About the developers of these Checklists
This website has been developed by Mark Richardson (content and website programming) and Anna Thorell (visual design).
Mark is a former director of a management training organisation and latterly involved with the management of charities and voluntary organisations.
"While working in charities and voluntary organisations I was very aware of how rarely there is any budget for training staff. And yet staff are often fulfilling significant management roles.
I am also aware from my years as a management trainer that training degrades rapidly if not regularly refreshed. But even in commercial organisations, today there is often little budget for refresher courses.
The idea of developing on-line, and hence easily accessible, management process checklists is an attempt to help solve this problem. It is by no means a replacement for training courses, but hopefully is better than nothing."
A major influence on the content of this website is the book 'Thinking Fast and Slow' by the Nobel Prize winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman.
In this book he demonstrates that human actions are often determined by unconscious behavioural biases which lead us to make quick choices that are easier to make rather than those that require logical reasoning and take more time and effort.
Many of these biases have origins in our evolutionary past when quick decisions were needed to survive as hunter-gatherers. The problem is that a number of them are not so appropriate in today's more complex social environments.
Knowing that theses biases exist is important for all of us so that we can 'counter' them when appraising a situation. The following examples have all been demonstrated by repeatable experiments.
The 'availability heuristic' - The tendency to place greater value on information that comes to your mind quickly. You give greater credence to this information and tend to overestimate the probability and likelihood of similar things happening in the future.
The 'confirmation bias' - The tendency to favour information that conforms to your existing beliefs and discounting evidence that does not conform.
The 'anchoring bias' - The tendency to rely too heavily on the very first piece of information you learn.
The 'actor-observer bias' - The tendency to attribute your own actions to external causes while attributing other people's behaviours to internal causes.
The 'halo effect' - The tendency to allow the overall impression of a person influence how you feel and think about his or her character. This especially applies to physical attractiveness influencing how you rate their other qualities.
The 'self-serving bias' - The tendency to blame external forces when bad things happen and give yourself credit when good things happen.