The UK’s Operational Research Society has published “When spreadsheets go bad” in the October issue of their OR Insight magazine.

This week The Economist published an article (“This spreadsheet is different”, 21 September 2013) apologizing for a earlier article that was based on erroneous analysis. The problem was caused by a spreadsheet model that

…pulled data […] from the wrong place in the spreadsheet, changing the results.

We’ve written about the problems with spreadsheets before. They are opaque, brittle and difficult to test. We’ll continue to see these kinds of embarrassing errors until analysts move to more robust tools.

Confrontation analysis provides a framework for understanding complex interactions. Its formality brings structure to the unstructured.

Over the past week I’ve been using it to think about the Syrian crisis—i.e. the US’ intention to bomb Syria in response to Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons. One thing stands out from this casual analysis—where’s the confrontation?

The US isn’t threatening to bomb. It’s not attempting to exert pressure on Assad so that he complies with some US objective. Instead, it’s effectively stating that it’ll bomb Syria regardless of what Assad does. This doesn’t make much sense. If the US isn’t making a threat, what is it doing by striking Syria? There’s no suggestion that they intend to destroy chemical warfare facilities, so bombing can only be a means to an end. But what end?

Is there an implied confrontation that says that if Assad uses chemical weapons in the future he’ll be bombed and the current proposed action is to make that threat credible? If so, I’m not sure that’s an effective strategy. Assad isn’t threatening to use chemical weapons. So, the US has a trust dilemma with Assad. Bombing your way out of a trust dilemma would require the bombing to be so devastating that it would pretty much put paid to the regime anyway. There are more palatable options available to the US.

This is why the proposal put forward by Russia today makes sense. All chemical weapons facilities will be put under international control or the US will launch its strikes. Simple. There’s the confrontation.

For those who are interested in the subject, Decision Workshops have a more in-depth confrontation analysis of the Syrian crisis on their site.

Here’s a question for you: How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?

Most people have no problem in answering “Two.” Of course, Moses didn’t take any animals into the ark—Noah did.

Your brain is good at filling in gaps in information. Yu cn prbly red ths sntce evn tho it mssng al srts of lttrs. However, sometimes your brain is too good and leads you astray.

In most of our day-to-day activities this “automatic processing” allows us to be much more efficient than if we had to stop and reflect on everything. Of course, sometimes we need to reflect on a problem—possibly because it’s counterintuitive or novel.

Research suggests that complicating things can improve our ability to understand them. The idea is that we are forced to slow down and consciously reason about the information being presented to us. For example, research at the University of Michigan has shown that using a difficult-to-read font makes it more likely that readers will spot the mistake in the Moses Illusion question.

Researchers at Princeton conducted a “real-life” experiment in an Ohio high school. Children given materials in a disfluent font scored higher in classroom assessments than those in a control group.

There seems to an obsession with simplification and clarity these days. Maybe that is contributing to the infantilization of society…dumbing us down. When confronted with difficult, novel problems consider the value of a little obfuscation.

Andrew Tait recently presented confrontation analysis to an audience of Latin American politicians at the “Liderazgo y Gobernanza” (Leadership and Government) conference hosted by George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management in Washington, DC.