational’ posters in the hallways we’ll get ahead.
I have a favorite quote that I cannot attribute. “The news is usually very accurate, unless it something I actually know about”. Mr Burns speaks with such authority and conviction that I would believe most of what he says.
Except… Sully was flying an Airbus 319 not a 380. Subtle, I know but a 319 is about the size of a Boeing 737. The 380 is larger than a 747. There have not been “radio operators” or “navigators” on airliners since the 1950’s. The “crew resource management” consisted of talking to the man next to him and notifying the flight attendants to prepare for the crash. He did take control of the aircraft and did a masterful job. The concept of taking input from those around you is a good one, this is just a bad example. This level of misinformation leads me to wonder if Mr. Burns knew anything about the subject. Keep up the good work.
DanR
Airline Pilot, Atheist and Skeptic.
Dan,
I’m glad to hear there are airline pilots - like you, presumably - who won’t resort to praying when things go wrong.
Good catch, though.
Mr. Burns may have valuable and important things to offer in his book, but I have to say I didn’t catch anything new in the interview.
The existence of confirmation bias is not a revelation, nor is the fact that confirmation bias is made more likely and stronger in a group setting.
And like DanR, I’m an airline pilot (I’ve been flying into and out of the NYC airports since 1985), and was taken aback by Mr. Burns’ assertion that the USAirways incident was an excellent example of collaborative effort. While many airline crew action scenarios (studied over and over in CRM type classes) are good examples of team efforts, the USAir situation was the exact opposite.
That incident was an example of time critical decision making and authoritative commands by one person - Capt. Sullenberger - followed by rapid and unquestioning compliance by the crew, and of Sullenberger’s unwavering commitment to the truly scary but only potentially survivable flight path into the Hudson.
The recent innovation of CRM had nothing to do with it - there wasn’t time. This was an example of the old traditional crew plan, which is Captain as General in a true military sense - requiring automatic compliance by the troops in order enhance the probability of everyone’s survival. Airline captains joke sometimes about “the loneliness of command,” and it’s usually a joke for good reason. But this was a true case of that “loneliness” - all those lives were in those few seconds totally and utterly dependent on Sullenberger’s judgment, experience, and skills.
It was a remarkable event for sure - probably the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in the airline biz. (Or at least the most amazing and positive thing - I was in NY on 9/11.) To make a long explanation short, the likelihood of bird strikes sufficient to knock out both engines of a jet just at an altitude where the crew can’t make it to any available runway, but can glide into a straight and very busy waterway during daylight with little wind where there are no slow moving barges, tugs, or other vessels in the way is, I’d guess, about the same as winning a giant lottery two or three times in a row.
But that the flight had amazingly bad luck immediately followed by some really good luck in no way detracts from the absolutely stellar performance of the entire crew, and the ace skills of Capt. Sullenberger.
I would be curious what Burns would say about the over-reaction to the Y2K problem (remember—things would break down because computers couldn’t handle the year moving from 1999 to 2000…..). In this case a lot of work went into mitigating the problem and it was largely a non-issue.
I was disappointed that Mr. Burns didn’t really have any suggestions on how to improve human decision making on a large scale. In this he was like pretty much everyone who writes popular books on logical fallacies or cognitive biases. Yes, in theory, knowing about these thinking errors can help us avoid them, but changing our habits is really hard work, and only a small, small minority of the human population will expend the effort, and even smaller numbers will succeed.
What I’m interested in are methods that can enable you to take large groups of people and reshape their thinking habits. If someone writes on this subject, as Mr. Burns did, and doesn’t have any ideas on that score, then he really doesn’t have anything new to say on the topic.
I would be curious what Burns would say about the over-reaction to the Y2K problem (remember—things would break down because computers couldn’t handle the year moving from 1999 to 2000…..). In this case a lot of work went into mitigating the problem and it was largely a non-issue.
That’s the problem with foresight….if you have it, then you avoid the problems you anticipate. Does that make your anxiety for nothing? Certainly not. A large part of the reason that the Y2K problem wasn’t a problem is that the industry spent millions and millions to ensure that it wasn’t.
So I see that as a case where decision-making went right. The real flaw in thinking occurred years earlier when people used sloppy coding practices to create the problem in the first place.
Given the two pilots who chimed in earlier in the discussion (and given that I’m an Atheist UU) I can’t resist to throw this joke at you:
An airplane was about to crash and the flight attendant asked a UU minister on board to pray. The minister responded, “Let us all join hands for silent meditation.”
I would be curious what Burns would say about the over-reaction to the Y2K problem (remember—things would break down because computers couldn’t handle the year moving from 1999 to 2000…..). In this case a lot of work went into mitigating the problem and it was largely a non-issue.
That’s the problem with foresight….if you have it, then you avoid the problems you anticipate. Does that make your anxiety for nothing? Certainly not. A large part of the reason that the Y2K problem wasn’t a problem is that the industry spent millions and millions to ensure that it wasn’t.
So I see that as a case where decision-making went right. The real flaw in thinking occurred years earlier when people used sloppy coding practices to create the problem in the first place.
I was a server administrator at Lucent Technologies during the 2000 rollover. I actually did almost nothing in the way of “fixing” any y2k issues.. MS had a compliance checker and I would scan our systems with it.. but even that almost never actually flagged anything. None of this was a surprise to me.. even before the “fix” tools existed I simply tested Y2K scariness by forwarding system clocks and watching it rollover. Nothing ever broke. This is not to say that there werent real bugs that got fixed (particularly on firmware-based systems like ATM machines) but the doomsday hype was totally absurd. The only thought more absurd is to think that every single critical computer system was expertly patched and not overlooked thus preventing disaster! Y2K hysteria sits on the media’s shelf next to Africanized Killer bees and SARS. DOOMED! Film at 11.
I agree with the others. Identifying common thinking errors is old hat and very few solutions are offered (perhaps the book contains more such material). I did find the bit about information unwieldiness salient and perhaps the most useful. No doubt at least some spectators on the deck of the Titanic or of Chase Manhattan scratched their heads and said uh, arn’t we basically blind here? Just no one was listening.
I was a server administrator at Lucent Technologies during the 2000 rollover….Nothing ever broke…. doomsday hype was totally absurd.
And I’ve been a software developer since the mid 80’s, and did Cobol in my early years. I warned those I was working with about storing two digit dates, but they laughed it off, saying they wouldn’t be using the same system by the time Y2K rolled around. They were and spent hundreds of thousands to fix the problems.
During the mid to late 90’s, there were thousands and thousands of jobs available to those who could do Cobol and RPG, not to mentioned obscure languages used by such systems as the FAA, which were proprietary. People use dates for the darndest things. I realized that a program that I had written in the early 90’s wasn’t Y2K safe, because although the dates were stored in a Y2K safe format, I used a two digit year as the starting prefix to invoice numbers. They wouldn’t sort correctly after 2000. But those are mainly application systems; most reasonably modern systems don’t store dates as text, but as some offset from an arbitrary time in the past, which is then converted to a recognizable date when displayed.
I’ll repeat what I said: it’s naive to assume that there was no potential for a problem when you use foresight to prevent that problem. That sort of reasoning tends to lead to inaction in the future.
I’ll repeat what I said: it’s naive to assume that there was no potential for a problem when you use foresight to prevent that problem. That sort of reasoning tends to lead to inaction in the future.
Know what else leads to inaction in the future? The media distorting every real or imaginary problem to a “its the end of the world! repent!” level of terror. When the world doesn’t end, no one will be listening the next time the media cries wolf about it. Lots of otherwise reasonable people (I’d include myself) were very hesitant to accept global warming as a danger because of the hippy-era “ice age is upon us!” doomsday climat-apocalypse that never came.
We’re not disagreeing here, really. Complacency is bad and so is needless hyper-terror. I just think the Y2K issue falls closer to the latter.
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