Thinking Analytically

A few months ago I mentioned that the bookHow Doctors Think reminded me of an article I had read discussing analytics involved in bird identification and disease diagnosis.  While going through some old files the other day in preparation for an office move, I actually found the original article!  It wasn’t published in a birding or nature magazine.  It wasn’t published in a medical journal.  No, it was published in the August 2002 issue of Harvard Business Review!

The article is a Q&A with birders David Sibley and Julia Yoshida.  Sibley is one of the foremost birding experts in the world.  (I met him a few years ago and own several of his books.)  Yoshida is both a birder and medical doctor.  In the article they discuss the importance of pattern recognition to their respective fields and HBR makes the connections to business.

I found a number of insightful concepts in the article — too many to mention in one post.  Over the next few weeks, I’ll share a few of them.  Here’s a starter:

The ability to grasp complicated phenomena and discern possible trends from seemingly random events can be a source of competitive advantage, allowing managers to capitalize on opportunities before they are apparent to others…To thrive in an information-rich world, executives need to be adept at pattern recognition.  They can learn a lot from expert-birdwatchers.

You can purchase the article at the HBR web-site.

Amazon carries the books mentioned in the article including:

The folks at A Beautiful WWW have created a couple of very interesting visualizations to explain or represent activity on Wikipedia. The first article – Visualizing the ‘Power Struggle’ in Wikipedia – includes a description of the technique. They even have a zoomable and scrollable graphic.  This is a good place to start. The follow-up shows science and technology activity. I find this fascinating. It reminds me of some of the visualizations in Edward Tufte’s books such as is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. (Graphic from www.abeautifuwww.com)