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The return to the office needs to be accompanied by a radically new outlook from employers and employees so that we avoid falling into the same patterns of behaviour that in the past led to poor decision-making. Nobel prize-winning author and psychologist Professor Daniel Kahneman told the BBC on Radio 4's Start the Week this morning that as workers returned to the office it was essential to improve our evaluation of behaviour and understand the discordance between actions and words. Financial journalist Gillian Tett, meanwhile, explored how using anthropological approaches would improve our reasoning at work in the post-lockdown era. [pullquote]Wherever there is judgement there is noise and more of it than you think” – Prof Kahneman[/pullquote] Kahneman introduced the concept of “noise”, the subject of his latest book, which he describes as the variability in decisions made by people. Investigating to what extent decisions were uniform he studied the work of insurance firms’ underwriters, who when given with the same facts often came to completely different conclusions to those that the company's executives had expected, much to their surprise. To further illustrate this he used a US study of 208 judges who were presented with the same 16 cases. One would have expected, he said, the judges to broadly agree what the sentences should be in the cases. But despite an average of seven years there was wide divergence of more than three years in sentencing decisions. “Wherever there is judgment there is noise and more of it than you think,” he said.Psychology and hybrid working
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