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Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts - Softcover

Duke, Annie

 
9780735216372: Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0735216371 ISBN 13: 9780735216372
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

A Wall Street Journal bestseller, now in paperback. Poker champion turned decision strategist Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions.

Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time. There's always an element of luck that you can't control, and there's always information hidden from view. So the key to long-term success (and avoiding worrying yourself to death) is to think in bets: How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making?

Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. For most people, it's difficult to say "I'm not sure" in a world that values and, even, rewards the appearance of certainty. But professional poker players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions don't always lead to great outcomes, and bad decisions don't always lead to bad outcomes.

By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don't, you'll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. You'll become more confident, calm, compassionate, and successful in the long run.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Annie Duke is a World Series of Poker bracelet winner, the winner of the 2004 Tournament of Champions and the only woman to win the NBC National Poker Heads Up Championship. Now, as a professional speaker and decision strategist, she merges her poker expertise with her cognitive psychology graduate work at UPenn. She is a founder of How I Decide, a non-profit that creates curricula and tools to improve decision making and critical thinking skills for under-served middle schoolers.

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Chapter 1

Life Is Poker, Not Chess

Pete Carroll and the Monday Morning Quarterbacks

One of the most controversial decisions in Super Bowl history took place in the closing seconds of Super Bowl XLIX in 2015. The Seattle Seahawks, with twenty-six seconds remaining and trailing by four points, had the ball on second down at the New England Patriots' one-yard line. Everybody expected Seahawks coach Pete Carroll to call for a handoff to running back Marshawn Lynch. Why wouldn't you expect that call? It was a short-yardage situation and Lynch was one of the best running backs in the NFL.

Instead, Carroll called for quarterback Russell Wilson to pass. New England intercepted the ball, winning the Super Bowl moments later. The headlines the next day were brutal:

USA Today: "What on Earth Was Seattle Thinking with Worst Play Call in NFL History?"

Washington Post: "'Worst Play-Call in Super Bowl History' Will Forever Alter Perception of Seahawks, Patriots"

FoxSports.com: "Dumbest Call in Super Bowl History Could Be Beginning of the End for Seattle Seahawks"

Seattle Times: "Seahawks Lost Because of the Worst Call in Super Bowl History"

The New Yorker: "A Coach's Terrible Super Bowl Mistake"

Although the matter was considered by nearly every pundit as beyond debate, a few outlying voices argued that the play choice was sound, if not brilliant. Benjamin Morris's analysis on FiveThirtyEight.com and Brian Burke's on Slate.com convincingly argued that the decision to throw the ball was totally defensible, invoking clock-management and end-of-game considerations. They also pointed out that an interception was an extremely unlikely outcome. (Out of sixty-six passes attempted from an opponent's one-yard line during the season, zero had been intercepted. In the previous fifteen seasons, the interception rate in that situation was about 2%.)

Those dissenting voices didn't make a dent in the avalanche of criticism directed at Pete Carroll. Whether or not you buy into the contrarian analysis, most people didn't want to give Carroll the credit for having thought it through, or having any reason at all for his call. That raises the question: Why did so many people so strongly believe that Pete Carroll got it so wrong?

We can sum it up in four words: the play didn't work.

Take a moment to imagine that Wilson completed the pass for a game-winning touchdown. Wouldn't the headlines change to "Brilliant Call" or "Seahawks Win Super Bowl on Surprise Play" or "Carroll Outsmarts Belichick"? Or imagine the pass had been incomplete and the Seahawks scored (or didn't) on a third- or fourth-down running play. The headlines would be about those other plays. What Pete Carroll called on second down would have been ignored.

Carroll got unlucky. He had control over the quality of the play-call decision, but not over how it turned out. It was exactly because he didn't get a favorable result that he took the heat. He called a play that had a high percentage of ending in a game-winning touchdown or an incomplete pass (which would have allowed two more plays for the Seahawks to hand off the ball to Marshawn Lynch). He made a good-quality decision that got a bad result.

Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: "resulting." When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn't turn out well in the short run.

Pete Carroll understood that his universe of critics was guilty of resulting. Four days after the Super Bowl, he appeared on the Today show and acknowledged, "It was the worst result of a call ever," adding, "The call would have been a great one if we catch it. It would have been just fine, and nobody would have thought twice about it."

Why are we so bad at separating luck and skill? Why are we so uncomfortable knowing that results can be beyond our control? Why do we create such a strong connection between results and the quality of the decisions preceding them? How can we avoid falling into the trap of the Monday Morning Quarterback, whether it is in analyzing someone else's decision or in making and reviewing the decisions in our own lives?

The hazards of resulting

Take a moment to imagine your best decision in the last year. Now take a moment to imagine your worst decision.

I'm willing to bet that your best decision preceded a good result and the worst decision preceded a bad result.

That is a safe bet for me because resulting isn't just something we do from afar. Monday Morning Quarterbacks are an easy target, as are writers and bloggers providing instant analysis to a mass audience. But, as I found out from my own experiences in poker, resulting is a routine thinking pattern that bedevils all of us. Drawing an overly tight relationship between results and decision quality affects our decisions every day, potentially with far-reaching, catastrophic consequences.

When I consult with executives, I sometimes start with this exercise. I ask group members to come to our first meeting with a brief description of their best and worst decisions of the previous year. I have yet to come across someone who doesn't identify their best and worst results rather than their best and worst decisions.

In a consulting meeting with a group of CEOs and business owners, one member of the group identified firing the president of his company as his worst decision. He explained, "Since we fired him, the search for a replacement has been awful. We've had two different people on the job. Sales are falling. The company's not doing well. We haven't had anybody come in who actually turns out to be as good as he was."

That sounds like a disastrous result, but I was curious to probe into why the CEO thought the decision to fire his president was so bad (other than that it didn't work out).

He explained the decision process and the basis of the conclusion to fire the president. "We looked at our direct competitors and comparable companies, and concluded we weren't performing up to their level. We thought we could perform and grow at that level and that it was probably a leadership issue."

I asked whether the process included working with the president to understand his skill gaps and what he could be doing better. The company had, indeed, worked with him to identify his skill gaps. The CEO hired an executive coach to work with him on improving his leadership skills, the chief weakness identified.

In addition, after executive coaching failed to produce improved performance, the company considered splitting the president's responsibilities, having him focus on his strengths and moving other responsibilities to another executive. They rejected that idea, concluding that the president's morale would suffer, employees would likely perceive it as a vote of no confidence, and it would put extra financial pressure on the company to split a position they believed one person could fill.

Finally, the CEO provided some background about the company's experience making high-level outside hires and its understanding of the available talent. It sounded like the CEO had a reasonable basis for...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735216371
ISBN 13 
9780735216372
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
289
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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