Welcome!

Hi, my name’s Lorien Pratt, and I’m Chief Scientist and co-owner of the Quantellia family of companies. I’ve been promoting decision intelligence (DI) and machine learning (ML), in a number of ways over the years, including my 2019book Link,  the DI News page, the DI LinkedIn group, the World Modeler blog , videos on the DI YouTube site, and more. When I started this blog a few years ago, I realized that there are hundreds of DI “nuggets”: experiences, stories, concepts, and the like, which fit better into a blog form.

Since that time, I’ve had more and more interest in my “classic” ML experiences: lots of epic fails, best practices, and lessons learned from over three decades of experience. So those are here as well.

So the original purpose of this site was to be a DI blog landing page, and it’s served that role well.  Over the years, I’ve added some new materials and DI/ML resources, and I’m delighted that a number of guest bloggers have contributed their insights as well.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably already got a notion of why decision intelligence is important to you.

• Maybe you’re a machine learning coder who’s got an instinct that there are lots of ways that your work can be used which go beyond the marketing, advertising, and recommendation engine “usual suspects”.  Or maybe you’re looking for a more structured way to help your clients figure out how ML fits into their business. DI does both of these things.
• Maybe you’re a government policy maker who feels that those Machine Learning people probably have something valuable to contribute, but you need some help structuring your situation into a form that will allow data and evidence to play a part.
• Maybe you’re a visionary, who understands that the great problems of the world remain unsolved because, in part, we are stuck in a way of thinking about them that is fundamentally limited.
• Perhaps you understand that we must shift how we solve complex problems from Broca’s Area: an “alpha software” part of the brain that’s really limited in its computational power compared to visual and motor centers.
• Or you might be an educator, who understands that systems thinking is the most important “literacy” of the 21st century.

My goal is to serve you all, and more, and to help to “connect the dots” both horizontally between domains (such as from education to health, climate, and energy) as well as vertically between modalities: up and down the data stack as well as up from an understanding of the brain, through how we work together, to how to create laws and policies, to how we solve the most intractable problems.

It’s a bit contradictory to be writing, in text, about a new communication and collaboration medium that is so fundamentally different than text. But there’s a method to the madness: my goal is to lead you down a path, from this text mode that is familiar today, across to the interactive, graphical, visual/motor world of interactive decision modeling.

We won’t throw away text along the way, but we’ll increasingly integrate it with an approach that encourages “connected up” thinking. It’s the only way forward. So grab a cup of coffee, and let’s get going!