Search

In our work and everyday life there is not a day that passes where we do not hear about someone being confused about something, but they carry on. This prompted us to explore the subject and we soon realized that that the notion of confusion merited dedicated effort towards clarification and practical usage. We have initiated several qualitative conversations in the workplace to help our clients exploit confusion as an opportunity. In this paper, we review our understanding of the current conversation about confusion and present a set of tools that we have sketched as supporting ideas to help manage this condition. We describe (1) the findings of convenient sampling based short qualitative interviews with 20 Academics and business people in France and Japan on “what is confusion to you”?; (2) An early list of + ten typical confusions we observe in the business world; (3) A management cycle to help address confusion that we name the TAPE Cycle where we tag confusion, act upon it, build on our initiative to address it and expand on our practice to fully digest it so we can face new confusion situations; (4) An exploratory reason for confusion checklist; (5) A confusion – clarity index; and (6) A confusion matrix assessment tool. At this stage, our combined business and academic backgrounds lead us to believe that these actions carry valuable insights, but we seek to inform the reader that solid research needs to be engaged as this process falls into the category of early theory building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a normative theory of the number of representatives based on a model of a representative democracy. We derive a formula giving the number of representatives as proportional to the square root of total population. Simple tests of the formula on a sample of a 100 countries yield good results. We then discuss the appropriateness of the number of representatives in some countries. It seems that the United States has too few representatives, while France and Italy have too many. The excess number of representatives matters: it is positively correlated with indicators of red tape and barriers to entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]