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“Moneyball,” Part 2
/in Nuggets and Encouragement Regarding Strategy and Focus/by Tom DoescherTom Doescher
In my last blog, I introduced the concept of “heuristics” and promised I would provide more insight from The Undoing Project, the latest book by Michael Lewis.
So, here’s a brief overview: In the 1950s, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Herbert Simon suggested that while people strive to make rational choices, human judgment is subject to cognitive limitations, and people are limited by the amount of time they have to make choices/decisions. In the 1970s, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced and labeled the specific ways of thinking people rely on to simplify decision-making.
As I mentioned in my previous blog, this topic is quite technical, but it’s very important for business owners and senior executives to be aware of the practical implications present in the decisions they make every day. For that reason, I would highly recommend reading The Undoing Project.
To whet your appetite, I’ll share two basic examples of the impact of heuristic biases from the book.
Belief in the Law of Small Numbers: The power of this belief can be seen in the way people think of totally random patterns — like, say, those created by a flipped coin. People know that a flipped coin is equally likely to come up heads as it is tails, but they also think the tendency for a coin that’s flipped a great many times to land on heads half the time would also express itself if it were flipped only a few times — an error known as “the gambler’s fallacy.” If I flipped a coin a few times in a row and it landed on heads every time, what do you think it would land on on the next flip? Most people would say it will land on tails, as if the coin itself could even things out. Tversky and Kahneman would say this is a glitch in human behavior. In reality, if you were to flip a coin a thousand times, you would be more likely to end up with heads or tails roughly half the time than you would if you only flipped it 10 times.
Framing–Sensitivity to Negative Outcomes: If I gave you $1,000 and then gave you a choice between another gift of $500 and a 50/50 shot at winning $1,000, what would you pick? Most people pick $500, because it’s the sure thing. Now, how about if I gave you $2,000 and then gave you a choice between losing $500 for sure and a 50/50 risk of losing $1,000? Most people would take the bet. The bottom line is that the two questions are effectively identical. In both cases, if you decide to gamble, you’d wind up with a 50/50 shot at being worth $2,000. And in both cases, if you chose the sure thing, you’d wind up being worth $1,500. When the sure thing is framed as a loss, people choose the gamble. However, when you frame it as a gain, people choose the sure thing.
Hopefully these two examples give you a brief glimpse into heuristics. When you reflect on your business, think about those times when you’re quoting on new work or evaluating your team members. Are you basing your conclusions on objective data, or intuition? As a seasoned businessman, I realize more and more each day how many biases, rules of thumb, and gut feelings I have that are wrong.
Give the book a chance.
The Real Story Behind “Moneyball”
/in Nuggets and Encouragement Regarding Strategy and Focus/by Tom DoescherTom Doescher
The other day I met with a client who shared information about recent discussions he had had with his team about bidding on new work. He believed the team was more focused on landing the project (top-line focused) than on the profitability. This is a common issue experienced by many businesses, and I was totally following him until he used the word “heuristics.” I made him repeat himself three times (he probably thinks I have a hearing problem), and then I asked him to spell it. To my knowledge, I had never seen or heard this word before. Later he sent me a September 27, 1974, article from the publication Science entitled “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” written by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. (Yes, this was over 40 years ago!)
I started reading the article, which my client said was a “little” heavy. Actually, it was really heavy; in fact, it caused me to relive the pain of my college statistics class. The good news is that he also recommended I read The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis, the famous author of three books that became successful movies, including Moneyball. I would be willing to bet that most of my readers are very familiar with the subject explored in Moneyball, which is a great story about the phenomenal success of Major League Baseball’s Oakland A’s that resulted after the cash-poor team changed its selection criteria for baseball players from decades-old traditional methods.
In the introduction of his new book, Lewis cites a very damning book review written by University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and law professor Cass Sunstein about his original book, and quotes Thaler and Sunstein’s assessment: “… the author of Moneyball did not seem to realize the deeper reason for the inefficiencies in the market for baseball players: They sprang directly from the inner workings of the human mind.” Lewis goes on to explain that the ways in which some baseball experts might misjudge baseball players— the ways in which any expert’s judgments might be warped by the expert’s own mind — had been described years ago by a pair of Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Lewis says: “My book wasn’t original. It was simply an illustration of ideas that had been floating around for decades and had yet to be fully appreciated by, among others, me.”
It reminds me of what King Solomon said in Ecclesiastes: “… there is nothing new under the sun.”
I will stop there and, in my next blog, I’ll attempt to summarize The Undoing Project, which does a wonderful job of explaining and providing practical examples of the dangers of heuristic decision-making. As I read Lewis’s examples, my ears were ringing, recalling situations in the past where I may have made business decisions that weren’t grounded in adequate objective data.
What Is the Key to Leading a Healthy and Happy Life?
/in Sharpening Your Personal Leadership Skills/by Tom DoescherBelieve it or not, for 80 years Harvard researchers have studied the question of what is key to a healthy and happy life. In 1938, scientists began tracking 268 Harvard students to try to determine the answer, and today the Harvard Study of Adult Development is still working on the project with the remaining 19 students, who are now well into their 90s. I will let the current study director, Robert Waldinger, share with you their surprising findings in this fascinating 12 minute TED talk.