
A Silent Cause of Bad Business Decisions - davesuperman
https://medium.dave-bailey.com/the-silent-cause-of-bad-business-decisions-b95d977b5ca7#.1jckdefsh
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ScottBurson
When 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
Sounds like you're managing your manager.

~~~
yazaddaruvala
Seriously: Why wouldn't everyone manage their manager?

~~~
overcast
Because I won't take on the responsibility of someone making twice as much as
I do. ;)

~~~
yazaddaruvala
What do you care if they get paid more than you? Do you care that they can out
bowl you? Do they care that you can out chess them? Life is a marathon, you
don't win a marathon by coming first in the race. You win a marathon by
beating your last time.

Don't misunderstand, I'm always competing with my last paycheck. I always want
to be getting paid more. I just don't care about other people's salary and if
our responsibilities are lesser/equal/greater.

For me its all about optimizing the things I can control. I can control my
future paycheck, and I can control how much effort I need to be putting in
from week to week. I can't control someone else's salary, and it can't
negatively effect me, so why expend the energy thinking about it?

Meanwhile: Responsibility != Effort.

For me its all about correcting mistakes with the least effort possible (I'm
lazy you see). Also, if I'm paid the same, and I input less effort, then I'm
technically being paid more :)

I would way rather put in the minimal effort required to question and correct
(i.e. "manage" as you put it) an error upfront while its an idea, whoever's
idea that might have been, rather than to put in the effort to correct the
error while shit is hitting the fan.

This is just my personal preference. Your milage may vary.

~~~
r_smart
I love your response, and would only want to add: I only care about how much
other people make because it helps inform me in terms of what I can work
towards for my own paycheck, and it shows me what the organization values.

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falsedan

      > 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
> 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?

~~~
falsedan
Yeah, 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.

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geophile
This 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.

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blowski
It 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.

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beachstartup
anecdotal 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.

~~~
afarrell
You'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
Is 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."

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geophile
Actually, 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
Ironically, you just asked us to use intuition in order to support a baseless
claim that voters are using only intuition.

~~~
mwfunk
No, 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
Selectively misinterpreting them or removing them from context has similar
flaws.

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joewee
I 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.

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marmaduke
I've always thought that choosing good experiences is always important even if
passive, because our intuitions are always undergoing tuning and calibration.

~~~
DenisM
Can 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
I 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.

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Double_Cast
aka "use of Effectual Reasoning where Causal Reasoning is more appropriate".

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hackaflocka
> 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.

