When smart people make dumb decisions

We’ve all observed it.  Most of us have experienced it personally.  The deal gone way sour, or the wrong person hired.  The wrong product chosen to develop.  The wrong partner invited.  Many examples.  And when we look back over the history, there they were, the warning signs that should have screamed at us to turn back.  These are the kinds of mistakes that were preventable, not the failures that were caused by factors out of our control or because we couldn’t have known what we know now.

When I began making all my own business decisions, it was initially bliss and later became a pain in the neck.  First, there was no one else to blame for my mistakes.  And then whenever I did screw up, I had to endure a tongue lashing from a most unsympathetic boss.  In order to avoid those uncomfortable “performance improvement” discussions with the jerk, I made a field study of why hard-working, motivated, relatively intelligent people can somehow make the dumbest decisions.  I have identified several over the years.  And here’s one of them.

But bear with me.  First, a story.  I belong to a multi-site gym.  Last night I dropped into one that has underground parking.  The gym rats are required to park on the third level down.  Presumably they think we need the exercise.  And it’s appropriate for, well, rats.  It’s down deep in the earth, the air is stale, it smells of dirt and exhaust.  It could be a blazing hot summer day up on the surface, but not a photon would reach the third level.  So the garage has lights throughout.  After my workout, I left my space and moved down the aisle.  A car approached with its lights on, sliding inexorably towards me.  Just before I had to swerve and brake, the driver corrected his course.  As his car passed, he tossed out, “Headlights!” inferring that, without them, I was invisible.

My first reaction was to turn around, find the driver and explain to him that the high wattage illumination of the garage made my headlights superfluous.  Then I realized that, yet again, here is an example of the principle of human behavior that what we perceive is determined by what we expect.  The driver had come down from the night, where all the cars had their headlights on.  He was not expecting to encounter a vehicle without its lights on.  And thus he didn’t see me.  It didn’t matter that there was sufficient lighting in the garage to see a rat on a skateboard from fifty feet away.  His expectations determined what he was able to perceive.

Our expectations are driven by our motivations, by what we want.  If we want something bad enough, and we expect it to happen, we will fail to see many things that would steer us in a different direction.  If the deal is too important, if we really want it to be good, then we will see all the things that make it good, and none that say otherwise.  If we’re short-handed and can’t keep working eighty hour weeks, the candidates will begin to seem better and better.  It’s the same reason that the longer you stay at a nightclub, the more attractive everyone who’s left looks.

Whenever we find ourselves imagining the great things that will result if we take a particular course, or make a specific decision, it’s the warning flag to pause and pull back from the desire.  An alarm should go off in our heads with a neon sign saying “Don’t want it!”  There’s a difference between having a vision and acting to create it, and letting our expectations blind us to the facts.  My grandpa Roy used to say, “Life is the tension between what you think you want, what you’re willing to really work for, and what you ultimately get”.  Staying objective is part of the hard work that can help us get what we think we want.  And if we want it so badly that we can’t read the signs, the “it” we get may not be anything close.

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