by Annie Duke
A productive decision group would do well to organize around skepticism. That should also be its communications guide, because true skepticism isn’t confrontational. Thinking in bets demands the imperative of skepticism. Without embracing uncertainty, we can’t rationally bet on our beliefs. And we need to be particularly skeptical of information that agrees with us because we know that we are biased to just accept and applaud confirming evidence. If we don’t “lean over backwards” (as Richard Feynman famously said) to figure out where we could be wrong, we are going to make some pretty bad bets.
If we embrace uncertainty and wrap that into the way we communicate with the group, confrontational dissent evaporates because we start from a place of not being sure. Just as we can wrap our uncertainty into the way we express our beliefs (“I’m 60% sure the waiter is going to mess up my order”), when we implement the norm of skepticism, we naturally modulate expression of dissent with others. Expression of disagreement is, after all, just another way to express our own beliefs, which we acknowledge are probabilistic in nature. Therefore, overtly expressing the uncertainty in a dissenting belief follows. No longer do we dissent with declarations of “You’re wrong!” Rather, we engage by saying, “I’m not sure about that.” Or even just ask, “Are you sure about that?” or “Have you considered this other way of thinking about it?” We engage this way simply because that is faithful to uncertainty. Organized skepticism invites people into a cooperative exploration. People are more open to hearing differing perspectives expressed this way.
Skepticism should be encouraged and, where possible, operationalized. The term “devil’s advocate” developed centuries ago from the Catholic Church’s practice, during the canonization process, of hiring someone to present arguments against sainthood. Just as the CIA has red teams and the State Department has its Dissent Channel, we can incorporate dissent into our business and personal lives. We can create a pod whose job (literally, in business, or figuratively, in our personal life) is to present the other side, to argue why a strategy might be ill-advised, why a prediction might be off, or why an idea might be ill informed. In so doing, the red team naturally raises alternate hypotheses. Likewise, companies can implement an anonymous dissent channel, giving any employee, from the mail room to the boardroom, a venue to express dissenting opinions, alternative strategies, novel ideas, and points of view that may disagree with the prevailing viewpoint of the company without fear of repercussions. The company should do its best to reward this constructive dissent by taking the suggestions seriously or the expression of diverse viewpoints won’t be reinforced.
Less formally, look for opportunities to recruit a devil’s advocate on an ad hoc basis. When seeking advice, we can ask specific questions to encourage the other person to figure out reasons why we might be wrong. That way, they won’t be as reticent to challenge the action we want to pursue; we’re asking for it, so it’s not oppositional for them to disagree or give us advice contrary to what they think we want to hear.
Make no mistake: the process of seeing ourselves and the world more accurately and objectively is hard and makes us think about things we generally avoid. The group needs rules of engagement that don’t make this harder by letting members get away with being nasty or dismissive. And we need to be aware that even a softer serve of dissent to those who have not agreed to the truthseeking charter can be perceived as confrontational. See David Letterman for details.
Communicating with the world beyond our group
This chapter has focused primarily on forming truthseeking groups on our own initiative or being part of such groups. Unless we have control over the culture around us,* those of us more actively seeking dissent will generally be in the minority when we are away from our group. That doesn’t mean that truthseeking is off-limits in those settings. It just means we have to take the most constructive, civil elements of truthseeking communication and introduce them carefully. There are several ways to communicate to maximize our ability to engage in a truthseeking way with anyone.
First, express uncertainty. Uncertainty not only improves truthseeking within groups but also invites everyone around us to share helpful information and dissenting opinions. Fear of being wrong (or of having to suggest someone else is wrong) countervails the social contract of confirmation, often causing people to withhold valuable insights and opinions from us. If we start by making clear our own uncertainty, our audience is more likely to understand that any discussion that follows will not involve right versus wrong, maximizing our truthseeking exchanges with those outside our chartered group.
Second, lead with assent. For example, listen for the things you agree with, state those and be specific, and then follow with “and” instead of “but.” If there is one thing we have learned thus far it is that we like having our ideas affirmed. If we want to engage someone with whom we have some disagreement (inside or outside our group), they will be more open and less defensive if we start with those areas of agreement, which there surely will be. It is rare that we disagree with everything that someone has to say. By putting into practice the strategies that promote universalism, actively looking for the ideas that we agree with, we will more naturally engage people in the process of learning with us. We will also be more open-minded to what others have to say as well, enhancing our ability to calibrate our own beliefs.
When we lead with assent, our listeners will be more open to any dissent that might follow. In addition, when the new information is presented as supplementing rather than negating what has come before, our listeners will be much more open to what we have to say. The simplest rhetorical touches can make a difference. If someone expresses a belief or prediction that doesn’t sound well calibrated and we have relevant information, try to say and, as in, “I agree with you that [insert specific concepts and ideas we agree with], AND . . .” After “and,” add the additional information. In the same exchange, if we said, “I agree with you that [insert specific concepts and ideas you agree with], BUT . . . ,” that challenge puts people on the defensive. “And” is an offer to contribute. “But” is a denial and repudiation of what came before.
We can think of this broadly as an attempt to avoid the language of “no.” In the performance art of improvisation, the first advice is that when someone starts a scene, you should respond with “yes, and . . .” “Yes” means you are accepting the construct of the situation. “And” means you are adding to it. That’s an excellent guideline in any situation in which you want to encourage exploratory thought. The important thing is to try to find areas of agreement to maintain the spirit of partnership in seeking the truth. In expressing potentially contradictory or dissenting information, our language ideally minimizes the element of disagreement.
Third, ask for a temporary agreement to engage in truthseeking. If someone is off-loading emotion to us, we can ask them if they are just looking to vent or if they are looking for advice. If they aren’t looking for advice, that’s fine. The rules of engagement have been made clear. Sometimes, people just want to vent. I certainly do. It’s in our nature. We want to be supportive of the people around us, and that includes comforting them when they just need some understanding and sympathy. But sometimes they’ll say they are looking for advice, and that is potentially an agreement to opt in to some truthseeking. (Even then, tread lightly because people may say they want advice when what they really want is to be affirmed.)
This type of temporary agreement is really just a reverse version of the kind of temporary opting out that we did in my poker group when someone just had to vent about an especially intense, still-raw loss. Flipping that on its head, it doesn’t have to be offensive to ask, “Do you want to just let it all out, or are you thinking of what to do about it next?”
Finally, focus on the future. As I said at the beginning of this book, we are generally pretty good at identifying the positive goals we are striving for; our problem is in the execution of the decisions along th
e way to reaching those goals. People dislike engaging with their poor execution. That requires taking responsibility for what is often a bad outcome, which, as David Letterman found out, will shut down the conversation. Rather than rehashing what has already happened, try instead to engage about what the person might do so that things will turn out better going forward. Whether it’s our kids, other family members, friends, relationship partners, coworkers, or even ourselves, we share the common trait of generally being more rational about the future than the past. It’s harder to get defensive about something that hasn’t happened yet.
Imagine if David Letterman had said, “It’s too bad you have all these kooky people creating all that drama in your life. Have you thought about how you might get rid of all this drama in the future?” If Lauren Conrad had said something “dramatic,” like “I’ve got so many problems I can’t even think about the future,” or “I’m stuck with these people so there’s nothing I can do about it,” that obviously would be a good time to end the discussion. But the more likely result is that she would have engaged. And that focus on the future could get her to circle back to figure out why all the drama occurred; she wouldn’t be able to sensibly answer the question about the future without examining the past. When we validate the other person’s experience of the past and refocus on exploration of the future, they can get to their past decisions on their own.
This is a good approach to communicating with our children, who, with their developing egos, don’t necessarily need a red pill shoved down their throats. A child isn’t equipped to consent to the challenges of truthseeking exchanges. But they can be nudged. I know, in The Matrix, Morpheus took Neo to visit the Oracle and, while waiting in the lobby, he saw children bending spoons with their minds and engaging in other precocious red-pill behavior. But real-life kids are sensitive to feeling judged. And no real-life parent wants a kid with the ability to mentally send cutlery flying across the room.
My son was expert at fielding bad test scores as the teacher’s fault. I had to be careful not to Letterman him. Instead, I would tell him, “It must be hard to have a teacher like that. Do you think there’s anything you can do to improve your grade in the future?” That at once provided validation and led to productive discussions about subjects like developing strategies for preparing for future tests and setting up meetings with the teacher to figure out what the teacher was looking for in assignments. Meeting with the teacher also created a good impression that would likely be reflected in future grades. Ultimately, even with our own kids’ decisions, rehashing outcomes can create defensiveness. The future, on the other hand, can always be better if we can get them to focus on things in their control.
These methods of communicating with people outside our truthseeking group focus on future goals and future actions. When it works, they take a short trip into the future, beyond the frustrations of the present and toward ways to improve things they can control. Accountability to a truthseeking group is also, in some ways, a time-travel portal. Because we know we will have to answer to the group, we start thinking in advance of how that will go. Anticipating and rehearsing those rational discussions can improve our initial decision-making and analysis, at a time when we might not otherwise be so rational.
That leads to the final decision strategy of this book: ways to use time-travel techniques for better decision-making. By recruiting past and future versions of yourself, you can become your own buddy.
CHAPTER 6
Adventures in Mental Time Travel
Let Marty McFly run into Marty McFly
Thanks to the success of the three Back to the Future movies, our go-to source on the rules of time travel is more likely to be Doc Brown than Dr. Stephen Hawking. The first rule, emphasized by the trilogy and repeated by nearly every time-travel movie since, is “Whatever you do, don’t meet up with yourself!” Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) explains to Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) in Back to the Future: Part II (1989) that “the encounter could create a time paradox, the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe. Granted, that’s the worst-case scenario. The destruction might, in fact, be very localized, limited to merely our own galaxy.”
“Don’t meet up with yourself” has become an unquestioned element of the “science” of time travel. In Timecop (1994), because “the same matter can’t occupy the same space at the same time,” Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character destroys the villain by pushing his past and future versions together. The villain turns into a liquefied blob and disappears from existence.
In real-life decision-making, when we bring our past- or future-self into the equation, the space-time continuum doesn’t unravel. Far from turning us into a liquefied blob, a visit from past or future versions of us helps present-us make better bets. When making decisions, isolating ourselves from thinking about similar decisions in the past and possible future consequences is frequently the very thing that turns us into a blob, mired by in-the-moment thinking where the scope of time is distorted. As decision-makers, we want to collide with past and future versions of ourselves. Our capacity for mental time travel makes this possible. As is the case with accountability, such meetings can lead to better decisions: at the moment of the decision, accountability to our group can pop us briefly into the future to imagine the conversation about the decision we will have with that group. Running that conversation will often remind us to stay on a more rational path.
Just as we can recruit other people to be our decision buddies, we can recruit other versions of ourselves to act as our own decision buddies. We can harness the power of mental time traveling, operationalizing it, encouraging it, and figuring out ways to cause that collision of past, present, and future as much as possible. Present-us needs that help, and past-us and future-us can be the best decision buddies for the job.*
Poker players have unique decision challenges that get them thinking a lot about how to get this collision of past-, present- and future-self to occur at the moment of making a decision and executing on it. Because decisions in poker are made so quickly, players don’t have the luxury of time in coordinating their rational, long-term, strategic plans with their decisions at the poker table. And all those decisions made under severe time constraints have immediate consequences expressed as an exchange of poker chips. The constant exchange of chips reminds players that there is risk in every decision. Of course, the direction in which the chips flow in the short term only loosely correlates with decision quality. You can win a hand after making bad decisions and lose a hand after making good ones. But the mere fact that chips are changing hands is a reminder that every decision has consequences—that all those execution decisions you make along the way really matter.
Away from the poker table, we don’t feel or experience the consequences of most of the decisions we make right away. If we are winning or losing to a particular decision, the consequences may take time to reveal themselves. If we make a losing eating decision, like substituting SnackWell’s for apples, there’s no immediate outcome that lets us know there might have been a cost to that choice. If we repeat that kind of decision enough, there will be consequences, but they take time to play out. In business, if a leader ignores the ideas of an intern because “What does an intern possibly know?” it could take years for that intern to become a successful competitor before that mistake becomes obvious. If the trajectory of that business suffers because of the poverty of new ideas, the owner of the business might never realize the effect of that attitude.
The best poker players develop practical ways to incorporate their long-term strategic goals into their in-the-moment decisions. The rest of this chapter is devoted to many of these strategies designed to recruit past- and future-us to help with all the execution decisions we have to make to reach our long-term goals. As with all the strategies in this book, we must recognize that no strategy can turn us into perfec
tly rational actors. In addition, we can make the best possible decisions and still not get the result we want. Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them. Even when that effort makes a small difference—more rational thinking and fewer emotional decisions, translated into an increased probability of better outcomes—it can have a significant impact on how our lives turn out. Good results compound. Good processes become habits, and make possible future calibration and improvement.
Those methods involve a lot of mental time travel, and those poker players could teach Marty McFly and Doc Brown a thing or two.
Night Jerry
For all the scientific research on the battle between our immediate desires and long-term goals, a particularly succinct explanation comes from Jerry Seinfeld, on why he doesn’t get enough sleep: “I stay up late at night because I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. ‘What about getting up after five hours of sleep?’ ‘That’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem. I’m Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want.’ So you get up in the morning: you’re exhausted, you’re groggy. ‘Oooh, I hate that Night Guy.’ See, Night Guy always screws Morning Guy.”
That’s a good example of how we struggle in the present to take care of our future-self. Night Jerry is always going to want to stay up late and, if Morning Jerry has no say in the decision, Night Jerry will get his way regardless of what’s in Jerry’s longer-term best interest. When we make in-the-moment decisions (and don’t ponder the past or future), we are more likely to be irrational and impulsive.*
