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Date
Here you see a young lady with what dentistry and marketing professionals would tell you is a confident smile. So much in life depends on confidence and likelihood.
And sometimes our lives and perhaps (dare we say this?) the continuation of our species also depends on confidence.
This time, though, it's about confidence in the much more technical sense of the word: confidence levels in data and assertions and conclusions made from that data. It is - as we assert during our courses on communications, presentation skills, and project management, about the promotion from Data to Information, Information to Knowledge, and Knowledge to Wisdom.
We know that not everyone agrees on whether Climate Change is real, or if real, whether or not it is caused by 'little old us' humans. But the international body charged with making those conclusions has recently stated its case. The sometimes-maligned IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has dug in, checked, rechecked, and rechecked the checking of the checking and has made a bunch of conclusions, which we'll summarize at the bottom of the post. However our focus is on the idea of confidence levels.
Here is how the IPCC itself describes confidence and likelihood:
---
Description of confidence
On the basis of a comprehensive reading of the literature and their expert judgement, authors have assigned a confidence level to the major statements in the Technical Summary on the basis of their assessment of current knowledge, as follows:
|
|
Terminology |
Degree of confidence in being correct |
|
|
Very high confidence |
At least 9 out of 10 chance of being correct |
|
|
High confidence |
About 8 out of 10 chance |
|
|
Medium confidence |
About 5 out of 10 chance |
|
|
Low confidence |
About 2 out of 10 chance |
|
|
Very low confidence |
Less than a 1 out of 10 chance |
Description of likelihood
Likelihood refers to a probabilistic assessment of some well-defined outcome having occurred or occurring in the future, and may be based on quantitative analysis or an elicitation of expert views. In the Technical Summary, when authors evaluate the likelihood of certain outcomes, the associated meanings are:
|
|
Virtually certain |
>99% probability of occurrence |
|
|
Very likely |
90 to 99% probability |
|
|
Likely |
66 to 90% probability |
|
|
About as likely as not |
33 to 66% probability |
|
|
Unlikely |
10 to 33% probability |
|
|
Very unlikely |
1 to 10% probability |
|
|
Exceptionally unlikely |
<1% probability
|
---
Once again, regardless of your feelings on Climate Change, or the UN, or this panel, regardless of your politics, there is a lesson here in communciation. As project managers, we asssert that 95% or our work is in the area of communicatons and uncertainty. And of course - the overlap - intersection of both - is in communicating uncertainty, or communicating in an environment of uncertainty. So the way that the IPCC parses out this scale could be handy to you no matter what you think of the conclusions themselves.
Our coaching to you here is two-fold. You might say it is about the medium AND the message. The medium, the careful way in which the IPCC makes its case, is one thing. And the message - the warning that they have for you and I and everyone on the planet, and we would assert, especially us, as change-agent project managers - is that we need to examine what types of changes may be necessary if we are doubly arrogant (see great George Carlin video here). That is, arrogant enough to think that we caused some of the climate issues below, and arrogant (and confident?) enough to think that we just may be able to turn it around or at least slow it up.
Here are just some of the key findings. Note the references to the confidence and likelihood levels they mention above.
The entire summary report is available here.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: October 07, 2013 02:18 PM |
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