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Hindsight Bias

In Nancy Leveson‘s forthcoming book, “Engineering A Safer World“, she provides the following attributes of Hindsight Bias (a.k.a “hindsight is always 20-20“):

So THAT’s why Bulldozer00 is always 100% right!

I find that the text in the blue ellipse is very insightful. If one switches his/her analysis slant from “what they did wrong” to “why it made sense at the time“, one’s emotional reaction will soften toward “those who are responsible for the mess“.

BD00’s attitude toward FUBAR situations, which used to be anger and frustration, has changed to wonder and curiosity.  At some serendipitous point along the line, BD00 finally came to the realization that since borgs exhibit emergent behavior that can’t be traced back to a single source, tis better to laugh than cry.

Organizations often behave worse than any member would – Fred Brooks

  1. Mark's avatar
    Mark
    October 15, 2011 at 4:10 pm

    Interesting way to look at it, and makes sense. Don’t know how many times a certain someone dear to me has used her stunning hindsight abilities to tell me how stupid I have been. I try to tell her why it made sense at the time, what I was thinking (even that I was actually thinking), that it was a mistake, etc.

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