
Do You Have Too Many Moves That Win Harder When Losing? - networked
http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2015/04/do-you-have-too-many-moves-that-win.html?again
======
networked
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
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.

