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Decision Making

back pain back pain advice decisions Apr 21, 2021

What was the last decision you made?

Perhaps it was something benign like whether to make tea or coffee?

Perhaps it was something huge like whether to retire early or to sell your house to become a monk?

We make some great decisions and praise ourselves for them (rightly so), and we also make some howlers. At the very most, we can hope that we have made the best decision at any given time with the information we have available to us at that time.

 

Need some framework?

A useful framework that can help in decision making asks us to look at a problem and classify it as either simple, complicated, complex or chaotic.

A light that won't turn on because the power is off is a simple problem. It also gets called an obvious problem...

complicated problem is a game of chess. You know the rules of what can move where, and when it's your turn, but you don't know what your opponent will do. Known unknowns. 

complex problem involves unknown unknowns. Things you didn't know you didn't know. A general watching over a huge battlefield doesn't really know the full impact of fresh tactics. Changes made to an ecosystem have effects that were most likely not considered beforehand. 

Other systems in life are chaotic. There is no observable cause and effect. Perhaps the system is stable, or perhaps it is worsening. Would you like an example?

 

Back Pain

Back pain, in our eyes as experts who tackle it day in day out, is a chaotic problem. And it's usually a worsening phenomenon at the point it greets us.

What to do?

Act, sense, respond.

Do something! See the results, decide what to do next.

Our motivation in a worsening environment is to first stop the system from worsening. Cold water running over a burn doesn't heal the burn but it prevents it from becoming worse.

And to make things more complicated (yes, I meant that), the same system can have elements of a simple problem, a complicated one and a complex one, all wrapped up within the chaos.

Sounds like fun.

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If you find this interesting, check out the Wikipedia page on the Cynefin framework here

 

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