The Illusory Truth

How we come to believe things that aren’t true.

Because our "selfish genes" love to conserve calories we use mental shortcuts (heuristics) to avoid the calorie intensive work of thinking and we often end up with something that seems right in the meeting but doesn't get the job done in the real world.

This was fine when our predictions were focused on the physical here and now - is that rustling in the bushes the wind or a hungry tiger, will that berry nourish or poison me, will that branch hold if I jump onto it?

Nowadays we are often tasked with analysing & predicting things very complicated, often long term, global outcomes that involve a lot of people and systems rubbing up against each other. Our ability to compute the data or even grasp this situation often breaks down without our realising it. It's very hard to tell when you have missed something you didn't know was there or your brain has fed you a simple lie over a complicated truth.

This blog is about why that happens and what you can do to fix it. 

The main cause of this is an old favourite of mine - "Cognitive load". Our brains try as often as possible to slip into 'autopilot' behaviour and don't like to be pulled out of it unless there is an immediate threat or treat in the vicinity.

Autopilot mode leaves us susceptible to simple answers that sound right over complicated answers containing many causes and clauses.

This issue is often compounded by social norms, if everyone else, including your boss, is agreeing it is often not worth the effort trying to lay out the real case.

Another enabler of this is how meetings and companies are often set up, they don't reward long silences while people think about something and long soliloquies or mathematical proofs derailing the agenda. 

2 main problems arise as a result of this thinking

• Firstly, we can fall prey to confidence tricksters who tell us what we want to hear. This is often a belief we hold or a simple story that masks the real story. 

• Second, we hold onto a narrative that worked in the past but is working against us now.

What is the solution? 

 

The Hedgehog & the Fox. Tetlock found that we fall along a spectrum from Hedgehogs to Foxes. 

• Hedgehogs are dogmatic, they felt their experience + expertise would guarantee success. They were bold, strident and confident in their views

• Foxes on the other hand are bright, curious and often full of self doubt

Foxes are better forecasters by a mile. Lifelong learners, often spanning multiple fields, picking up info wherever they could. They make smaller, more hedged predictions, more often aware when they lack all the facts however they tend to struggle in leadership positions as they struggle with the required decisiveness and confidence to get people to follow you.

 

The methods below can be used to bring problems in range of our higher cognitive functions, away from guesswork and the resultant “great idea but” excuses: poor execution, poor timing, just a random market movement, just didn’t gel with customers, let just move on to the next campaign.

The more accurate a prediction is, the more nuanced it is likely to be. Here are a few ways you can escape the matrix of illusory truth.

1. Understand what you know/ can control. There will be variables beyond your control. Where can you make a reasonable estimate of impact? It may be 50% of a larger issue or 85% of a smaller one. Keep tipping th A hypothesis that has a 51% chance of being right is better than comforting guesses over the long run. Just ask any casino.
2. Utilise in-depth explanations. Make people read things before a meeting (or if you are Amazon in silence at the beginning of one). These form the basis of high level standardised summaries for sharing. Standardised reporting is your friend and very rare in startups. 
3. Don’t solve massive questions. Why are our ads better, how is my website doing, why aren’t customers more loyal. Break a problem down into its component parts and solve a different problem week for 10 weeks. 
4. Don’t always reward speed over quality. Standardise a problem solving method that rewards conceptual leaps & automate repetitive, speed focused tasks.
5. Remove the fear. Imagine you are advising another company on what they should do. Or try, explicitly, looking at the problem through different approaches e.g.  wearing different hats.
6. Do a Pre-mortem. Think up reasons why something may fail before it starts. This is not to reject any idea with a flaw but acknowledge the risks and create contingency plans. 
7. Optimise in flight! Too many people launch an initiative then wait until it is done before conducting any analysis by which time it is often too late. 
8. Become an archeologist. Keep a list of all your findings over time in a structured way. Once your initiative, test, campaign is over the biases we discussed will tempt you into ignoring the evidence, to keep ploughing on so set aside meaningful time & rewards to uncover deeper, more impactful causes. 

All these things should help you create the future rather than having to predict it. It might feel uncomfortable at first, you will need to stay the course and probably reward yourself with a cake after a long day. Your brain will thank you for the calories!