In my view, lecture 9 was one of the best so far this semester.  We began class with a short (10 minute) quiz covering the assigned readings and topics from lecture 7.  The reading for the day was “Performing a Project Pre-Mortem” by Gary Klein (published in the September 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review, pp. 18-19).  On the quiz I asked students to describe a process for conducting a pre-mortem analysis.  Additionally, I asked the students to described the information used by the author to make his case for the use of pre-mortem analysis (ANSWER: scientific findings and anecdotes).  The multiple-choice portion covered such things as cardinality, power sets, cross products, and generalization/specialization.  I think it went well.

The book of the day (which I just ordered just before lecture, actually) was a longer piece by Gary Klein entitled The Power of Intuition: How to Use Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work (2007, ISBN: 978-0385502894).  This book was cited by the pre-mortem article, and without knowing much more about it, I assume that this book covers the idea of “prospective hindsight” in greater depth (for more on “prosepective hindsight,” check out this article if you have access to it).  If not, the book is still a Gary Klein book, which at the very least suggests that it would be a good and worthwhile read.

The only really teaching I did in this lecture centered on one slide where I showed the following equation for risk:

I used this equation as a basis for reviewing how much we already learned about risk, and to talk about the techniques we learned to assess parts of it.  Personally, I was surprised at how much we already covered.  The goal for lecture 9 was to talk more about vulnerability analysis, in particular the use of pre-mortem analysis to understand the weaknesses present in a system that might cause undesirable impacts.  The backdrop the in-class exercise was campus security.  We began by reading a case study on the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings prepared pro bono by my friend Thomas Shreeve of the Intelligence Community Case Methods Program.  This case study was used to create a frame of reference for a pre-mortem analysis centered on the same event occurring at Penn State.  In particular, I asked each group to articulate an appropriate scenario (pairing of outcome and event) and use this as the basis for brainstorming reasons why this scenario occurred at Penn State.  These reasons, if correct, reveal system weaknesses, or rather vulnerabilities, that contribute to the potential for the scenario occurring.

Next time: the axioms of probability (with a slew of in-class exercises)

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