Research
Abductive Heuristics
Abductive Heuristics
In environments characterized by high uncertainty, incomplete data, or excessive complexity, traditional analytical approaches often fall short.
Abductive Heuristics (AH): These are concepts to keep in mind when looking at a complex system, organization, or situation. Skilled navigators, business leaders, and creative executives (should) use heuristics where there’s no model, inadequate data, too much data, or where key factors are effectively invisible to the standard way of managing a situation. Experience helps. The AH toolkit condenses experience and knowledge from studying complex adaptive systems, chaotic human behavior, and more than human ecologies and evolutions.
Abductive Tactics (AT): These are ways of accomplishing things when confronted with navigating uncertain circumstances beyond anyone’s control but in which you have a stake. AT generate:
- Facts of a different order than the facts given
- Hypotheses and propositions on what to do or think that are always “best fit” and never final
The current toolkit includes AH and AT from the following thematic sources:
- Indeterminacy
- Complexity
- Resilience / Ecological viability
- Social capital
- Incommensurate values
The list of abductive heuristics should be continually refined, and never freeze, given continually developing ontology.
Lead Researcher
Travis Kupp
References
- David Morris, “Bergsonian Intuition, Husserlian Variation, Peirceian Abduction: Toward a Relation between Method, Sense, and Nature.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 43 (2005): 267-98.
- David Morris, Merleau-Ponty’s Developmental Ontology. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2018.
- Sander van der Leeuw and Gary Dirks, “Illusion of Control,” Global Perspectives 5.1 (2024).
Related
Abductive Heuristics Digital Garden