Soft Skills Workshop

The Soft Skills Workshop yesterday in Driftwood was by all accounts a great success.  This is the fifth year the workshop has been held at the INFORMS spring conference.  The workshop included discussion and exercises on six sets of “people” skills: partnering with clients, framing problems, working in teams, interviewing experts, eliciting from groups, and communicating results.  The Guest Lecturer this year was Dr. Patrick Noonan, Associate Professor of Decision Sciences at Emory University Patrick_Noonan@bus.emory.edu.  Dr. Noonan offered a set of best practices for problem framing and reminded the participants that to avoid Type III errors, we need to devote up-front time to getting the question right.  As Albert Einstein said, “A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.”