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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Is the Think Again framework in need of rethinking?, May 31, 2009
The authors of "Think Again," impeccably credentialed and versed in management strategy, are eminently qualified to scrutinize the performance of executives and senior managers in making organizational decisions. In their book they discuss numerous cases involving high-ranking decision makers. It is quite sobering, though not at all surprising, to see so many atrocious decisions consistently being made by people who are supposed to be masters of that craft. Evidently, these professionals are nowhere near as proficient as they are usually deemed to be. In view of the prevalence of this situation, it is hard to avoid concluding that, on the whole, top decision makers are no better at doing their job --making the right decision-- than would be a randomly selected employee drawn from the ranks of their own organization. Even more troubling is the fact that no other professional field of endeavor seems to suffer from such an appalling condition.
The book tackles this disconcerting problem by proposing a framework which consists of three parts: a description of how our brains make decisions and how it can be tricked into false judgments, an explanation of four posited conditions under which flawed thinking is likely to happen, and a set of safeguards prescribing how to counterbalance the four sources of error. The brain is presented as a pattern recognition apparatus that employs emotional tagging and one-plan-at-a-time processing to make sense of what's going on in the world and devise a response to the perceived challenges. Most of that processing, however, is conducted beyond the realm of consciousness, so the hapless (and ostensible) decision maker is in an extremely weak position to question the validity of the brain's verdicts or its torrent of neural decrees. The clinical evidence sustaining this point is striking: V.S. Ramachandran's notable work in behavioral neurology is cited on several occasions. (See Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind.)
Decisions go wrong, state the authors, because of two factors: (1) an individual or group makes an error of judgment (which follows from the above) and (2) the decision process fails to correct the error. Four sources of error, called red flag conditions, are identified: misleading experiences, misleading prejudgments, inappropriate self-interest, and inappropriate attachments (yes, of the type denounced by Siddhartha Gautama). The authors then advance four categories of safeguard to counter the inevitable errors: provide decision makers with new experiences or data and analysis, create group debates which challenge biases, institute governance teams to protect against flawed judgments, and set up extra monitoring processes to track the progress of important decisions.
That is all very fine. But is it an adequate description of and, more importantly, a reliable solution to the problem of faulty managerial decision making? Let's see.
Consider one of the cases discussed in the book: John F. Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. According to the authors, the preceding year's Bay of Pigs fiasco taught Kennedy a lot, namely, how not to wage war or rattle sabers. This time around, "Kennedy recognized the red flag conditions and created a process that reduced the risk of a flawed decision." Specifically, "Kennedy set up a decision process to create room for rigorous and multifaceted debate" by forming the ExComm committee of senior advisers. "President Kennedy rejected early options involving air strikes or invasion, asking ExComm to think again to see whether there was a solution that reduced the risks of nuclear war. As a result, they came up with what proved to be the best option: a blockade of Cuba." (The quotations are from pp. 159 and 160.)
Proved to be the best option?
The 40th Anniversary Conference of the Cuban Missile Crisis held in Havana, Cuba on 10-12 October of 2002 revealed the following: (Source: National Security Archive, George Washington University)
1. US intelligence never located the nuclear warheads for the Soviet missiles in Cuba during the crisis, and only 33 of what photography later showed was a total of 42 medium-range ballistic missiles.
2. The US Navy dropped a series of "signaling depth charges" (equivalent to hand grenades) on a Soviet submarine at the quarantine line. According to the Soviet signals intelligence officer on the receiving end inside submarine B-59, Vadim Orlov, the depth charges felt like "sledgehammers on a metal barrel." Unbeknownst to the Navy, the submarine carried a nuclear-tipped torpedo with orders that allowed its use if the submarine was "hulled" (hole in the hull from depth charges or surface fire).
3. Exhausted by weeks undersea in difficult circumstances and worried that the U.S. Navy's practice depth charges were dangerous explosives, senior officers on several of the submarines, notably B-59 and B-130, were rattled enough to talk about firing their nuclear torpedoes, whose 15 kiloton explosive yields approximated the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in August 1945.
That nuclear war was averted was due to extraordinary prudence on the part of the Soviet leadership and naval commanders mixed with an abundance of sheer luck, not to a debate-based decision process on the American side which in several respects was clueless as to pivotal facts. One cannot conclude that just because the outcome turned out fortuitous the decision --or the decision maker(s)-- was therefore correct. Had Washington or New York been blown off the map, this book would almost certainly have not declared that ExComm "came up with what proved to be the best option." The correctness of a decision cannot be predicated on the uncontrollable occurrence of a specific favorable outcome.
The authors go on to claim: "Kennedy found a way of allowing Khrushchev to back down without losing face, by using backdoor Russian contacts to secure a trade: the withdrawal of US missiles stationed in Turkey for Soviet agreement to dismantle the missiles in Cuba." (p. 160) They repeat that claim on page 168: "... helped him [Kennedy] come up with the idea of trading the missiles in Turkey for those in Cuba." Those assertions are incorrect. In his letter to Kennedy of 27 October 1962, Khrushchev states: (Source: Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, October 27, 1962, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum)
"Your missiles are located in Britain, are located in Italy, and are aimed against us. Your missiles are located in Turkey.
"You are disturbed over Cuba. You say that this disturbs you because it is 90 miles by sea from the coast of the United States of America. But Turkey adjoins us; our sentries patrol back and forth and see each other. Do you consider, then, that you have the right to demand security for your own country and the removal of the weapons you call offensive, but do not accord the same right to us? You have placed destructive missile weapons, which you call offensive, in Turkey, literally next to us. How then can recognition of our equal military capacities be reconciled with such unequal relations between our great states?"
"I therefore make this proposal: We are willing to remove from Cuba the means which you regard as offensive. We are willing to carry this out and to make this pledge in the United Nations. Your representatives will make a declaration to the effect that the United States, for its part, considering the uneasiness and anxiety of the Soviet State, will remove its analogous means from Turkey. Let us reach agreement as to the period of time needed by you and by us to bring this about. And, after that, persons entrusted by the United Nations Security Council could inspect on the spot the fulfillment of the pledges made."
The point to be made here is this: even the authors, who --individually and as a monitoring team-- are deliberately focusing their best efforts at explaining and promoting the Think Again framework as the recommended means of safeguarding against errors of judgment, failed to catch and correct the error. Why should one expect things to be any different in the executive suite? This lapse calls into question the credibility of the entire framework, particularly when it comes to real-time situations where the available information is rarely unambiguous, complete, properly structured, sufficiently precise or demonstrably accurate.
Consider another case from the book: Paul Wolfowitz's dalliance with questionable ethics at the World Bank. True to their framework, the authors attribute Wolfowitz's conduct to inappropriate attachments (pp. 129-34). Perhaps this was far too generous a judgment. Other possibilities spring to mind, including outright corruption and, if Wolfowitz's role in instigating the still ongoing war in Iraq is allowed to figure in the assessment, plain old managerial incompetence. The possibility arises that by pigeonholing the faculty of reason with preconfigured templates of red flags and safeguards, the Think Again framework may actually hinder the process of procuring accurate interpretations of reality necessary for unbiased and efficacious decision making.
That might explain why the authors' judgment of Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku in the Battle of Midway (chapter 4) seems biased. Their portrayal of Yamamoto as an inflexible strategist bent on carrying out his pet plan irrespective of the concerns of his superiors (which was a factor, though by no means the only one nor the most critical, as shown below) is compatible with the framework's one-plan-at-a-time assumption. But never is it mentioned or taken into account (1) that Lt. Col. Jimmy...
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"On second thought....", March 24, 2009
In a previous book published in 2004, Sydney Finkelstein explains why smart executives fail and what we can learn from their mistakes. In Think Again, he and his co-authors, Jo Whitehead and Andrew Campbell, investigate this subject in much greater depth. They "traveled to the heart of decision making in organizations of all shapes and sizes throughout the world" and began to assemble a database of decisions that went wrong, "decisions in which any clearheaded analysis at the time would have concluded that it was the wrong decision." They realized that at least some decisions based on considered thinking can turn out badly because of unforeseen risks. Also, "Sometimes people are just unlucky." With considerable difficulty, they differentiated between flawed decisions and calculated risks that turned out badly. What did they learn? "The answers were "simpler and more powerful than we were expected. Two factors are at play in a flawed decision: an individual or group of individuals who have made an error of judgment, and a decision process that fails to correct the error. Both have to be present to produce a bad decision. This is an important realization." Indeed it is. There are others throughout the authors' narrative.
First, they focus their research on how brains make decisions. They explain how the brain "has been wonderfully designed for decision making - but also how it can be tricked into false judgments." (Part One, Chapters One-Four, Pages 3-71). Next, they examine the four conditions under which flawed thinking is most likely to happen. "We call these [begin italics] red flag conditions [end italics] because they provide a warning that when these conditions exist, even an experienced decision maker can get it wrong." (Part Two, Chapters Five-Eight), Pages 75-153). Then in Part Three (Chapters Nine-Eleven, Pages 157-204), they suggest which "special steps" must be taken to ensure that a decision does not go "off the rails." When there are red flag conditions, they recommend four types of external "safeguards," each of which can help an individual to "strengthen the decision process, so that the distorted thinking is diluted or challenged." Readers will also appreciate the provision of two appendices: a database of cases and a database of safeguards. The authors also extend an invitation to visit two Web sites, www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/thinkagain and www.thinkagain-book.com, for additional advice, ideas, and resources.
It is important to keep in mind, of course, that there are limits to the extent that safeguards can defend against the risk of error. For example, one or more of them may not be fully understood and/or improperly established and/or ineffectively applied. The same is true of red flags. There must be a comprehensive and active system in place throughout the organization that will elevate them whenever flawed thinking is about to produce a bad decision. In many organizations, governance processes and rules in place and rigorously maintained can cause other problems. "Each major blunder leads to additional processes and rules that are applied to all major decisions. The result is a bureaucracy that is costly, time consuming, and demotivating. Most importantly, managers start to lose respect for the system and seek ways of circumventing the processes." The safeguards framework described in this book will be effective only if and when there is a culture of candor, one in which everyone is not only encouraged but required to express principled dissent, especially when doing so "speaks to power." Dante had excellent reasons for reserving the last and worst ring in hell for those who, in a moral crisis, preserve their neutrality.
I commend Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell on their rigorous and thorough coverage of a major challenge that decision-makers in all organizations face each day: What are the right questions to ask, what is the best answer to each, and how can I verify that? Even then, it is not possible to eliminate all the risks. "Even armed with our safeguards framework, leaders will still make mistakes - but it possible to improve the odds."
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Finkelstein's aforementioned Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes and Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls co-authored by Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis as well as Torkel Klingberg's The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory, Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide, Joseph Hallinan's Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, and Phil Rosenzweig's The Halo Effect: ...and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Don't look back in anger, August 17, 2009
I was handed this book at the conclusion of a management seminar I had unexpectedly enjoyed, and so spurred by that novel experience but otherwise against my better judgement, decided to give it the benefit of the doubt.
The authors' programme is interesting enough - to analyse famous the decision-making process that culminated in the most egregious political and corporate blunders - but it would be guilty of 20:20 hindsight were it not for the caveat that examples selected were those which were patent howlers even at the time the decision was made, as opposed to informed punts that just didn't work out. Some of the examples may well be controversial: time might have sufficiently told on Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco, but I dare say there are more than a defiant few who would still defend the decision to invade Iraq, which makes me wonder whether the determination "obvious on its face howler" itself is only that can only emerge after the passage of time and opportunity for sober reflection. If so, much of this book's thrust is undermined.
In any case the authors have sifted through literally hundreds of such obviously catastrophic decisions and from them extracted some commonly occurring "red flags" which, they say, could have pointed to concerns about the soundness of the decision at the time - "misleading experiences" and "misleading pre-judgements" informing the decision, and "inappropriate attachments" and "inappropriate self-interest" undermining the judgement of the decision-maker. If you spot one or more of these reg flags floating about when you're about to make that major call, reach quickly for what the authors identify as "safeguards" - seek more data and further analysis; conduct full and open group debate (but no more than is necessary) to surface contrary points of view; insist on rigorous governance for the decision governance; and monitor the decision-making process.
All of which is fine, and so much common sense, but it's hard to put into any kind of workable practice. Exactly which experiences and pre-judgements are misleading, and which are on the money, is the sixty-four thousand dollar question - difficult to know until the scenario has played out, at which point - too late - it becomes dead easy. Yet this is, of necessity, the point before which the authors cannot begin their data-gathering. And the authors present cogent evidence of our tendency to rationalise or justify inappropriate conflicts and attachments, meaning it will be necessarily difficult to know what we're on the lookout for.
I have a sense that the case-histories are somewhat self-selecting and suffer from a sort of inverted survivor bias: from the fact of a catastrophic decision one then proceeds to identify the missed red flag behind it (and there must be one, or it wouldn't have been a catastrophic decision, by the authors' own theory). All these car-crash anecdotes make for entertaining, schadenfreude-filled reading (it's a bit like watching one of those police chase TV shows) but its value informing a prevention strategy is not easy to gauge. It is much harder, after all, to identify those decisions where red flags were identified, safeguards employed and a catastrophe was unequivocally averted.
That said, "Think Again" is definitely food for thought, so it certainly does what it says on the tin, and the case studies make eye-watering reading, but the real lesson is the more general one that we're far less rational and far more dangerously capricious than we like to think.
Olly Buxton
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by Paul A. Argenti
