Preface

Test Your Judgment

Answers to Judgment Test

Part I: Why Do Good Managers Make Poor Project Decisions?

Chapter 1. Mental Errors in Project Management

  • The Power of Misplaced Perception
  • Why Do We Make Irrational Choices?
  • Mental Errors in Project Management
  • Mental Errors or Intention?
  • Why Is Recognizing and Dealing with Mental Errors so Difficult?

Chapter 2 Analysis vs. Mental Errors

  • Why Don’t People Perform Even a Simple Analysis?
  • Overconfidence
  • Confirmation Bias
  • Optimism Bias
  • Analysis Is Not Trivial
  • What Is the Value of the Analysis?

Chapter 3. Choice Engineering

  • The Processes vs. Mental Errors
  • What Is Choice Engineering?
  • Policing vs. Choice Engineering?
  • When Policing Is Necessary
  • A Few Ideas Behind Choice Engineering

Part II: Travel Inside a Project Manager’s Mind

Chapter 4. Memory and Project Mental Errors

  • Memory Errors in Project Management
  • What Is a Memory?
  • Reconstructive Memory
  • How Memories Are Created
  • How to Improve Your Ability to Memorize
  • Do Memory Exercises Actually Work?
  • Using Choice Engineering to Mitigate Memory Errors

Chapter 5. Emotions in Project Management

  • The Head-buttFelt Around the World
  • Our Emotional Choices often are Not the Best Ones
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • How to Become Emotionally Intelligent: A Choice Engineering Approach

Chapter 6. Behavioral Traps

  • Sunk Cost
  • Time Bombs
  • Prudence Traps
  • Collective Traps

Chapter 7. Heuristics and Biases

  • How Project Managers Became “Gamblers”
  • Availability Heuristic
  • Anchoring
  • Representativeness and Stereotypes
  • Some Other Heuristics and Biases

Chapter 8. What Makes Your Project Team Happy?

  • Why Are We Talking About Happiness in Project Management?
  • Why Did Eliot Spitzer Do It?
  • Why Some People are Happier than Others
  • Habituation
  • Why Time Seems to Pass More Quickly as We Age
  • Managing Exceptions
  • How Happy are You in Your Project Team?

Part III: Project Analysis vs. Mental Errors

Chapter 9. How to Process Project Information

  • My Dentist Has a Very Nice Website
  • All Marketers Are Liars
  • “Time Zone” Trick in Project Management?
  • “Peak-end” Rule in Project Management
  • Filtering Information for Your Project
  • I Did Not Read This Book, But I Know I Do Not Like It
  • Any Suggestions about What to Do?

Chapter 10. An Expected Value Manifesto

  • How to Win a Lottery
  • How Project Managers Ignore Expected Value
  • Incorrect Probability and Incorrect Expected Value
  • How to Choose a Scenario Based on Multiple Conflicting Objectives

Chapter 11. Project Risks and Mental Errors

  • Which Risk Is the Most Dangerous?
  • Are You Afraid of Falling Asteroids?
  • What is Risk Attitude?
  • Why People Have Different Attitudes towards Risk
  • Paradoxes with Estimation of Probabilities
  • Gambler’s Fallacy and Statistical Independence
  • Loss Aversion in Project Management
  • Risks vs. Opportunities

Part IV: Choice Engineering

Chapter 12. The Power of Adaptation

  • Processes Are Always Changing
  • What Is Adaptive Management?
  • How Adaptive Management Works
  • Barriers to the Acceptance of Adaptive Management
  • Tendency to be Consistent
  • Status Quo Bias

Chapter 13. What to Do About Risks

  • Make It Simple
  • Strategies for Dealing with Risks
  • How to Build a Rocket or Risk Ranking
  • Should We Protect Commercial Airplanes Against Surface-to-Air Missile Attacks by Terrorists?
  • Zero-risk Bias
  • Risk Engineering
  • When Quantitative Risk Analysis is Necessary

Chapter 14. Choice Engineering for Organizations

  • Are You Borg?
  • Don’t Be Evil!
  • Disclosure Therapy
  • What to Do to Make Your Team, Your Clients, and Your Boss Happy
  • What to Do to Make Yourself Happy and Spread the Virus of Happiness

Conclusions

Appendixes

Appendix A: 14 Defenses against Project Illusions

Appendix B: Heuristics, Biases, Traps, and Other Psychological Effects in Project Management

Appendix C: Risk and Decision Analysis Software

Appendix D: Professional Associations, Societies, and Groups in the Area of Risk and Decision Analysis

Appendix E: Decision and Risk Analysis Journals

References

Index