Below are the answers to the decision-making quiz. If you didn’t do well, fear not. I only got one right (Attila the Hun). “Right” is defined as the answer falling between your range. I got #7, the moon landing, wrong for the same reason they state below. Well, humility is a good thing!
*****
If you were honest and thoughtful about your answers, at a 90% confidence interval your estimated intervals should contain the correct answer nine times out of ten. In other words, only a single answer would be outside the high and low estimates you wrote down last Friday.
1. Length of the Nile River (in miles): 4187
2. Diameter of the moon (in miles): 2160
3. Weight of an empty Airbus 380 (in pounds): 606,000
4. Year in which Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born: 1756
5. Gestation period of an Asian elephant (in days): 645
6. Air distance from Chicago to Shanghai (in miles): 7,061
7. Year the first spacecraft landed on the moon: 1959
8. Area of US national parks (in square miles): 131,875
9. Year in which Attila the Hun died: 453 AD
10. Average population density of the US (in people/sq mi): 83.6
How did you do? Since your confidence intervals were entirely under your control, getting less than nine answers within your range indicates overconfidence in your abilities. A little humility is a good thing.
P.S. Many factors contribute to bad decisions, including making false assumptions. Most people guess 1969 for question #7 because they equate “moon landing” with “the first manned moon landing” in 1969, but that was not what the question asked. The Soviets (crash) landed Luna 2 on the moon on September 12, 1959.
________________________________________
Copyright (c) 2010, Institute of Management Consultants USA
Get your own subscription to Tip of the Day by email or by RSS feed Use the Update Profile link below to pick daily or weekly (Friday) delivery.
We encourage comments on Tips and for you to view the Tips archive.
Filed under: Human Resource Management Tagged: | decision-making, human resource management, project management
