Epiphany & Apophany

YOW! London 2022

Human beings have an astounding ability to see patterns and apply them in new contexts...but how often do we see patterns that don't truly exist, and what happens when those patterns are misapplied?
In a complex domain it's only in retrospect that we can understand how outcomes emerged, and we don't get much more complex than human systems.

In this session, we look at our confirmation biases and how they might be preventing us from creating change, or enabling us to move forward in uncertainty. When we don't know what's going to work, how can we avoid our tendency towards root cause analysis?
How can we find out what might work if we tried it?
And how can we ensure it's safe to fail?

I'll use some facts about elephants to show what happens when we assume we get it, fixing our beliefs and then our processes in place, and introduce some techniques to help avoid that tendency while enabling us to move forward in uncertainty.