Noise: How to overcome the high, hidden cost of inconsistent decision making (Harvard Business Review, 2016)

Summary

Organisations expect to see consistency in the decisions of their employees, but humans are unreliable. Judgments can vary a great deal from one individual to the next, even when people are in the same role and supposedly following the same guidelines. And irrelevant factors, such as mood and the weather, can change one person’s decisions from occasion to occasion. This chance variability of decisions is called noise, and it is surprisingly costly to companies, which are usually completely unaware of it.