In 2024 I volunteered boatloads of time to help create the INFORMS Analytics Framework. At the end of the process, we had the spec for three certification exams in analytics but still needed to write the questions. Over the next year I helped write many questions for those three exams, including participating in the technical review process where each question is carefully reviewed by a group of experts.

Contributing to the project taught me a lot. One of my key lessons in writing exams was that if you want your question to have a single right answer, you always have to qualify your definition of “best.” We had a lot of lines like “what is the most appropriate approach?” because while it required judgement… the psychometrician (measurement expert) said that was an acceptable way to be vaguely specific.

In daily life we sometimes run into the same challenges. I learned some of the core tenets of a field called descriptive psychology more than a decade ago. The stickiest one for me has been that people do things that make sense (to them). So, if someone disagrees with you, it’s safe to assume they have some different understanding of the world that makes their position perfectly sensible to them.