Thinking, Fast and Slow

Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Wikipedia defines cognitive bias as “systematic pattern of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment”. And the list of biases in the same article is impressive. Humans are quite irrational and our judgement does not always follows rules of logic. The one cannot remove biases and mental shortcuts – it is not possible to override thousands years of human brain evolution. But, the one can detect situations where biases are triggered and stay alerted.

Daniel Kahneman got his Nobel prize back in 2002 for his prospect theory that basically created behavioral economics. The theory also challenged assumption that Humans are economically rational species. Here it is in a nutshell:

  • Faced with a risky choice leading to gains, individuals are risk-averse, preferring solutions that lead to a lower expected utility but with a higher certainty
  • Faced with a risky choice leading to losses, individuals are risk-seeking, preferring solutions that lead to a lower expected utility as long as it has the potential to avoid losses

A book Thinking, Fast and Slow provides detailed explanation how this theory applies to various situation in our daily life and how it impacts our decision making process. (Spoiler: it impacts a lot and we not even aware about it). However, this is just a small part of knowledge that I got from the book.

The book starts with a description of simplified version of a human “thinking” mechanism that consist of two systems that play different roles in cognitive process. It explains how associative machine works, how cognitive ease derails us from original question and makes us to substitute it and etc.

Then the book goes into details of selected biases and heuristics – availability, anchoring, stereotyping, framing and others. There are a lot of mechanisms that allow us jump to conclusions without mental effort and the book gives overview how they work and how small change in a question’s frame can sway an answer to an opposite direction.

The author concentrates a lot on two important topics – overconfidence and choice. I was surprised that there are numerous studies which clearly demonstrate how bad we are in predicting the future and how often experts’ intuition is wrong. The book also gives an explanation how overconfident view, planning fallacy and optimism are important drivers for economy.

Choice, risk assessment, value assignment are parts of prospect theory and covered in the book as well. These chapters helped to understand my own thinking process when it comes to risky decisions and gambling. It also gave an insight why the same outcome may have different psychological effect depending on the context and framing.

The last part of the book is about two selves – experiencing self and remembering self. This part gave me rational explanation why our memories of events are more important than actual experience we had during the events.

After finishing the book I became even more critical to my judgements and intuition. So, I am more prepared now to employ critical thinking when it is necessary. There are several mechanisms that I will keep for my professional life – pre-mortem to fight planning fallacy, outside view and base rate. Read the book and I am sure you will find it useful too.

Overall, 5 out 5. Thinking, Fast and Slow is a perfect book for everybody. I highly recommend it.

Check out my other book reviews!


AWS whitepapers

The Best AWS Whitepapers for Cloud Procurement

Migration to Cloud impacts whole enterprise organization from engineering to marketing. Procurement and financial teams are not an exclusion as well. In fact, these teams need to adopt completely new mental model – shift from CAPEX to OPEX, shortened procurement cycles and high pace of change.

The new way of working between Financial and Engineering parts of organization in Cloud is FinOps or Cloud Financial Management. I am going to write a detailed article about FinOps implementation in large enterprises at some point in time. But even if organization does not plan to implement FinOps practices, they still need to teach procurement and finance how to operate in the new reality.

Disclaimer: This post is on my own and doesn’t necessarily represent Amazon Web Services’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

How you do that?

The challenge is that last 10-15 years of technological innovation did not change procurement process much in large enterprises. So, the gap is significant. In my experience, organizations tend to forget about it or do not realize that it exists. As a result, engineering organization may already adopt Cloud, while for finance team it is still an unknown land and their processes are not aligned with Cloud Economics.

I came up with a list of AWS Whitepapers and other resources that can be used as “Introduction to Cloud Economics for Procurement”.

  1. We start with some chapters from Overview of Amazon Web Services, specifically – “What is Cloud Computing?”, “Six Advantages of Cloud Computing” and “Types of Cloud Computing”
  2. The next step is to get familiar with Core Concepts of AWS and take this 10-minutes virtual training
  3. After that we can move on to procurement specific topics and study Ten Considerations for a Cloud Procurement whitepaper.
  4. AWS Pricing is a next topic in your journey. This is a very long and fundamental whitepaper. Save link to it and use it as a reference for future budgeting and forecasting.
  5. One of the most important instruments for cost planning is AWS Calculator, so spend some time to review how does it work here.
  6. Final step is to become proficient with main instrument of cost visibility – AWS Cost Explorer

Cloud Financial Management is a huge topic at AWS but 5 resources above is an absolute minimum that your procurement team should read and understand.

Check out my other post about AWS Whitepapers.