News > January 2012

Correlation is not Causation

A very happy new year to all our clients, workshop participants and awards alumni. As we start the new year, many of us will make resolutions to improve and change our behaviours and habits. Rest, time to reflect and being away from work helps to bring some distance and fresh thinking to our work as well as daily routines. 

At this time of year, we tend to receive an increase in emails from those that have made a fresh commitment to complete their awards which is always great.

We also tend to receive more enquiries from people who have decided that this year they will make a real effort to plan and monitor their investments more systematically and who have resolved to apply a more disciplined and rigorous approach to their evaluations. 

I've been reading a marvellous book over the holiday period which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in changing behaviours and practices at work.Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I can do no better than quote the following which I found on the Amazon website. "There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, distils a lifetime of research into an encyclopedic coverage of both the surprising miracles and the equally surprising mistakes of our conscious and unconscious thinking. He achieves an even greater miracle by weaving his insights into an engaging narrative that is compulsively readable from beginning to end. My main problem in doing this review was preventing family members and friends from stealing my copy of the book to read it for themselves...this is one of the greatest and most engaging collections of insights into the human mind I have read (William Easterly Financial Times )"

For my part, it has helped greatly in clarifying so much of what we have been trying to teach over the past few years and I will have no hesitation in including it in our reading list for our Postgraduate Certificate. It has given me hugely increased confidence in our approach plus provided me with a large body of direct references for many of the lessons we try and convey to our clients. To refer to just one: correlation is not causation. Kahneman's analysis of how we jump to conclusions and assign cause without evidence is a joy to read. 

New e-learning resource supports all abdi workshops

abdi is delighted to announce that abdi's new online learning system (using Moodle) will be provided to all those participating in abdi's workshops. 

The online service will be open to all new workshop participants with additional resources, scheduling of work together with the online forum and live discussions. Sandeep Joshi, Product Research and Development Executive at abdi has developed the new online learning system and will provide support to all users. 

The online learning system will be an integrated part of our new Postgraduate Certificate in Impact and Performance Measurement. 

For more details, contact abdi at +44(0)1223 360240

 

Launch of new online learning and community service. First stop: NHS Yorks and the Humber  Community of Practice

abdi is delighted to announce that the first service for abdi's new online learning system (using Moodle) was launched in the first week of December 2011. The first users for this new support service are those NHS managers that have already completed the ROI Evaluator Award and comprise the NHS Y&H ROI network group.

The online service supports a Community of Practice (CoP) with shared experiences, resources, scheduling of work, together with the online forum and live discussions. Support for this new Community of Practice has been provided by Michael Holgate, Lifelong Learning Manager at NHS Yorkshire and the Humber(pictured above). Sandeep Joshi, Product Research and Development Executive at abdi (also pictured above) has designed and developed this new online learning system and will administer support to all users.

Latest videos

 

Click here to access our Youtube Channel for our latest videos