(2022-01-27) Butler Decision Forcing Cases Gaining Experience Without The Hurt

Chris Butler: Decision-Forcing Cases: Gaining experience without the hurt. Product people play an amorphous, uncertain, and constantly renegotiated role on product teams. To do well in that role requires experience.

To become a great product person, you need to be able to understand the signals of a new situation and match it to analogies that have happened in the past.

In growing product people, I’ve found it more effective to bring them together for product critiques or to make learning look more like regular work than just asking them to take today’s online courses

How could we learn from each other more effectively? One more way I have found is in decision-forcing cases (DFC) as used in professional military education (PME) by the US Marine Corps (USMC). This is a step beyond the traditional case study as popularized in MBA programs and versions can be found in the legal and medical professions.

I first discovered DFCs through The Decision Game Club, a group of people who play out historic military scenarios aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico

Many military and military-adjacent professionals join on a weekly basis as part of their own continuing education.

The DFC, and its cousin the tactical decision game (TDG), are a story told in a way that you are the protagonist. You are presented with information that is incomplete and ambiguous (like the real world) and are asked to make a decision about what to do next.

If you want to see some of the TDGs used by the USMC, there is a book of them available online called Mastering Tactics by John F. Schmitt from 1994.

Some key differences between the DFC and the TDG are as follows:

DFCs offer a wide range of benefits. The most obvious ones include developing a person’s skills to make tough decisions under pressure, communicate those decisions clearly and concisely, and then defend them under scrutiny.

think critically, practice empathy, ask good questions, appreciate history, understand concepts

teach people on how to deal with huge amounts of uncertainty and problems with alignment.

The uncertainty is part of a term used in military circles: VUCA.

Product people deal with lots of VUCA in their day-to-day decision making, especially because they have imperfect information about their customers.

Carl von Clausewitz is often cited writing about the “fog and friction” of war in his book On War.

Product people also deal with huge amounts of friction

I’ve found that product people need to build a breadth of possible experience

Gary Klein and his work in expertise and naturalistic decision making (NDM) has often remarked that experts in fire fighting had a type of intuition (or even ESP) that they couldn’t explain

Even Gary’s training company ShadowBox uses this method by putting together various scenarios of the month like DFCs that take on traditional military tactics, child welfare, police work, and more

Cedric Chin of Commonplace recently summarized the book Accelerated Expertise that discusses how you get people to a level of expertise faster than just letting them gain natural experience.

Teaching atomised concepts will prevent novices from learning these connections, and may in fact result in either subpar performance or a training plateau later on.

I’ve found this is the case for teaching product management. We learn the artifacts and processes but not how they combine in the real world.

I’ve run product-oriented DFCs over the last couple months and found that product people are excited and interested in participating. Afterwards, they were excited to do more and felt it had a real benefit to their practice.

One of the benefits is that they got to see how peers would consider the situation differently than them

Everyone benefited by seeing more angles to a situation than they would be initially inclined to.

gaining some experience in another context let’s people prepare for different types of decisions than they may be on right now.

To write a case, you need to start with a real story, someone’s actual experience.

There should be nuance and complexity in what needs to be considered. In fact, the more complex the better. The discussion with the group will be more interesting and people’s assumptions will be challenged.

The key to writing a great DFC is to put the person in the shoes of the protagonist. From there, you give context and then ask important questions

I’ve found that reviewing the questions asked through the Socratic Method is a great starting point.

In addition to these steps, I like to make sure that the work we are doing is contextualized in the regular work of a product person

When running a DFC, you are a combination of a dungeon master (from Dungeons & Dragons) and a facilitator for a workshop. There is no right answer for people to give even if what happened already happened.

There are a few key aspects to prep before you give the DFC:

Ask “why” they believe what they believe–a lot!

A common request is to do “more user research” during the DFC. The response I usually give is a question “what would this help you decide?” and “what do you think you would learn from this?”

The more we know about other people on our teams and the way they approach problems, the better we can work with them.

I do want to make a particular distinction about DFCs vs. other methods for future circumstances that haven’t happened yet. I’m a huge fan of future-looking workshops like scenario planning and wargame-ing as they explore a hypothetical scenario

because the cases in wargaming may not be real there may not be enough cues for an expert to make a decision like they would in reality.

This is very different from a DFC, where we need to understand the context and how our decision making differs from what actually happened and why. The fact that it is a compressed version of a real story makes it different.

You not only learn about novel situations that you could be in, but also learn how other people (both junior and senior) might react in that situation. This is the core of gaining mastery in a very tricky profession.