4 ms·

Do You Have Too Many Moves That Win Harder When Losing?

2 points by networked 11y ago

networked 11y ago
I found a link to the blog that hosts this article when its author commented on the story about homeless students in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9495895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9495895. When I read the article what immediately struck me is that its central idea — that you can get good at managing crises to the detriment of your other skills — applies beyond one's personal life and financial situation. An example that comes to mind from the world of IT is the system administration team that over time gets really good at "fighting fires" but less so at preventing them. Similarly, the idea offers a surprisingly Hanlon's razon-compliant [1] explanation for the overuse of crunch time. The management sees a tool meant for crisis resolution work well for resolving crises and decides never to stop using it. I am not entirely sold on the idea but it seems compelling enough to worth investigating for where it can offer novel preductions. My hunch so far is that it may better apply to business failure than to poverty itself. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
- mswen 11y ago
  networked Thanks for posting this and your application to business settings. It feels like this is an instance of a more general class of reasoning errors. The reasoning error is to ignore or underestimate the impact of the context when we attribute cause and effect. "What worked before will work again, even though the surrounding context is totally different." I have seen it with sales people moving from large organizations to smaller early stage businesses. The transitioning employee and the new employer often jointly make the same attribution mistake. You were very successful at selling services for giant corp X, so you are a superstar business development person and will naturally be able to use all those contacts (Rolodex) and do wonderful things selling our business services. A few months or a year later everyone is wondering why this guy hasn't sold hardly anything? The mistake is to assume that this person's sales skills were truly general when in fact his former success was due to an unusually good fit between his skills and the giant corp's culture, services and customer base. So instead of transferring right over from superstar for them to superstar for us the sales guy is struggling, fighting a loss of confidence and trying to regain sales momentum. Although it is harder to see in reverse, I suspect the following to be true. I try something based on common wisdom. It doesn't seem to have the effect predicted by everyone else. But that advice is from people in a very different starting position. Maybe at a later stage in life I am in the right situation but because of my prior failed experience I don't try again even though this is the context in which that advised approach really works well.

2 points by networked 11y ago

I found a link to the blog that hosts this article when its author commented on the story about homeless students in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9495895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9495895. When I read the article what immediately struck me is that its central idea — that you can get good at managing crises to the detriment of your other skills — applies beyond one's personal life and financial situation. An example that comes to mind from the world of IT is the system administration team that over time gets really good at "fighting fires" but less so at preventing them. Similarly, the idea offers a surprisingly Hanlon's razon-compliant [1] explanation for the overuse of crunch time. The management sees a tool meant for crisis resolution work well for resolving crises and decides never to stop using it. I am not entirely sold on the idea but it seems compelling enough to worth investigating for where it can offer novel preductions. My hunch so far is that it may better apply to business failure than to poverty itself. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

mswen 11y ago
networked Thanks for posting this and your application to business settings. It feels like this is an instance of a more general class of reasoning errors. The reasoning error is to ignore or underestimate the impact of the context when we attribute cause and effect. "What worked before will work again, even though the surrounding context is totally different." I have seen it with sales people moving from large organizations to smaller early stage businesses. The transitioning employee and the new employer often jointly make the same attribution mistake. You were very successful at selling services for giant corp X, so you are a superstar business development person and will naturally be able to use all those contacts (Rolodex) and do wonderful things selling our business services. A few months or a year later everyone is wondering why this guy hasn't sold hardly anything? The mistake is to assume that this person's sales skills were truly general when in fact his former success was due to an unusually good fit between his skills and the giant corp's culture, services and customer base. So instead of transferring right over from superstar for them to superstar for us the sales guy is struggling, fighting a loss of confidence and trying to regain sales momentum. Although it is harder to see in reverse, I suspect the following to be true. I try something based on common wisdom. It doesn't seem to have the effect predicted by everyone else. But that advice is from people in a very different starting position. Maybe at a later stage in life I am in the right situation but because of my prior failed experience I don't try again even though this is the context in which that advised approach really works well.