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A Silent Cause of Bad Business Decisions
- falsedan 10y ago> A leader gets an idea. He finds logical, data-backed > reasons why the idea is the right course of action. The > team scrunch up their faces and ask innocently ‘is this > really the simplest way to address this particular > problem?’. The founder insists, explaining how it will > ‘kill several birds with one stone’. The team nods > their heads in agreement and execute the idea. And the > problem survives. I've seen this so many times, As a "leader", I'm guilty of it too. I make sure to preface my suggestions to the team with, "Now, this is probably another terrible manager-idea, but how about we…".
- almata 10y ago> I make sure to preface my suggestions to the team with, "Now, this is probably another terrible manager-idea, but how about we…". Does this work for you? I mean, do you get more constructive criticism using this? I tend to think in real life we are programmed to agree with our managers most of the time. Have you received more sincere feedback when you start saying this?
- taurath 10y agoJust indicating that you are okay with being incorrect is enough to garner at least SOME contrary opinions.
- falsedan 10y agoYeah, it makes it easier for people to push back, disagree, or propose alternatives. Part of it is that, as a manager, I really shouldn't be making suggestions for engineering approaches, and I try to defuse the feeling of "my boss told me to do this" by explicitly pointing out that I'm usually wrong.
- mamcx 10y agoProbably if is a trend, instead of a single remark here and there..
- caseysoftware 10y agoFrom a manipulative boss, that sounds like "convince me I'm right." I try to flip it around and say "here are my assumptions, what information or understanding am I missing? why is this is a bad idea?" We all miss things due to our own biases, lack of understanding or information, experiences, or even just not being on that email thread. I think my questions have worked because it plays towards people who want to demonstrate how smart or well-informed we are... and we're all there at some point. :)
- vehementi 10y agoI just straight up say, here's a bad naive way to do this. How can we improve on it or do it differently? It's unlikely I've come up with the best solution in the world and the people on my team, who are probably smarter than I am, together will be able to get a lot closer
- taneq 10y agoThe thing is, when the team ask "is this really the simplest way...?" what they're really saying is "we're not convinced, can we talk about this?" They're trying to open a dialogue. Replying with a stock, amorphous phrase like "kill several birds with one stone" is a conversation stopper. It's not about whether the idea is really a good or bad idea. It's that the team feel that the proposed course of action doesn't make sense, or that a better one is apparent, but that the leader ignores their concerns. That's going to destroy morale. If, as the leader, you can't even convince your own team that your idea is good, it's probably not good.
- vehementi 10y agoTo go one step more the team is also acting on their intuition -- they haven't fully used deductive reasoning to come up with their own solution to the problem, it just "smells bad", and now they're coming up with rationalizations (weird that OP calls it strategic reasoning) why it's not a good way.
- beachstartup 10y agoanecdotal evidence: many of the bad decisions we've made have been data-driven. in other words, we should have listened to our guts more. i think the challenge is knowing when to use data, and when to use gut. either way, making decisions is very hard. it's basically predicting the future based on flawed information about the past.
- acbabis 10y ago> many of the bad decisions we've made have been data-driven The author of the article would probably say that people's preconceptions influence their data collection in these cases.
- beachstartup 10y agoyeah, sure. i mean, how meta do you want to get? at some point you have to draw a line between data and feelings. you can't say that data is really just feelings, so everything is feelings.
- afarrell 10y agoYou're still making a couple gut decisions when you use data: - This data was collected in a representative way. - The problem we are addressing is the same as the one this data investigates. The first one assessment is a pretty big one, given the possibility of survivorship bias and the silence of users who are only mildly satisfied/annoyed.
- mamcx 10y agoIs like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan So Sussman began working on a program. Not long after, this odd-looking bald guy came over. Sussman figured the guy was going to boot him out, but instead the man sat down, asking, "Hey, what are you doing?" Sussman talked over his program with the man, Marvin Minsky. At one point in the discussion, Sussman told Minsky that he was using a certain randomizing technique in his program because he didn't want the machine to have any preconceived notions. Minsky said, "Well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they are."
- ScottBurson 10y agoWhen my manager comes up with a bad manager-idea, I ask questions like: () what concrete problem are you trying to solve? () what do you think is the root cause of that problem? () how, specifically, is this idea going to address that cause? () what might be other possible solutions? This doesn't always work right away, but at least it points the conversation in the right direction.
- overcast 10y agoSounds like you're managing your manager.
- yazaddaruvala 10y agoSeriously: Why wouldn't everyone manage their manager?
- wojcech 10y agoWe could make a new word for people who manage each other mutually, coexisteling in their operations without blind hierarchy...we could call it mumanagement
- geophile 10y agoThis is correct. I was at a particularly dumb company in the early 2000s, when outsourcing was all the rage. It was completely wrong for us, as we were still doing R&D. Yet the folks inhabiting Mahogany Row read Fortune and Forbes and listened to consultants who all said that outsourcing was the new hot thing to do. And when I kept asking why, the reason kept changing. First it was cost. Then, when it was clear that it would not be cheaper, it was some bullshit about freeing us up to work on tougher problems. And then it changed again. So of course they did it. And of course it was a disaster.
- geophile 10y agoActually, intuition is actually the cause of pretty much every decision. Think about how people are deciding to vote in the upcoming US presidential election, for example.
- pklausler 10y agoIronically, you just asked us to use intuition in order to support a baseless claim that voters are using only intuition.
- mwfunk 10y agoNo, you intuited that that's what the poster meant. :) It's not like this isn't a well-documented phenomenon. I can't even tell you how many times this or that politician, analyst, blogger, or forum poster has defended some statement by Trump by saying, "he didn't really mean that", seemingly based on nothing more than assuming he must be way more reasonable than his words suggest, while complaining about people taking him too literally. It's become a cliche in this election. Selectively ignoring someone's words based on an assumption that those words don't reflect their beliefs or character or competence is absolutely relying on intuition.
- paulddraper 10y agoSelectively misinterpreting them or removing them from context has similar flaws.
- marmaduke 10y agoI've always thought that choosing good experiences is always important even if passive, because our intuitions are always undergoing tuning and calibration.
- DenisM 10y agoCan you expand on that? I feel like you're onto something, but I don't want to put words in your mouth. So what is the story with calibration?
- marmaduke 10y agoI see intuition as something which integrates over hundreds of experiences, weighted by emotion. Arguably, our intuition adapts to our experience to improve our prediction of outcomes, so that, given some situation, we can quickly understand what's going on, and situate ourselves. For the sake of example, if you binge watch TV series about terrorist situations (e.g. 24), you may be calibrating your intuition in terms of survival, bombs, torture etc. As a result, you may be less inclined to reflect thoughtfully, e.g. on whether to buy food which is organic or not, rather buy bas ed on whether it's produced in a country associated with terrorism or whatever. That could be a totes bulls hit example, but my point and theory is that our intuitions are built from millions of tiny moments where we observe cause-effect, hypothesis-experiment-result etc. The conséquence is that we can strive to improve or cultivate our intuition, by avoiding passive consumption of prepackaged reality like TV and actively interact with real world (however you determine what that is). I suspect there are a number of ways to support this view, from psychological, behavioral and neuroscience literature, but then I'd be guilty of exactly the thought process the posted article seeks to deride. Nevertheless my degree was in these subjects, so I doubt these ideas are original or unfounded.
- lordnacho 10y agoI agree that unsubstantiated intuition can be a reason for bad decisions, but the real culprit here is the idea of the visionary. Because the visionary legend is why we even have the word "strategy". Society, through unhelpful renditions of history (think of any historical movie), lauds people who are "strategic thinkers". Big picture people who had the guts to follow some grand plan. Well, I call shenanigans. We're all told (I went to business school, but don't hold it against me) to be this sort of magical thinker type who comes up with grand schemes. It's unhelpful. The reason is that, amazingly, we can all think up grand schemes. 20 years ago everyone dreamt up a world where all information was available all the time, anywhere. Everyone would have a camera in their pocket. You could work from home. And so on. The people who actually deserve credit are the ones who can actually make one of the big ideas happen. Everyone is already looking for a way to make fusion happen, cure cancer, and so on. We know that we want a world like that, and normally when someone has a vision of the future, it's quite familiar to everyone. As a coder, it's actually easy to see this side of the story. It's the BSers we tend to work with who have a hard time seeing why talk is cheap. I recall building an app with a guy like this where every suggestion was some sort of revelation. I told him to stop masturbating, and he got quite angry at me. But that's what it was.
- pnathan 10y agohey `lordnacho`, you made a good comment, but it's dead and invisible to people who don't have showdead. ---- I agree that unsubstantiated intuition can be a reason for bad decisions, but the real culprit here is the idea of the visionary. Because the visionary legend is why we even have the word "strategy". Society, through unhelpful renditions of history (think of any historical movie), lauds people who are "strategic thinkers". Big picture people who had the guts to follow some grand plan. Well, I call shenanigans. We're all told (I went to business school, but don't hold it against me) to be this sort of magical thinker type who comes up with grand schemes. It's unhelpful. The reason is that, amazingly, we can all think up grand schemes. 20 years ago everyone dreamt up a world where all information was available all the time, anywhere. Everyone would have a camera in their pocket. You could work from home. And so on. The people who actually deserve credit are the ones who can actually make one of the big ideas happen. Everyone is already looking for a way to make fusion happen, cure cancer, and so on. We know that we want a world like that, and normally when someone has a vision of the future, it's quite familiar to everyone. As a coder, it's actually easy to see this side of the story. It's the BSers we tend to work with who have a hard time seeing why talk is cheap. I recall building an app with a guy like this where every suggestion was some sort of revelation. I told him to stop masturbating, and he got quite angry at me. But that's what it was.
- Double_Cast 10y agoaka "use of Effectual Reasoning where Causal Reasoning is more appropriate".
- blowski 10y agoIt looks a bit like impact mapping. One of the techniques I learned from that is to say the opposite of your intuition, and then try to prove it wrong. Obviously, it doesn't prove that your original intuition was right, but it's a useful exercise in critical thought. For example: * We'll get more signups by making this button bigger * Opposite - we'll get more signups by making it smaller * That's not true because fewer people will see it. But will they? What's if it's just a bit smaller? What if it's a different colour or in a different place or has more whitespace around it? The 'obvious' original intuition starts to look less obvious.
- joewee 10y agoI think the solution is even simpler. I'll call it "Market Driven Decision Making" - Define the problem statement with your customer - Brain storm solutions with your team and advisors - Stack rank solutions by time to implement and completeness - Present the top three solutions to the customer - Execute on the one the customer chooses Managers / Leaders should do this continuously in my opinion. Either you are solving a problem for a customer, or your ego. One pays, the other doesn't.
- hackaflocka 10y ago> I built and sold tech businesses in the UK, US and Brazil. It's always intriguing when people write that without mentioning the names of any businesses.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]