Air Miles seem like a great deal. But I'm not sure they really are. The problem is that you have to do a bit of research and some maths to really work out whether they are a good deal or not. Not an example of clear information! With a corporate discount, flying Upper Class London to LA with Virgin gets me 7,836 "Flying Co Miles" for £3,869 (£0.49 per Air Mile). You can't actually get a flight for the miles without paying taxes on that flight. And on some routes, taxes are a large part of the fare, so you don't actually get close to getting a free flight when you spend them - just a discount. Here are the routes I tried: I was looking for a trip to Havana, where my miles that cost £0.49 each were worth just £0.0088 each. Just under a penny.

(follow on to my earlier post on root causes)

Ok. So you have a thing. A thing that is good or bad or indifferent, but that you want to keep an eye on. You want to keep it good, or explain why it is bad, for example. But its complicated -there are a lot of other things that make it the way it is. So you have also put together a root cause tree. So you know all the things that are contributing to making it the way it is. What next?

BRAG it. That is Blue, Red, Amber, Green it.
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As the New York Times says so clearly: "The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of big numbers. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number.

When you are not happy about something there are probably a dozen or more potential causes. Its usually easy to jump to an idea which of these to blame. But do we really know it is the main cause? And have we even thought about the other causes to see how much each of them is to blame?

I had this problem in a big way at work. A project wasn't working. Something big. All sorts of systems and processes and people weren't quite playing together nicely and the collective outcome was bad, bad, bad.
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