Last Friday, we asked you to estimate a confidence interval for ten questions as a test of your decision making ability. Let's see how you did.

If you were honest and thoughtful about your answers, at a 90% confidence interval your estimated intervals should contain the correct answer nine times out of ten. In other words, only a single answer would be outside the high and low estimates you wrote down last Friday.

1. Length of the Nile River (in miles): 4187
2. Diameter of the moon (in miles): 2160
3. Weight of an empty Airbus 380 (in pounds): 606,000
4. Year in which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born: 1756
5. Gestation period of an Asian elephant (in days): 645
6. Air distance from Chicago to Shanghai (in miles): 7,061
7. Year the first spacecraft landed on the moon: 1959
8. Area of US national parks (in square miles): 131,875
9. Year in which Attila the Hun died: 453 AD
10. Average population density of the US (in people/sq mi): 83.6

How did you do? Since your confidence intervals were entirely under your control, getting less than nine answers within your range indicates overconfidence in your abilities. A little humility is a good thing.

P.S. Many factors contribute to bad decisions, including making false assumptions. Most people guess 1969 for question #7 because they equate "moon landing" with "the first manned moon landing" in 1969, but that was not what the question asked. The Soviets (crash) landed Luna 2 on the moon on September 12, 1959.

© 2010 Institute of Management Consultants USA

I wrote a series of white papers that I offer through my website. My intent was to have people who read these papers be sufficiently impressed or intrigued that they retain my services. People are certainly downloading, but no one is buying. What's wrong?

Your strategy is good in principle. Combining a bit of research with a summary of your expertise and ideas about trends or key issues in an industry is a good idea. Clients appreciate the perspective and data, and logic would suggest that if they find the content interesting, they'd want to learn more. However, people buy on emotion rather than logic. Here's a slight variation on your strategy that may make it more effective.

Tip: What if you charged a few dollars for your work? I don't mean charging $100, $50, or even $30. Think about $5 for a 10-page white paper. This taps into the psychology of buying where people perceive greater value for the "second cheapest" and "second most expensive" products. To many, free means limited value and many who download your white papers may never consider them valuable enough to open and read them.

Charging $5 for a report looks like a loss leader (especially if you compare it to a much more expensive research report or trend report you offer on your site). The money is minimal but the emotional commitment to your research or opinion is much higher than it would be if it were free. Your leads are much more qualified, your products are more likely to be read, and you make a few dollars to offset some costs.

© 2010 Institute of Management Consultants USA

Does your consulting practice or your client's organization have learning disabilities?

Just as individuals have disabilities when it comes to perceiving, understanding and applying knowledge, so too do organizations. If we are unable to establish a construct within which to actively seek or passively absorb information around us, it is difficult to acquire new perceptions or develop new habits of behavior. The same applies to processing, applying and benefiting from this new knowledge.

Organizations have the same challenges. If your client's organization, or even your own consulting practice, does not create the conditions for active learning and growth, it will fall behind competitors in being able to deliver constantly improving service and to thrive. There are many constructs for describing how organizations learn but they must be set up to learn, actively learn and structurally apply that knowledge to sustain performance.

Tip: Use a common three-step process to improve your organizational learning. First, investigate the circumstances of your strategy and operations. How well do you understand who you are, where you intend to go, what your capabilities are? Second, evaluate what is working and what is not. Can you identify what activities led to success and failures and why? How is this likely to change over time? Third, institutionalize what you have learned. This is the place where many consultants fail - they understand what happened and why, but do not do anything about it. Especially for your clients, but also for your own business, take specific actions to make sure your failures are not repeated and that the conditions the led to your successes become part of your practice DNA.

© 2010 Institute of Management Consultants USA