Monday’s Impromptu Birds-of-a-Feather Lunch Discussion of Keynote Themes in the Blockchain and Intuition Briefs
The format of today’s lunch offered us a choice between tables with and without topics for conversation. I like this format and normally would have chosen a table matching one of my interests (i.e. Emerging Techniques). However, this time I decided to choose a random table with no topic and was pleasantly surprised when our discussion appeared to have created our own personalized topic from our observed opening keynote themes within the Jay Liebowitz’s Intuition vs. Analytics and Michael Zargham’s Blockchain & Business Analytics briefs. It turns out that others at my table had gone to some of the same briefs that I had attended, so perhaps there was some subconscious bias in my choice from my recognized of them.
Either way, we discussed how surprising it was to hear Mr. Liebowitz offer numerous publications as evidence the growing organizational movement toward using intuition over analytics in strategy development, implementation and day-to-day decisions. Intuition rests upon scrutinizing failures to generate lessons learned, for which he offered the equation ‘Intuition = Analytics + Insight.” The Blockchain brief provided a high-level technical description of blockchain technology before offering an economic case study to show human in the loop decisions that can be supported with the technology. The lunch table discussed how most tutorials on Blockchain quickly turn to economics to make the abstract concepts more concrete, and that we were hoping that the speaker would have used a different business analytical use case. Both briefs offer contrasting views to the themes in the morning keynote, the former arguing that opposing dynamics may be more influential and the later having a take-away that the technology is the driving force that is bootstrapping use cases. In the end, I am excited about these healthy conference discussions and viewpoints look forward to seeing how these two concepts play out over time. If you have thoughts on these issues, I am certainly interested in hearing them.
