Four big ways to avoid "Excusable failure"

How many times have you seen this?  A big group initiative kicks off and there are two paths:

< Insert Frost quote here, if you really feel the need >

One path is more likely to succeed, but everybody on the team is culpable if it fails.  It will take a lot of work and dedication, but if everybody pulls together success is almost certain.  If it the project fails, there's no mistaking why.

The other path appears solid, but is really more likely to fail because nobody on the team is culpable if it does fail.  Responsibility is diffuse.  Significant aspects of the project rely on people outside the project team (maybe even external vendors or consultants) who may be perceived as experts, but collect a check no matter what happens.  If the project fails, it's possible to point fingers and claim "we did everything we could".  Sometimes the participants even move on to bigger and better projects half-way through and leave the mess for their replacements.

I have seen this many, many times.  Enough where I started calling out "excusable failure" as decision factor.  Like many agency problems, excusable failure is the situation when the people who are most responsible for the success of the project are not held responsible in the event of its failure.

How can you beat it?

Make and keep meaningful commitments

This is a motto for all aspects of life, but especially matters when kicking off a new project.  Start up front with a set of valuable contributions your project will deliver, an achievable timeline for delivery and then put yourself in the critical path.

Don't substitute an explanation for an accomplishment

Every project should start out with identifying the various possible ways it will fail.  Pre-mortems, FMEA, etc. are all great tools.  Once you have a good list of possible failure mechanisms DON'T ACCEPT THEM.  The project is starting because you want to accomplish something.  Set the standard up front that only the projects goals will be acceptable--if any of those risks go wrong, we need to understand why, but we can't give ourselves a participation award, we FAILED.

Don't substitute an excuse for an explanation

There is a big difference between an excuse ("this thing happened, so you have to forgive me") and an explanation ("this thing happened, and therefore we can make sure it doesn't happen again").  Know which one you're searching for--always try to figure out what you could have done differently (there is always something you could have done differently).  If you find yourself starting to think about why things are going wrong, you had better also be thinking about how to stop that from happening.

Keep skin in the game

We have probably all seen a leader/manager "doodle jump" themselves away from their commitments to a new role before their failures caught up with them.  It works in the short run, but it leaves a trail of destruction behind and seems to always catch up at some point.  Don't do it. Keep your skin in the game and see things through to completion.

Metacognition, forecasts and estimating ability

tl;dr: Odds are pretty good that your opinions on everything are worse and more ill-informed than you think they are. Suspend judgment about the ability of others (positive or negative) because it is probably just an echo effect (they're brilliant if they agree with you and stupid if they don't). This is all especially true if you aren't an expert in the field under consideration. Don't apply this logic to others, apply it to yourself first.

Metacognition refers to the act of thinking about thinking. This is the same sort of concept as Freud's superego, or what phenomenologist philosophers call our consciousness. Kahneman might refer to it as "slow thinking".

In general, our brain has two methods for making a decision. By "decision" I mean just about any sort of conclusion about something. There is a fast method that runs ahead and draws its conclusions based on instinct, training, experience and mental shortcuts. The fast method is great for things that we are evolutionarily prepared for and for things where training is effective. Generally training is effective for things that require quick reflexes and that provide immediate, salient feedback. Fast thinking is gut feel and reflexes and is not something we are aware of consciously because it doesn't formulate in language -- it forms in action.

The slow method is what we think of as "thinking". It is logical, it handles new ideas and concepts. It is what we observe as "thought". It presents itself in our language and is shaped by the way our language works. Slow thinking spends a lot of its time confabulating a logical reason why the fast method came up with what it did. A lot of our thought is spent thinking about what we just did and justifying it to ourselves.

This where our ability to forecast comes in. Most of the time, when asked about the future, people immediately have a gut feel. That gut feel is hugely biased (too many forms of bias to go into now). As long as we don't get immediate and obvious feedback that the forecast was wrong, our brain has mechanisms in place to pat itself on the back for another great forecast. Even if the forecast is terrible, if the feedback is subtle or slow, our brain still thinks it did a great job and our metacognition formulates a story to back it up.

Unfortunately, most of the forecasting situations we face in the modern world don't provide immediate and obvious feedback.

This is the reason that we're all bad at estimating our ability. We are best at identifying problems when we have expertise with a subject. The better we are at something, the more capable we are of identifying when we screw it up. Conversely, the worse we are at something, the worse we are at identifying how bad we are. We blithely go along, thinking we're pretty awesome at the stuff we're worst at. Those who are the best at things are also the most aware of their shortcomings.

There are lots of examples of this in the world. I guarantee that Tiger Woods is far more critical of his golf game than a typical weekend duffer. Proof-reading the English language is another great example--if you don't know the rules of grammar very well, then you won't be aware of your errors. Driving is another example where people are notoriously bad at identifying their own skill (except race-car drivers, who are typically very slow drivers on city streets).

So what?

Well, this whole thing applies to business, sure. I think what's really interesting is how much it applies to politics. Look at how many people who know nothing about economics are judging the economic policy pronouncements of the Presidential candidates. Look at how many people who know nothing about police training are hypothesizing about their motives. Look at how many people who know nothing about life experience as a black American are denigrating their perspective. Science would tell us all those people are probably wrong and atribiliously wrong about it because they are even ignorant of their ignorance.