(2011-08-27) Kelly Decision Making In A Complex World

Joseph Kelly: Decision making in a complex world. Streetlights and Shadows is a book by Gary Klein that takes commonly held maxims for decision making and overturns them, revealing cases where these practices break down. The book’s title comes from the story of the man who went looking for his lost housekeys under a streetlight instead of where he lost them in the shadows – he went for where there was more light. We do the same when we resort to old maxims that only help in ordered situations without realizing we need something different

He begins by outlining ten of the most widely held beliefs taught about systems and decision making, and after telling a few stories about each he describes a replacement maxim. The ten claims and their replacements are:

Teaching people procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully. Replacement: In complex situations people will need judgment skills to follow procedures effectively and go beyond them when necessary.

Our plans will succeed more often if we identify the biggest risks and then find ways to eliminate them. Replacement: We should cope with risk in complex situations by relying on resilience engineering rather than attempting to identify and prevent risks.

All of his replacement claims have common themes of adaptability, experience, and expertise winning over stricture, linear thinking, and risk management. I’ve found almost all of his ideas to be directly applicable to running a startup and the challenges of making decisions in that kind of environment

His more subtle examples include statements about goal setting, risk management, and heuristics. These examples are especially applicable to teams of people and early stage projects. It’s nearly impossible to set goals in the beginning of projects when there are so many unknowns. Admitting this, and acknowledging that you will have to discover and revise your goals along the way, let’s you clear your mind of these issues and get back to doing. During the process, if you stay aware, the goals you were looking for will emerge on their own.

An early stage company is essentially a group of people trying to do something together. Each person will have their quirks and challenges that make them difficult to work with. You can tinker with a lot of things in a startup’s early days, but not your founding team and stars.

they are unlikely to change

It’s up to you to build a culture where the erratic geniuses around you can get their work done, while minimizing their disturbances to progress elsewhere. A lot of my job is just supporting systems that create a more resilient environment where these folks can still thrive.

Some of the biggest ideas missing from Klein’s book come from war. Although he used a few examples from the modern military to show where local problems occur due to a misguided belief in some of the claims above, he made no mention of Boyd and his work on adaptability and the OODA loop, in which expertise and intuition are the keyholes. Klein even has a diagram of his own that looks like a dumbed down version of the loop. (Recognition Primed Decision making)

Carl von Clausewitz’ idea of friction also gives us a unique stance from which to appreciate Klein’s work. Friction is a very apt term to use when thinking about startup problems. Acknowledgement of its ever-presence, with the care to combat it using the toolkit Klein provides, just might help us get better at making good decisions in our complex world.