B.O.W. (Based on what?)

At a meeting of a number of related organisations a question came up about what effect a recent change in legislation would have on the number of people wanting to contest matters in court.

• one group believed that it would make no difference because, based on their experience, most people didn't realise that the law hadn't always been as under the changed legislation.
• one group didn't care since it had no impact on them.
• one group stated that they hadn't collected any figures that would lead them to a reasonable estimate

And then the CEO of a fourth group spoke up and said "Another 20,000 cases a year".

The question you would need to ask is "Based on what?". While any of the other three organisations could be considered to have taken a somewhat reasonable position, conjuring a figure out of thin air doesn't seem very reasonable. What makes it even less reasonable was that the types of cases that were likely to be affected by the change in the law only accounted for about 10% of those going to court and the total going to court numbered less than 20,000 per year in total. So the CEO of the fourth organisation was surmising a ten-fold increase in the number of those kinds of cases going to court, from 2,000 to 20,000.

When you see things like that happening, you have to wonder how they came up with the figure and why they felt obliged to come up with any figure at all, especially in an area in which they were clearly unfamiliar.

In some organisation you see this happening all the time. A CEO tells employees that business is going to double in the next 2-3 years, based on a naive confidence that a business that they supply is going to meet its growth targets even though the other business has consistently failed to meet its targets in the past and even though there is likely to be a change in owners within a year.

There are times when you need to articulate your assumptions and then make a realistic estimate as to how likely it is that those assumptions hold true. Once you spell them out in black-and-white then it becomes clearer whether what you suppose to be the case is based on anything at all, whether it is based on shaky assumptions or wishful thinking. And when assumptions are surfaced, you can provide the opportunity for other people to question them and possibly gain new information of which you were previously unaware. This in turn can shape a re-estimate of how things are likely to turn out.

However, if you fail to bring assumptions into the light of day where they can be questioned, if you fail to ask yourself "Based on what?" then you are setting yourself and your organisation up for failure. You may invest resources where they are not needed and raise the costs of your business without any corresponding gain. And you may lose the confidence of employees as to whether you have sound judgement, if you repeatedly make claims which fail to materialise.

A similar question is: What makes you think that? I find this question useful when a colleague makes a judgement about someone else in my organisation, especially when the judgement surprises me. I want to know if there is something useful my colleague knows that I don't. What I tend to find is a mixture of fact and interpretation and when I make a few tentative interpretations of my own I begin to draw out the information on which their judgment is based, whether it comes from a credible source and whether the judgment is reasonable or whether there may be a more charitable interpretation. In some cases, I can add things that I know that shed light on the situation, so that we both emerge with greater clarity.

The lesson here is that judgments don't exist in a vacuum. They are underpinned by:

• biases,
• blindspots
• assumptions,
• interpretations 
• limited knowledge
• ignorance
• failure to effectively use the knowledge you do have
• believing something which is in fact not true
• not adequately weighting the reliability of different information sources
• believing a situation is stable but which is actually in a state of flux (or vice versa)
• overconfidence in your own infallibility.

When you are surprised that something didn't pan out the way you expected it is a signal to re-evaluate your assumptions and to learn how you went wrong. The situation may have changed in a way that could not have been predicted. But equally, it could have changed in a way that was foreseeable given the facts you had at your disposal. It is an opportunity to learn about your particular weaknesses in judgement so that you can correct them or so at least in future you can ask yourself: "Am I making the same mistake again? What am I missing?".

At least then a momentary failure can sow the seeds of better judgments in the future.