The Council of Engineering and Scientific Specialty Boards is an accreditor of accreditation boards, and serves as an aggregator of best practices for developing certification criteria for assessing the competencies of individuals within engineering and scientific. They have identified 4 criteria for such certifications (and implicitly, for competency measures in general):

1. They must be useful to constituents
2. They must differentiate what makes the competency distinct and important
3. They must be relevant to the work which must be performed and the outcomes which must be achieved
4. They must connect with what we experience as individuals

To be affordable and effective, any competency endeavor must therefore be supported with educational offerings that reliably deliver on multiple fronts, providing: Read more »

The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisions.

Since Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we blink and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind's black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they re discovering that this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason and the precise mix depends on the situation. When buying a house, for example, it s best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when we re picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray. The trick is to determine when to use the different parts of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.

Jonah Lehrer arms us with the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research as well as the real-world experiences of a wide range of deciders from airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players.

The term health care reform has diverse meanings for the many stakeholders involved in the US health care system. The underlying issues associated with implementing such reforms are quite complex, but pressures for reform are high. In this context, such reforms are similar in nature to many large improvement initiatives which are pursued within large businesses (though these are each dramatically different in scale).

In 2005 alone, the United States spent more than two trillion dollars on health care, or over $7,100 per person, and are growing at over twice the rate of growth of our overall economy. Government and private insurance fund about 80 percent of those costs, and the rest largely comes directly (rather than indirectly) out of our pockets. About a third of these expenditures occur within hospitals; clinicians get another third, and the rest is spread across nursing homes, prescription drugs, and the costs of administering our insurance system. Read more »

Processes are as difficult to develop as products, and when considering cultural issues, can be even more difficult.  Unfortunately, developing or improving a process often isn't taken as seriously as a product development effort is... and as a result, the quality of the outputs from such process improvements can have very detrimental impacts on users, who have to try to muddle on, and may find themselves having to build products and fix proceses at the same time.

As an example, I've seen cases in which many different released processes prescribe what is supposed to happen for some activity at a macro level, without breaking down or allocating the steps into meaningful roles that individuals can actually perform. Expectations are set when a process is released that it will produce what it promises; when it doesn't, people are faced with two untennable options - fixing the process, or ignoring it, and they often choose the latter. Read more »

In becoming more effective, either as an individual or a business, should one only focus on the business results that are desired, or are the means to those ends equally important? Is it enough to care passionately about goals and be able to clearly articulate their importance and why they matter to customers, or is it equally important to chart an efficient path which will reach those goals, navigate and anticipate risks along the way, and respond effectively to issues as they arise? Which of these two types of criteria - results vs means - is best for our use in evaluating performance? Which is more important as leverage to enable improvements? I'd like to tackle these questions indirectly, by showing how they relate to an important current problem at the national level. Read more »