A colleague has not replied to an email sent on Tuesday. By Thursday you are not thinking about an absent reply. You are thinking about whether they are avoiding the question, whether the answer is going to be no, whether the last conversation went worse than you realised. None of that is in the situation. All of it is in your account of the situation, and the account is what you will act on.
This level is the split between the two. It is the least impressive thing in the course and the one that changes the most, because every later discipline runs on it. You cannot grade evidence you have not separated from inference. You cannot ask the question that surfaces a missing fact if you do not know which of your facts are missing. You cannot state a confidence in a claim that is three inferences deep and presenting as an observation.
The level also disposes of something you may have come here for. There is a version of this subject that consists of learning the names of thinking errors, and it does not work: the evidence that it does not work is stronger than the evidence for most of the errors. What replaces it is narrower and duller. Four patterns that survived large-scale replication, watched for at the two or three points in a week where they actually operate, and a written split that takes fifteen minutes.
You leave this level with a split of your live decision, a reconstruction of one past decision using only what was on the record at the time, and a named unknown you can go and resolve.
Level 0 lessons
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You are not responding to what happened. You are responding to your account of it.
Done against a real organisation you choose, not a case study. The gates below are about what these produce.
01
Exercise 0.A - The split on a live situation
Take the live decision you named in The inspectable record and produce a written split: established fact with a source tag on every line, inference, and unknown split into decision-relevant and comfort. Expect about 45 minutes for the first one and fifteen for later ones.
Two things make this fail. The first is a fact column containing verbs of intention, which means the inferences have been written in the wrong place and the exercise has produced a tidier version of what you already believed. Read every line back and delete any word that describes what someone wanted, meant or decided. The second is an unknown column with nothing in it that could be resolved this week, which means the split has produced no action. Rewrite at least one unknown as an observation somebody could make in the next five days, and name who.
02
Exercise 0.B - The reconstructed decision
Choose a decision you took at least six months ago whose outcome you now know. Reconstruct it using only material that existed at the time: emails, documents, notes, calendar entries. Write what was established, what was inferred, and what was unknown, as of the date of the decision. Then write, separately, what you remember believing. Expect about 90 minutes, most of it in the archive.
The exercise produces two findings and the second is the point. The first is the gap between the reconstruction and the memory, which is usually larger than people expect and always in the direction of the outcome. The second is what you did not go looking for at the time, which is more useful than any bias you can now name, because it is specific, it is yours, and it will recur. It fails if you work from memory and consult the record only to confirm, which is the natural order and the wrong one. Open the archive first.
Level 0 gates
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What you should be able to do after this level. Tick each one when it is true. Nobody marks these. Sign in to tick them.
You can take a live situation from your own work and produce, in under fifteen minutes, a written split of established fact, inference and unknown, with a source tag on every fact.
Evidence that shows it: Attach the artefact, or attest with a date if it lives somewhere you cannot upload from.
Not ticked
You can state, for the decision you are currently facing, the single unknown that would most change it, and what you would do differently under each possible answer.
Not ticked
You have found one belief about a colleague, a supplier or a stakeholder that rested on an inference you had stopped noticing was one, and can state the observable event underneath it.
Not ticked
You can rewrite a claim about someone's intention as a claim about their observable behaviour without losing what you actually meant.
Not ticked
You have reconstructed one past decision from the record alone and named the evidence you did not look for at the time.
Evidence that shows it: Attach the artefact, or attest with a date if it lives somewhere you cannot upload from.
Not ticked
You do not use the name of a bias in place of an argument, and can state what your actual reasoning is instead.
