德研社社长带你读《Think in Bets》1.2:结果导向的危害

再开始这一章节之前,社长我再给大家带一个福利,对顶级职业牌手Daniel Negreanu 一个经典视频做了一个听译(社长翻译很辛苦的,勿忘打赏,哈哈),希望大家喜欢!

看完之后,我们就开始今天的学习,首先作者提出了一个测试:

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

花点时间想象一下你今年做出的最佳决定。再花点时间想象一下你今年最糟糕的决定。

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

我敢打赌,你最好的决定产生了一个好的结果,最坏的决定诞生了一个坏的结果。

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.

上一节我们聊到的事后诸葛亮,其实并不是少数人的习惯。正如我从自己的扑克经历中发现的那样,这是一种困扰我们所有人的常规思维模式。在结果和决策质量之间建立过于紧密的关系会影响我们每天的决策,并可能会带来深远的灾难性后果。

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.

社长我早期玩牌的时候,喜欢AA平跟入池,因为早期有几次这样的奇袭埋伏让我赢了一些手牌,这样的结果我当然非常喜欢。于是我相信AA埋伏是经常有利可图的。但是后来有好多次,被对方的两对、三条、顺、花打得满地找牙。这种结果导向让我付出了学习的代价。

作者安妮继续写到:

当我给企业管理层做咨询培训时,我有时会从这个练习开始:我请小组成员来参加我们的第一次会议,简要描述他们去年的最佳和最差决定。

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.”

在与一群首席执行官和企业主的咨询会议上,该小组的一名CEO认为解雇他的公司副总裁是他最糟糕的决定。他解释说,“自从我们解雇了他,很难寻找到他的替代者。我们有两个不同的人在分担他以前的岗位职责。销售额正在下降,公司经营的不好。我们还没有找到任何人能像他一样优秀。"

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).

这听起来是一个灾难性的结果,但是我很好奇为什么这位CEO认为解雇他的副总裁的决定是如此糟糕,有没有除了结果很糟这个原因之外的原因?

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.”

他解释了解雇副总裁的决定过程和相关原因。“我们观察了我们的直接竞争对手和类似的公司,并得出结论,我们的表现没有达到他们的水平。我们认为我们可以达到他们的水平,但目前可能是一个领导能力问题。”

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.

我问过他决策过程中是否包括提前与副总裁沟通,了解他的技能差距,了解如何让他可以做得更好?他回答说,事实上,曾与他合作过,以确定他的技能差距。CEO还聘请了一名高管教练与副总裁合作,以提高他的领导技能以及一经发现的主要弱点。

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.

除此之外,在高管培训未能提高绩效后,公司也考虑将这个副总裁岗位的职责分开,让这位副总裁专注于自己的优势,并将其他职责转移给另一位高管。他们后来拒绝了这一想法,认为副总裁的士气会受到影响,员工可能会认为这是一次不信任的投票,拆分他们认为一个人可以胜任的职位将会给公司带来额外的财政压力。

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 believing they would find someone better.

最后,这位首席执行官还提供了一些背景资料,介绍了该公司高管岗位外聘经验以及对候选人才的理解。听起来这位CEO有合理的理由相信他们会找到更好的人。

I asked the assembled group, “Who thinks this was a bad decision?” Not surprisingly, everybody agreed the company had gone through a thoughtful process and made a decision that was reasonable given what they knew at the time.

我问聚集在一起的小组,“谁认为这是一个糟糕的决定?“不足为奇的是,每个人都认为这家公司已经经历了一个深思熟虑的过程,并根据他们当时所知做出了一个合理的决定。

It sounded like a bad result, not a bad decision. The imperfect relationship between results and decision quality devastated the CEO and adversely affected subsequent decisions regarding the company. The CEO had identified the decision as a mistake solely because it didn’t work out. He obviously felt a lot of anguish and regret because of the decision. He stated very clearly that he thought he should have known that the decision to fire the president would turn out badly. His decision-making behavior going forward reflected the belief that he made a mistake. He was not only resulting but also succumbing to its companion, hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable.

这听起来是一个糟糕的结果,而不是一个糟糕的决定。结果和决策质量之间不完美的关系摧毁了CEO的信心,并对公司的后续决策产生了不利影响。这位首席执行官认为这个决定是错误的,完全是因为它没有成功。由于这个决定,他显然感到非常痛苦和遗憾。他非常清楚地表示,他认为他应该早就知道,解雇总裁的决定会很糟糕。他的决策行为反映了他犯了一个错误的信念:结果导向误区

Those beliefs develop from an overly tight connection between outcomes and decisions. That is typical of how we evaluate our past decisions. Like the army of critics of Pete Carroll’s decision to pass on the last play of the Super Bowl, the CEO had been guilty of resulting, ignoring his (and his company’s) careful analysis and focusing only on the poor outcome. The decision didn’t work out, and he treated that result as if it were an inevitable consequence rather than a probabilistic one.

这些信念源于结果和决定之间过于紧密的联系。这是我们评价过去决策的典型方式。像众多批评皮特·卡罗尔未能赢得超级碗最后一场比赛的人们一样,这位首席执行官也犯了这样的错误,无视他(和他的公司)的仔细分析,只关注糟糕的结果。这个决定没有成功,他把这个结果当作先前决策之后不可避免的结果,而不是概率性的结果。

In the exercise I do of identifying your best and worst decisions, I never seem to come across anyone who identifies a bad decision where they got lucky with the result, or a well-reasoned decision that didn’t pan out. We link results with decisions even though it is easy to point out indisputable examples where the relationship between decisions and results isn’t so perfectly correlated.

在我要求的确定你最佳和最差决定的练习中,我似乎从来没有遇到过这样的人,他们认为做出的最差决定缺幸运地得到了好的结果,或做出了一个最好的决定但没有成功。尽管很容易指出决策和结果之间的关系没有如此完美关联的无可争议的例子,我们还是很容将结果与决策联系起来。

Yet this is exactly what happened to that CEO. He changed his behavior based on the quality of the result rather than the quality of the decision-making process.

然而,这正是首席执行官的遭遇。他根据结果的质量而不是决策过程的质量来改变自己的行为,自责与愧疚又来了其他的连锁反应。

下一章节,我们来看下,从生物学角度,为什么我们的大脑会让我们如此容易“结果导向偏见”呢?

系列持续更新中,欢迎关注知乎专栏或者德研社公众号!

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