A great interview on Smart City (a radio program out of Memphis) features Paul Schoemaker, co-author of the book Winning Decisions: Getting It Right the First Time. Schoemaker teaches and consults on issues of decision-making strategy, and on developing organizations that learn. His perspective on why we so often make bad decisions:
…people don’t spend enough time framing or defining the problem. They tend to jump in and solve the problem as they initially see it, or the way other people have defined it. We find that people often, therefore, solve the wrong problem.
As an example, he offers two scenarios he’s tested with many individuals and groups:
In scenario one, you are going to a play, for which the ticket cost $50. Somewhere on the way to the theater you realize that you’ve lost $50 in cash. When asked if they would still buy a ticket and go in to see the show, most people will say ‘yes,’ and chalk it up to bad luck.
In scenario two, you go to the theater early to buy your ticket for $50, and then wander around town a bit before the show. When you go to enter the theater, you realize that you’ve lost the ticket. When asked if they would go and buy another ticket for $50, most respondents will say ‘no.’ They’ve spent their allowance for entertainment, and they would just go home.
Even though the out-of-pocket is the same for each scenario ($100 for a $50 ticket), the frame people place around the problem is different. And therein lies the challenge.
As I’ve discussed before (here and here and here, for example), the human brain is wired in a wacky way, leading us into all sorts of decision problems if we don’t structure our processes and continually challenge our conclusions. This is particularly true in extraordinarily human-intensive activities such as cultural production/presentation, and in resource-starved organizations such as nonprofits. So, cultural nonprofits get a double whammy.
Schoemaker also raises the common disconnect between feedback and learning, and the fact that managers and organizations can do something over and over and over, and still not get any better at it. Says he through analogy:
Each time you play golf, an average player gets 90 strokes of experience. But that doesn’t mean that they play any better the next time. So, somehow, they are not able to take that feedback and translate it into learning. And I think it has to do with the lack of good conceptual models for understanding what underlies the craft.
Amen, brother. Give the interview a listen, and see how you might reconceive your own or your organization’s information-seeking, analysis, decision, and evaluation processes.
NOTE: I corrected the two scenarios on May 20, thanks to a thoughtful comment from Joe at Butts in the Seats. Thanks Joe.
