Author Archives: jlrodgers

P. 2 To Err Is 90 Percent Human …. We all know the cliché “To err is human.” And this is true enough. When something goes wrong, the cause is overwhelmingly attributed to human error: airplane crashes (70 percent), car … Continue reading →

P. 25 Meaning Matters; Details Don’t Why should we remember faces, but not the names that go with them? Part of the answer is that when it comes to memory, meaning is king. 28 Names, it turns out….don’t mean much, … Continue reading →

P. 64 Hindsight Isn’t Twenty-Twenty …. In fact, one of the most significant sources of human error is hindsight bias Basically, hindsight bias comes down to this: knowing how things turned out profoundly influences the way we perceive and remember … Continue reading →

P. 92 How We Frame Issues ….A great many day-to-day errors come about because we frame, or look at, an issue in the wrong way. 93 Through a series of experiments they [Daniel  kahneman and Amos Tversky] demonstrated that how … Continue reading →

P. 130 How Much of What You Say Is True? The most common alteration was omitting important details, which was reported in 36 percent of the stories. Exaggeration and minimization occurred about equally, appearing in 26 percent and 25 percent … Continue reading →

P. 138 Many studies over the years have shown that men and women perceive and remember aspects of their lives in different ways— often from a very young age—and that the roots of some of our mistakes can be traced … Continue reading →

162 Information Overload What might explain the persistence of such an illusion? Part of the answer lies in the beguiling power of information. The more we read (or see or hear, for that matter), the more we think we know. … Continue reading →

p. 180 One-Trick Ponies Another problem with the bushwhack approach is that people tend to be one-trick ponies. If we learn to do something a certain way, we tend to stick with it. Psychologists refer to this mental brittleness as … Continue reading →

p. 189 The lesson here should be obvious: simplify where you can, and build in constraints to block errors. Looking for Root Causes …mistakes attributed to human error often have deeper roots elsewhere. This is one reason why we so … Continue reading →