It appears that overconfidence in Moody’s was one of Desjardins biggest mistake in this matter. The irony here is that Moody’s rate negatively institutions (Desjardins) that are in difficulty because they relied on Moody’s positive rating of certain financial product. It sound like Moody’s rates Moody’s’ negatively.

This graph shows the evolution of George W. Bush’s approval rating over time. His approval rating rose to 68% in March 2003, at the beginning of the Iraq war, and declined steadily after that. It is now at 26%. Not only did the war not proceed the way he had told people but there is a growing number of Americans questioning the idea of going to Iraq in the first place.

How to lead?
First: be right
No matter how good you are at executing and communicating, and how much charisma and resolution you have, if you are wrong, you will fail. Churchill was resolved but he was right. In the hiking story above, the leader was sure of himself but wrong. He overestimated how lost we were.
To be right, you need facts.
In real life, we do not know with certainty the actual situation. In the context of uncertainty (most real life situations), the more certain you are the more likely you will be wrong. Facts are even more important in uncertain situations. Why? What you know and what don’t know are facts. ”I am lost in the forest” is a fact. If the leader in the hiking story would have admitted the true level of uncertainty about how lost we were, he could have proposed a series of tests. For example, he could have propose a short walk in a different direction to gather more facts about the current location. A negative result would then have been seen as new information on where not to go instead.
Second: Communicate facts (reason for change)
It is very difficult to convince people to change something if they are not convinced about what the problems are and their urgency, see John Kotter. Two economists might disagree even if they use the same economic model. By separating fact from opinion, we might understand the input or assumption and understand why those economists disagree. Whenever you make a decision where people must follow your lead, facts are the essence of getting people agreeing on the current situation and the course of action.
In business transformation (change Management), facts are more than data “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” (Sign hanging in Albert Einstein’s office at Princeton), facts are like an observable situation that can be described and shared.

Once facts are gathered and separated from opinion, they can be shared during working sessions. Those sessions permit the group to agree on problems. Consequently, it will be much easier to get the group to agree on a course of action once they have agreed on the problems. During those working sessions, the focus is first on the current situation, not the course of action. Ensure everybody that they are respected and never discard people expressing bad news (don’t shoot the messenger). Often they might be your best source of facts. To ensure the free flow of information, remove red tape, formal presentation and favor a more informal organization with a high degree of respect, see ‘‘The Death to Bureaucracy” from Jack Welch.
Third: gather more facts
Often, you need to collect more facts. Creativity and imagination are required to gather facts. For example, in the above story, a series of short walks in different directions is an approach to gather more facts on the current location. Gathering facts is boiled down to: observation, experiment, calculation and simulation. Fact gathering is not a consensus driven process. You are collecting evidence. Never rely on opinion. Humans are biased and opinions rarely correlate with facts.
In business transformation initiative, the best sources of fact are field studies. The field is rich and wild; people develop very sophisticated tactics in real work environment. Knowledge lies in the field, not in meeting rooms. The worst source of facts is the traditional hierarchy : line manager, director and executive. Facts gathered through this path will surely be altered, trimmed down or hidden.
Fourth: prevent bias
Facts may be distorted. When relying on human sources, multiple independent sources are required. Be careful with surveys or focus groups, they do not gather facts but opinions. They provide the tip of an iceberg. Avoid group meetings. Groups are only good to solve problems, to brainstorm or share information.
Objectivity does not exist; you have to cope with that.
No matter how good the information is, if you are biased, or already convinced of the answer, you are in danger. A bias could, for example, lead one to accept or deny the truth of a claim, discard evidence or look for evidence that confirms a preconceived idea (confirmation bias). In the hiking story, the guy seemed so sure of himself that we trusted him even if the direction he gave did not ring a bell to us.
To reduce bias, observe yourself to see if you feel emotional. You need to detach yourself. It is well known that a lawyer should never defend himself or a medical doctor should never diagnose himself. Ask different persons in a one on one session to interpret facts. Don’t give them your thoughts. Observe the difference in their interpretation. Try to think as fresh as you can. Gather all facts prior to a decision. In order to avoid bias, good investigators will collect evidence and then conclude. After all this work, let the decision emerge naturally. If you still do not feel not comfortable, your instinct will tells you there is something wrong, listen to it. It means there are still uncertainties that you have to work with, or simply wait.
The four steps described here relate to making the right decision and communicating that decision (vision) to a group of people. Once you have the right direction and a group of people agreeing with you on the course of action, executing change is a piece of cake.
Leading people in the right direction requires hard work, time, experience and wisdom. You can get there faster by practicing the right thing. For more on the subject, I suggest reading John Kotter on this subject and “Engineering psychology” by Christopher Wickens.

Sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Almost all users of the classical stove design, as showed in figure 1, activate the wrong burner at one time or another.

Why? It is in the human nature to associate objects that are side by side. As showed in the figure 1, the controls of the back burners are closer to the front burners. We cannot tell witch control activates what. This layout is highly error prone. To ensure we activate the right burners, we need to pay attention and look at the instructions. See also Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things.

Fig.1 Classical Stove Design

Fig 2. New Stove Layout

With the layout presented in figure 2, there is no confusion. Association of control with the burner is now easy because the layout of control is compatible with the layout of the burner.

This example demonstrates design can play an important role in preventing human errors. A design that respects human’s nature and limitations will reduce the likelihood of errors.

Human error in managing human error

After having done hundreds of interviews with managers, we observed when discussing employee’s errors, most managers:

1. Blame employees for lack of attention or for lack of training (practice).
2. Overlook the possibility of preventing errors by a redesign of workstation or processes.

In our highly advanced technological society, we are still at the Stone Ages in term of human errors management

The stove example is the tip of the iceberg. Human errors are everywhere; from day to day errors such as trying to pull a door that should have been pushed to high impact errors such as: being attentive on the wrong signals and crashing a plane killing hundreds of people, having the wrong information and making bad investments, forecasting the wrong economics figures, misjudging intelligence report and brining a nation to war, making the wrong medical diagnosis, underestimating a budget for a project and being insouciant of consequences of our action on the environment.

Most of those errors, boils down to a combination of human errors that are at the cognitive level. They are errors of detection, attention, planning, estimation calculation, judgment, decision, comprehension, discrimination and execution.

Although aircrafts are still crashing, the safety record of the aviation industry is impressive when compared to other industries. At the end of World’s War 2, the aviation industry realized, following the pioneer work of Alphonse Chapanis and Paul M. Fitts, that human errors were caused by subtle inherent human cognitive limitations. The Aviation industry stopped blaming pilots or maintenance personnel for human errors decades ago. They tried to understand the inner cause of human errors.

This demonstrates it is possible to move away from the stone ages in a few decades. Managers need to stop limiting explanation of human errors to the lack of attention, lack of training or poor personnel selection and expand their analysis of to the real nature of human errors.