Thinking Analytically

See the original post here. The post describes an interview with a birder and a doctor. They discuss similarities between pattern recognition in bird identification, medical diagnosis and business. Here’s an insightful quote:

HBR:  Does randomness have a role to play in birding?

Sibley:

Even then these vagrant birds (ones not expected to be in a certain location) tend to show up in places that have a pattern of rare birds turning up.  So they’re probably not random occurrence but a pattern we haven’t worked out yet.

ThinkingAnalytically discussion starters:

• Can you think of a time that an apparent set of random data turned out to be an undiscovered pattern?  What was it?
• How do you avoid claiming a random situation too early?

Use the comments to contribute.

Purchase full the HBR article here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Articles, Birds and Business, Business Intelligence, Lighter Side, Patterns, Probability analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.