This a draft copy of a book posted for review purposes only.

Our recent scientific advances as a species are the result of more precise facts and knowledge of more and more things. But this precision is both a strength and a weakness because it is based on a monochrome perspective where things are either black and white; true or false.

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 or grey.

Sometimes this is because we don't have the time or the instruments needed to collect data and be more precise, but often precision doesn't matter for the kind of decisions we need to make. But there are many things that are impossible to measure precisely (such as thoughts feelings and opinions) and others, like any forecast of the future, where we can be precise but we know we will be wrong.

We have few tools to help us navigate through this realm of imprecision and fuzziness so we have to fall back on judgement. The good news is that our brains have evolved to handle messy real world data - indeed this is the only form of data we have had for most of our existence. The bad news is that our brains are often fail when we ask it to solve the sort of problems that our Palaeolithic ancestors never had to face - which includes most of what we do at work. We also have no way of surfacing the assumptions behind our judgement in a way that helps us work collabaratively.

This books explains ideas and concepts designed to help us manage better 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 key concept of 'fuzzy sets' 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. These applications demonstrate that this is a set of serious ideas with powerful practical applications. But these devices represent the most sophisticated and complex uses to which these ideas can be put.

This book tackles the other end of this spectrum and shows how fuzzy sets can be used to help tackle common place business problems of the sort that we encounter everyday; simple enough to be applied using pen and paper or crude spreadsheets, and without the need for any mathematical training.

Although the primary audience for this book is practical business people, it will also be of interest to the intellectually curious general reader because is forces us to question the nature of reality that most of us take for granted.

For example, it starts by offering a solution to the Sorites paradox which continues to baffle people, two millennia after it was first stated.

It goes like this:

If 100 stones make a heap when we take away one is it still a heap?

What if we take away another, and another and so on?

Intrigued?

Read on.