You just got lesson number one: Don't think, it can only hurt the ball club. - Crash Davis, Bull Durham
Opening Day is this week!
The Orioles have the number one farm system in baseball.
I haven’t been this excited about the Orioles since my Bar Mitzvah!
Should I buy my tickets to the World Series now!?!?!?
Not so fast…
All signs point to a bright future for the Orioles, many of which can be objectively measured. However, if the road I want the Orioles to travel ends with a World Series, it’s essential to remember that a potentially infinite number of variables can throw my hopes and dreams into disarray.
Baseball is the perfect case study to explore why we assume the best possible future and discount the likelihood of failure. In 2003, our friend Nate Silver, then of the Baseball Prospectus, introduced a new statistic to the world: Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, more commonly known as PECOTA.
PECOTA is a prediction algorithm with a twist, providing a window into the percentage likelihood of the best and worst-case scenarios for players and teams (as well as every possibility in between.) Last year, the Orioles won 101 games, and as of today, PECOTA predicts that in 2024 the Orioles will win…
(Gulp.)
I should hold off on buying those tickets.
Or should I?
In fairness, it makes sense that I want to see the Orioles marching in a parade by the Inner Harbor with a World Series trophy, their first since 1983. And perhaps they will; the projection from PECOTA means that the Orioles will likely make the playoffs. But my desire for the best possible scenario can cloud my judgment of the most likely scenario.
And that brings us to this week’s heuristic.
Best-Case Heuristic
How long did it take for you to get COVID?
I’m not much of a germaphobe, so when a mysterious virus started to get people sick, I took no precautions (other than perhaps using more hand sanitizer).
Before you recoil with horror, it’s not that I didn’t believe COVID-19 was real. Rather, I believed COVID was real, but it would likely not affect me.
My earliest recollection of COVID was being annoyed that my daughter’s play was canceled because a few kids got sick (assuming that the cancellation was due to overzealous parents.)
In hindsight, it’s amazing I did not get sick earlier.
While the COVID-19 pandemic produced invaluable research about the virus and potential containment strategies, living in a pandemic world was also an enormous natural experiment that tested how much human beings make decisions amid uncertain futures.
Not surprisingly, humanity (mostly) flunked. Just ask Triumph…
Meet the best-case heuristic (BCH). Consider the following scenario:
You know that people overrate their abilities.
You also know that all kinds of cognitive biases make you overly optimistic.
As a result, when you are asked to rate the likelihood of being diagnosed with COVID-19, you want to make a more realistic prediction that factors in the cognitive biases you’ve learned.
Given what you know, how much more accurate will your predictions be when you proactively factor in the need to be as realistic as possible?
Sadly, Hallgeir Sjåstad and Jay Van Bavel find that the answer is “not much.”
Sjåstad and Bavel find that “participants [in their experiments] made "realistic" predictions that were much closer to their best-case scenario than to their worst-case scenario.”1 In particular, they find that people consistently exhibit “unrealistic optimism in comparative judgment,” consistently rating their chance of contracting COVID-19 as lower than the average person's. Even when people think they are being realistic, their definition of realism presumes “what they want to happen…because the best-case scenario comes first to mind.”
During a pandemic, people possess largely similar definitions of what defines the best possible future; it’s hard to imagine anyone who entered the pandemic wanting to get COVID-19. But turning to the Jewish organizational world, the definition of “best” becomes slightly murkier because, for many of us, the “best” possible future is where our preferences or predictions win out. And our prediction proving true is not the same as reaching the best possible outcome.
This is one of many reasons that the organizational processes we create are as important, if not more important, than the vision we bring to these organizations, which brings us to this week’s book recommendation.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz loves rap.
I get it if it seems odd to introduce Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things with this factoid.
But if you choose to read the book, you will see that Horowitz introduces each chapter with a rap lyric, which helps understand how Horowitz thinks about dealing with uncertainty. Given that Horowitz is one of the most well-known venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, I won’t argue with the guy.
Horowitz’s book begins with a seemingly obvious yet profound statement: The hard thing about dealing with hard things is that "there is no formula for dealing with them.” Thus, instead of trying to offer a formula that cannot exist, Horowitz spends much of his book focusing on how to lead organizations that embrace uncertainty effectively because dealing with uncertainty is a key differentiator between good and bad organizations:
Horowitz argues that good organizations are places where people “can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally.”2
However, poor organizations are places where “people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes.” And worse, because so much time is wasted on a broken system, people have “no way to know if they are getting the job done or not.”3
I have worked with good and bad organizations, and I find Horowitz’s framework incredibly helpful in understanding the best-case heuristic. If each of us is more likely to overrate the future being better for us than the average person, the only way to counteract this is to create a system that makes space for human imperfection while causing minimal damage to the system.
For the CEOs and aspiring CEOs who subscribe to this newsletter, take note because Horowitz argues that when senior management falls guilty to this cognitive trap, the organization begins to accrue what Horowitz calls “management debt,” when a leader makes an “expedient short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence.”4 As you climb the ladder, your cognitive biases do not change, but the biases can do far more damage if you don’t check yourself.
Can anything we’ve discussed this week guarantee that the Orioles will win the World Series?
Of course not.
But while I love to dream, I’m happier when I manage my expectations.
And perhaps you are too…
What You Do Is Who You Are
40 million
A study by researchers at Stanford and Georgetown analyzed 120 SPAM Facebook pages that produced AI-generated images. A single post from one page generated 40 million views in a single fiscal quarter.
Just wait until you hear about “Shrimp Jesus.”
Really.
What I Read This Week
We Need to Talk about Astrology: A most recent example of the power of Adam Grant? He managed to get me to take astrology seriously (sort of.)
Publish or Perish?: The adage in academia that one must “publish or perish” is one of those cliches that actually have a strong element of truth. But do the best researchers actually publish the most?
Everyday Supercommunicators: I am in the process of reading Charles Duhigg’s latest book, and I imagine that I will summarize it later. In the meantime, read this.
“Calling Forward” Instead of “Calling Out”: I hate the debates about cancel culture and avoid them at all costs. But I love the idea that when faced with someone saying things with which we vehemently disagree, we can invite that person to join us in a journey to be something greater.
Can AI Make Plans?: Cal Newport is my hero.
Ibid.
Ibid., 134.