Our scientific advances as a species are usually the result of more precise facts and knowledge of more and more things, but we know from our personal experience at home and in our working lives that most of what we deal with is not precise. It is imprecise and fuzzy, made up of shades of grey.

Sometimes this is because we don't have the time or the instruments needed to make precise measurements but there are many things that are impossible to measure precisely (such as thoughts, feelings and opinions) and others (such as forecasts) where we can be precise, but wrong. And often precision doesn't matter for the kind of decisions we need to make.

This talk explores the ideas and concepts designed to help us manage organizations more effectively in the world as it really is - messy, imprecise, uncertain and ambiguous. In other words, how to be roughly right rather than precisely wrong.

The idea of ‘fuzziness’ and concepts needed to handle it has been around for over 50 years and is embedded in the technology that controls household devices we use every day such as cameras, smart cookers and automatic gearboxes. It is clever stuff, but most of us will never need to know how it works in these applications.

This talk will examine the historical and intellectual context of fuzziness. And it will explore the many ways in which fuzzy methods can be applied to help tackle common place business problems of the sort that we encounter every day…in a way that simple enough to be applied using pen and paper or crude spreadsheets, and without the need for any mathematical training.