An Outsider amongst Insiders — A Journey of Benign Indifference
Daniel Kahneman in his famous book, ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ dedicated a chapter of his book to his experience with the Israeli Ministry of Education where they worked to develop a curriculum on teaching judgement and decision making within Israeli high schools. He takes a rather anecdotal approach to this piece of his life, sharing both the methodology approach they took as well as the social interactions he shared with the other researchers. In terms of applications of the lessons from being an ‘Outsider’ there are plenty, but I would like to commit this piece of writing to the challenges faced by my fellows and I within Data Analytics and Product Management.
Regardless of industry or sector, companies and organisation all around the world, past present and the future will face and have faced issues of project delays, cost overruns and bloated budgets that are the result of decision making that underestimates the volatility of well…life. ‘The Universe is Change. Life is Opinion’ (Marcus Aurelius), but we sometimes believe the change happens on our own expectations.
Kahneman begins the chapter with his first piece of advice that public discussions are not always best path to take but collect private judgement of members involved confidentially before the actual discussion. The purpose of this approach is to maximise the value that we can collectively extract from all the information available to us and prevent particular narratives from dominating the conversation. This reminds me of a scene from the TV series Quantico, where in episode 3 ‘Cover’ all the FBI NATs (New Agent Trainees) write profiles about each other as part of a psychological portion of their training. Whilst this is not exactly the same as Kahneman’s collecting judgements privately before a public discussion, the NATs writing their profiles before its public reveal opened up much information about how each trainee viewed the others and vice versa — maximising everyone’s view on each other’s perception of one another.
In the setting of our regular workday activities, we are always having to make decisions on projects and within the context of technology teams, they concern mostly to do with the products themselves or commercial activities around the company. Especially within large organisations, where opinions can get drowned out by the volume of voices willing to express the loudest, something that has not been helped by the working from home situation of most corporations, meetings can easily become anchored by particular opinions, which in effect translate into decisions with a bias to only a handful of rhetoric. This is not actually new nor very novel idea, as famously reported that Amazon conducts meetings in a similar structured format, or at least they do, where they ‘silently’ read a narrative-structured memo for 30 minutes or Twitters google-doc style meetings. Bezos was quoted saying that this method helped him and others value their time and purpose of meetings by adding ‘scope’ to their discussions.
Traditional meetings can lead to overconfident believe in delivery capability of work, leading to overconfident planning, only to be overrun by large delays and a U-turn. And it is not always easy to insert an alternative opinion when one can easily be overshadowed by other more extroverted individuals whom may unintentionally ignore ideas of the contrary. Cerebral lethargy of people is common in unwilling to challenge the tide not because they agree with what is being said but just that is not always easy, especially if you do not have a coherent line of thought to express in the heat of the moment.
What you see is all there is? (WYSIATI –coined by Kahneman)
One issue I have found common is that regardless of who is presenting, we tend to just believe that what we see is all there is about the subject.
Within Data Analytics, we tend to assume time to time that our data is all there is regarding the subject and thus all conclusions derived from it is all there is about that topic. For myself, I too am guilty of such foolhardiness, driven by the zest of credit than the inclination to serve properly (and thoughtfully) the one requiring the insights. For those who do not know me, I have worked in both product management and investment management and now in data analytics — and throughout each endeavour I have encountered moments and projects where I have had to influence the decision or make one myself, often using data and sometimes without (quite foolhardy when the latter is done with ego). As a way to maybe not fall into the insiders trap, that a few things mean I know more than others regarding a topic to try validate using external sources of data, produced by parties not impacted directly by our organisation. This way we won’t have our hand in how it is collected and if an apples to apples comparison is possible, helping to invalidate or not our hypothesis and hunches. I said invalidate, another way of saying to disconfirm because to fail is to learn, and within these data heavy teams that I work mostly with, we are in need to constantly learn about our products and services, the market and most importantly our customers/users.
But the insider has context the outsider just does not…
The voice of the insider should never be seen as permanently impaired because the inverse is also sometimes true, I have found. When approaching a problem from a birds eye perspective, my colleagues and I have often made the opposite mistake that our ‘number crunching, comic description made by our more non-data colleagues of what data analytics is, reveals all there is to know about the matter. Ironically we were giving conception to a type of inside view, which cultivated out of the impression that we are an outsider to the matter. In many ways the inverses of the perspectives were much closer in relation to one another in abstract structure than one initially thought. Bearing in mind, I or others would approach the problem after we have had a short discussion and guidance on the wider project; it’s not a solo activity. Here we would often see friendly opposition to the ideas we presented and have our recommendations challenged as ignoring some important tenants of the subject matter. One would kindly point out, “hey Shadman, while your graph does show there has been a clear shift in consumer behaviour, our conversations with market players have suggested that this is because they have opted to use a different method to conducting their business across borders — so in fact doubt is being raised as to whether what you think you see if actually something else altogether”. I have generalised the topic and the nature of his disagreement to preserve the anonymity of our clients and uphold privacy policies but what I wanted to show here is how as the data partner, I failed to understand the context in which the data was collected.
“We do not view objects in their true light, but view them from the light within us”
Positions of such as outlined above are quite interesting because I find the next increment of work as building on the convergence of our two understandings, mine coming from a data perspective, and the others coming from a day-to-day business experience. They taught me something quite valuable, “We do not view objects in their true light, but view them from the light within us”. Sometimes it is necessary to borrow the light, like the moon from the sun, of others to help better illuminate our path so that we have better equipped for the upcoming journey. And simple things like business review calls, where there is a proper set agenda and shared judgements prior to the call have been really good in helping to improve my work as a data partner in whatever project I have been involved in. This was also true in my product management role, focusing more on empathy for the user’s experience of the product rather than solely focusing on the data itself.
The end of a beginning amidst many firsts
Being a short passage, I don’t want to finish with concluding remarks, as I am very far from the end (barely a beginning to some) but that my time so far working in my various roles so far within finance and technology has helped me uncover some rather classical teachings, conveyed through the medium of contemporary problems; insider or outsider — we are both depending on the circumstance and context — share a ‘benign indifference’ between each other. Each angle of perception brings forth not the true nature of the problem at hand but a perspective that is tied to the logic of that particular perspective. If it is in opposition to others, friction is likely, and only by being open about where our logic is coming from can help to illuminate the path to resolution, where we are able to succumb from the “illusionary meaning” (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)
