I had a friend recommend a book to me recently that I have just started, but 40ish pages in, I have already had my whole world rocked.
I don’t know about you, but I have basically spent my entire life doing what this author warns NOT to do … and now it makes complete sense why I have an itty bitty shitty committee on my shoulder questioning my decisions.
The book is called – Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts
I think this book should be the bible for just about everyone, not just business owners.
Why the bible? … because basically 80% of life, and owning a business, is making the best decision you can without all the facts! So if we can get better at making decisions then that is a huge win!
But the thing that truly broke my brain is this phenomenon of “resulting.”
According to the author Annie Duke, renowned decision-making expert and former professional poker player, the biggest problem in decision making is known as “resulting” — equating the quality of a decision with its outcome.
Essentially this is when we judge a decision as good or bad based on the results. Annie cautions us about this because it creates doubt, trepidation, and hesitation in future decision making.
I, until having this book hit me like a 2 x 4, was probably the mayor of Resultingville and thus officiating weddings between decisions and outcomes daily.
Talk about a face palm moment. Had I continued down this path, this kind of thinking could very much come back to bite me in the bum.
She shows that a key to making better decisions is to parse outcomes from decision quality; which y’all is a hard habit to break! But I can already see how much my confidence in decisions across the board has increased!
She gives a powerful example. For instance, if you fire an underperforming CEO and their replacement also fails, it doesn’t mean that the initial decision to remove the first CEO was erroneous.
Rather than second guess your original decision, you should focus your energy reviewing the recruiting process that led you to select the underperforming replacement CEO.’
Annie also tells a great story about how in the 2015 Super Bowl the Seahawks are on the one-yard line of the Patriots. There’s twenty six seconds left in the game, it’s second down. The Seahawks have one timeout and they trail by four.
Everybody expects that Pete Carroll is going to call a handoff. He’s going to hand it off to Marshawn Lynch… (who) is going try to barrel through the defensive line. If he doesn’t get in, they call (a) timeout then maybe he’ll get another try at it.
But Pete Carroll doesn’t do that. He actually calls a pass play. Russell Wilson passes the ball and Malcolm Butler intercepts it in the end zone, and the Seahawks lose the super bowl in a flash.
(The next day)… the headlines were not kind. There wasn’t a whole lot of discussion about whether it was a good play or a bad play or what the reasoning behind it was.
Most of the discussion was about whether it was the worst play in Super Bowl history or just the worst play in football history period, ever. Now if he hadn’t passed it and they still lost, we know the headlines would be different, right? … that’s the danger in resulting.
She also talks about how hindsight bias is the tendency for highly uncertain past events to be thought of as predictable because you know the result. Talk about another holy crap moment!
In other words, the tendency after an outcome is known to treat the outcome as inevitable – and then in most cases if the result was not what you wanted, use it as proof of your poor decision making skills.
Do you see how this dangerous play can suddenly give you analysis paralysis, make you nervous to make any decision cause god forbid it be the wrong one, and ultimately keep you stuck!?
Hindsight bias also, interestingly enough, can have the opposite effect, causing overconfidence in your ability to predict other future events, leading to unnecessary risks because you convinced yourself that you accurately predicted an event before it occurred aka knew it all along.
The point of all this is, I wonder how much faster we would make decisions if we weren’t hung up on the results.
The truth is, at the time, we made the best decision with the information we have … and there is a fair amount out of our control after we make the decision.
I’m not saying go buck wild, willy-nilly, but I am genuinely curious how our businesses (and our lives) would change if we made decisions faster, launched things sooner, had just 1% more courage, or heck, even looked at progress vs perfection.
I know, for me, this has improved my confidence, but it also has helped me be a little more easy on myself when the outcome isn’t what I had hoped for.
It’s also made me more patient and forgiving of myself and others cause *gasp* we are not all perfect. And it also has helped me be more objective with hindsight.
All in all, I am so grateful this book found its way to me.
Let me know if this resonates with you … and if you too have been trapped by resulting for far too long!
Until next time!
Lauren
