Interactive guide
Show the Reasoning and Let People Overrule It
There are two ways a decision system stops being useful, and they look nothing alike from the outside.
In the first, nobody trusts it. The answers may be good, but they arrive with nothing attached, so every person who receives one has to decide whether to believe it with no basis for deciding. Most people default to ignoring it, quietly, and the system becomes a field nobody reads. In the second, everybody trusts it completely. The answers arrive looking authoritative, so people stop checking. When one is wrong, it is acted on, and the first sign of trouble is the consequence.
Both failures have the same cause. The result arrived without anything a person could inspect, disagree with, or correct. You will build a Decision Explanation and Review Policy. The lab saves your progress in your browser.
Start with a broken answer
Show the Facts Behind the Result
Chapter 1 of 8 · 12 min
The learning path
An explanation has a job, and it is not to make the answer look reasonable. Most of this guide decides what a person has to be shown. The rest decides what happens once they have looked and disagree.
The explanation
- 01Show the Facts Behind the ResultShow what was actually consulted, not a story written after the answer.12 min · exercise
- 02Show Which Rule MatteredName the one rule that decided it, and what would have changed it.12 min · exercise
- 03Separate Facts From InferenceNever let a guess and an observation look the same.12 min · exercise
- 04Communicate Unknowns and ConfidenceMake "not enough to say" visibly different from "no".12 min · exercise
What a person does next
- 05Route Ambiguous Cases for ReviewSend a human only what a human can act on, and size the queue to the people who have to clear it.14 min · exercise
- 06Support Overrides Without Erasing HistoryKeep the recommendation and the decision, so you can find out which was right.14 min · exercise
- 07Protect Human-Owned DecisionsDecide what the system may never write, and make it advisory on purpose.12 min · exercise
- 08Capstone: Review and Resolve Three DecisionsWork a real queue as the reviewer and validate the whole policy.15 min · exercise