All over the place there are people in organisations performing evaluations and comparisons of competing information systems products with a strong belief that they are being rational and objective. Since the late 1990s or so, most Universities seem to be doing this every 5 or so years around learning management systems. The problem is that these processes are never rational or objective because the nature of human beings is such that they never can be (perhaps very rarely – e.g. when I’m doing it 😉 ).

Quoting Dave Snowden

Humans do not make rational, logical decisions based on information input, instead they pattern match with either own experience, or collective experience expressed as stories. It isn’t even a bit fit pattern match, but a first fit pattern match. The human brain is also subject to habituation, things that we do frequently create habitual patterns which both enable rapid decision making, but also entrain behaviour in such a manner that we literally do not see things that fail to match the patterns of our expectations”.

Dave also makes the claim that all the logical process, evaluations, documents and meetings we wrap around our pattern-matching decisions is an act of rationalisation. We need to appear to be rational so we dress it up. He equates the value of this “dressing up” with that of the ancient witch doctor claiming some insight from the spirit world leading him to the answer.

Via a Luke Daley tweet I came across a TED talk by Dan Gilbert that provides some evidence from psychology about why this is true. You can see it below or go to the TED page

As an aside the TED talks provide access to a lot of great presentations and even better they are freely available and can be downloaded. Putting them on my Apple TV is a great way to avoid bad television.