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These findings supported the prediction that administrators may seek to justify an ineffective course of action by escalating their commitment if resources to
by DoreenMichele 6y ago
These findings supported the
prediction that administrators may seek to justify an ineffective course of action by escalating their commitment if resources to it.
It sounds like maybe they were trying to make it work rather than justifying it.
In a section titled Norms for Consistency, it talks a bit about President Carter and the importance of your convictions.
I think most likely this is really about the importance of leaders being wise and knowledgeable to a degree that exceeds the comprehension of the average person. People who don't understand your decision judge you based on how unflinchingly confident you are in it's correctness even though other people don't understand it, don't think it's a good idea (presumably because they don't understand it) and are against it because they have some conflicting agenda (such as personal gain).
It's 11 pages. I can't manage to finish it in one sitting but it looks like a worthwhile read.
- lumost 6y agoThis effectively claims that administrators are biased into making Martingale style doubling bets. As an administrator of a large program, cancelation may mean the end of your career "you're the guy who wasted X billion dollars on Y". Meanwhile many ineffective courses of action will eventually achieve their goals sufficiently well given enough resources. As a successful administrator you are likely to double down on failures rather than let them fail. With the goal to recoup your losses from the first round. This tends to mirror my experience with large organizations. Projects tied to a manager are rarely canceled unless the manager leaves (willingly or not). I wouldn't be surprised if unicorns had a similar trajectory of justifying previous losses with even bigger bets.
- Spooky23 6y agoThe pivot is the hack here. Sometimes in doubling down you end up with the framework for the next thing. You still need to keep the hopeless project on the books, but usually there’s a plan b that comes out of the ashes at some point.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pierrebai 6y agoI find amusing that your reaction is exactly as described in their experiment: people have a favorable bias toward someone who stuck to his course of action even after multiple failures than someone trying multiple different approaches. It's double amusing since the paper starts by outlining multiple cases where an administration of company stuck to decision to ultimate failure, yet the one example that you chose to single out is the one about president Carter being seen as waffling.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- colineartheta 6y ago11 pages is too much? …