This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Common Errors in Reasoning -- While on the subject of questioning beliefs with "why," it's also worth watching out for errors in reasoning, such as these offered by Flemming Funch...
...Situations in which people assess the frequency of a class or the probability of an event by the ease with which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind.
...When two events can occur separately or together, the conjunction, where they overlap, cannot be more likely than the likelihood of either of the two individual events. However, people forget this and ascribe a higher likelihood to combination events, erroneously associating quantity of events with quantity of probability.
...According to the ‘framing effect’ peoples’ understanding of a problem is profoundly influenced by how the problem is presented.
...People tend to judge the probability of an event by finding a ‘comparable known’ event and assuming that the probabilities will be similar.
...Research has shown that people find it very difficult to decide what information is necessary in order to test the truth of an abstract logical reasoning problem.
That last one brings to mind the underlying basis for communication with the TOC Thinking processes in describing logical systems. The use of the TP, allows for -- actually requires for full application -- scrutiny of our cause-and-effect-based CRT analyses and FRT propositions by soliciting concerns about the logical reasoning they present. These include questions about clarity, entity existence, causality existence, sufficiency of the stated causes to lead to the identified effects, absent predicted effects, and additional causes. In TOC jargon, these are known as the Categories of Legitimate Reservation -- CLRs.
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