Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.
Quote from Dan Ariely’s column in the Harvard Business Review, via Robin Hanson, who writes, “Apparently actually improving decision quality is way way down in the manager priority list.”
Indeed — somewhere down on the list below avoiding saying “I don’t know,” not giving people reasons to doubt your laser-like focus on performance, not getting fired…
Ariely suggests two reasons for the unwillingness to experiment:
1) Experiments require short-term losses for long-term gains — a trade-off companies aren’t inclined to make.
2) Answers from consultants and focus groups lead to action, while questions require more thinking… despite the fact that “asking good questions and gathering evidence usually guides us to better answers.”
I’m inclined to boil it down to the fact that the whole attitude of experimentation is in stark contrast to the attitude that leads most people into business in the first place — that is, a performance-driven mindset by which the future is clearly defined by goals and win/loss outcomes (or rankings): “there’s the target, go get it.”
By comparison, designers and scientists tend to have a more discovery-oriented mindset, by which the future is more of a question mark — not just of how one will perform relative to a goal, but a sense that something is missing, or a new opportunity might be opening up…
[Ultimately I think we can understand it as a variety in our levels of comfort with uncertainty -- not just comfort creating uncertainty, but comfort with how uncertain a lot of things really are.]
