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Abductive Heuristics
Abductive heuristics (AH) are a set of lenses: concepts to keep in mind when looking at a complex system, organization, or situation, and tactics: ways of accomplishing things when confronted with navigating uncertain circumstances beyond anyone's control but in which you have a stake. Skilled navigators, business leaders, and creative executives (should) use heuristics where there's no model, inadequate data, too much data, or where key factors are effectively invisible to the standard way of managing a situation. Experience helps. Our AH toolkit condenses experience and knowledge from studying complex adaptive systems, chaotic human behavior, and more than human ecologies and evolutions.
Abductive methods (1) generate facts of a different order than the facts given, (2) generate hypotheses and propositions on what to do or think that are always "best fit" and never final. The current AH toolkit includes lenses and tactics from: Indeterminacy • Complexity, Resilience / Ecological viability • Abductive tactics • Social capital • Incommensurate values
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Abductive heuristics (AH) are a set of lenses: concepts to keep in mind when looking at a complex system, organization, or situation,
and tactics: ways of accomplishing things when confronted with navigating uncertain circumstances beyond anyone's control but in which you have a stake.

Skilled navigators, business leaders, and creative executives (should) use heuristics where there's no model, inadequate data, too much data, or where key factors are effectively invisible to the standard way of managing a situation.

Experience helps. Our AH toolkit condenses experience and knowledge from studying complex adaptive systems, chaotic human behavior, and more than human ecologies and evolutions.

Abductive methods (1) generate facts of a different order than the facts given, (2) generate hypotheses and propositions on what to do or think that are always "best fit" and never final. The current AH toolkit includes lenses and tactics from:
- Complexity, Resilience / Ecological viability
- Abductive tactics
- Social capital
- Incommensurate values
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Lenses: try keeping in mindTactics: try doingNotes
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Indeterminacy
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What happens exceeds every planPeter Brook.. military exercise...
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Address trends, not just events
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Novelty is essential feature of life
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Design | plan for change
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The past conditions but does not determine future(s).
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Try 3-generation back-castingJapan
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Risk becomes indeterminate!
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Navigate rather than manage
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Complexity
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History matters (lock-in)QWERTY, self-driving cars vs train; convergent evoluion of eyes
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No factor is totally exogenous
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All systems are inextricably interdependent
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When factoring, mark dependency
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Indiscernable perturbations can yield macro effects
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Nip combinatorial explosionmake tangible, don't hide friction due to complexity
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More data ⇒ less knowledge
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Co-locate authority + local knowledge + resource + application site
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Try gardening | thermodynamic thinking
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Resilience, Ecological viability
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It’s not (just) about you. It’s not (just) about humans
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Ecosystems endure as individuals come and go AND Individuals are unique
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Shift from magic bullets to system redress
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Shift from event-response to system redress
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Prepare (budget for) understudies
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Consider relation | field effects
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Allow | Create more than one way to do X
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Abductive tactics
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All models are wrong; some are useful
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Recognize framing assumptions
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Be open to reframe
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Planning is more useful than plans
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Hold intentions lightly
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Navigate rather than manage
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(Re)Build metrics as you go
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(Re)Build knobs as you go
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Fit metric to X rather than X to metric
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Social Capital
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People = value as well as cost
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Enable multi-generational investments
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Enable multiplicative cross-products given additive investments
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Most values are tacit (hence not quantifiable)
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Anticipate and work with complementary (alien) interests
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Prepare to work with asymmetries in power and knowledge
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Incommensurate values
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Well-intentioned folks can disagree on best action
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Build meta-conversation habits into schools
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Adding facts may not move the needle (hence rational knowledge inadequate; but sophistry is both unethical and ultimately unsustainable)Stengers: different orders of fact, leal, scientific, socila,
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Harness (rather than ignore) asymmetric knowledge and power
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Assume no universal frame, no common language or understanding
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Shift from intersecting to projecting (casting)
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Shift from labeling or classifying to lensing
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Shift from watching fiction | representation to enacting fiction | representation