Causes of the Challenger Explosion

Cause 1: Space Shuttle Challenger exploded because of failing O-ring seals that were not designed to handle the cold temperatures of the launch morning.

Cause 2: Space Shuttle Challenger exploded because NASA was a dysfunctional organization.

The most immediate cause of the explosion is the O-rings failing. This is the proximate cause.

Why did the O-rings fail? Because they weren’t designed for cold weather.

Why did the space shuttle launch during cold weather? Because NASA allowed it to launch.

If you continue down the path of whys, you eventually get to the true cause, or the root cause.

In this case, the root cause was a dysfunctional NASA.

Discovering the Root Cause with Super Smash Bros

Once you know the proximate cause, continue to ask why until you discover the root cause.

I went to a Super Smash Bros tournament a few months ago and lost a few close sets (I ended up at 9th place…relatively mediocre).

Q: Why didn’t I win the Super Smash Bros tournament?

1. I got hit by Charizard’s f-tilt while doing a standard getup. Why?
2. I wasn’t ready for it and I didn’t know how to react from the ledge. Why not?
3. Because I didn’t bother figuring it out before the match. Why not?
4. Because there are a lot of matchups in the game, and I didn’t plan for them all. Why not?
5. Because I didn’t allocate time to plan for each matchup. Why not?
6. Because there are other things I value more.

Of course, this isn’t the only path the whys could take.

The proximate cause for losing is getting hit by a particular attack.

The root cause is that I don’t value winning enough to allocate more time to it.

Interesting.

Years later, I would have my language students practice something similar when working on their pronunciation. Sometimes it was popping the air for the p consonant as hard as possible. Other times it was making a final consonant sound as soft as a cloud. This also worked.

The idea here is that when we have an unintuitive skill, exaggerating it on both ends can be useful in reaching a more optimal medium.

Too shy, boisterous, polite, slow to speak? Try to exaggerate beyond what you think is natural. Then gather results and adjust from there.

My school folders were never particularly neat. I regularly forget where I put things. My desk is somewhat haphazard.

So the way I stay afloat is by subtracting anything possible, leaving only the essentials. Organization via negativa.

My desk has nothing on it except for my computer. I follow about 20 people on Twitter at a given time. My desktop has no links (I enjoy the background images). I commonly uninstall programs I’m not using anymore.

It’s still messy sometimes. But the difference between messy and clean is putting my headphones away, I’m able to stay on top things.

Damn, I learned a lot from him.

There were the outdoors skills (how to pitch a tent and tie a fisherman’s knot), the sports knowledge (how to make a bank shot, run a play-action, why Magic and Kareem were great), and cooking (trick garlic bread, bird’s nest, french toast). This list is not exhaustive.

Then there were the slightly less-obvious things: how to have fun playing an instrument (he loved playing the guitar and singing songs by The Beatles), the right mindset for playing youth sports (“have fun and do your best“), that throwing a temper tantrum was never the right option no matter what I was upset about (I only tried once).

Sometimes the lessons were confusing: “don’t apologize, just don’t do it again” never seemed to be consistent in its application.

And other times I had to learn from his struggles: addiction can haunt even the strongest.

But I did learn. From his frustration, sorrow, and regret. And from his persistence, happiness, and love. From all of it.

I am eternally and infinitely grateful.

I think she anchored my dish based on yours.

Anchoring is a cognitive bias where we rely too heavily on the first piece of information we get. It’s often used in pricing and negotiation. One extremely highly-priced piece of art can make the still-kind-of-expensive prints look like a deal.

Like any mental model, it’s helpful to have a fun or emotional story to be able to deeply understand it. This is mine.

The Octopus Decides

Last time I was in Malaysia, my colleagues took me to a food court for lunch. One of the options was a buffet with a variety of meat and vegetable dishes (mostly cooked in a Malay or Chinese style).

It wasn’t an “all-you-can-eat” buffet where you pay upfront and eat until you’re full. 

Instead, you filled up your plate and then took it to the cashier. 

When I asked my colleague how the cashier decided the price, he told me that it was almost as if an octopus was deciding (like Paul the Octopus, who decides the winner of football matches). In other words, an unpredictable magic heuristic.

The Octopus Finds a New Anchor

A normal price for a local was 8MYR. One of my colleagues made it up to 12MYR once. 

So I stacked my plate with everything I thought looked good and took it up to the cashier. I saw a smirk appear and quickly vanish before she told me the price…”15 MYR”.

And then my colleague, who ate there everyday and got his normal portion went up next…”15 MYR”.

I chuckled and apologized to my colleague after seeing his price. 

“I think she anchored my dish based on yours,” my colleague responded.

Most definitely.

The food was good, though!

Not only was it fun to play, but it was also very illustrative of the difficulties of making decisions when there are competing factors on a medium-to-long time scale.

How Pandemic Works

I find boardgames incredibly hard to learn without playing them, but here’s a paragraph from the Wikipedia entry for Pandemic with the very basics and a YouTube video for the curious:

The goal of Pandemic is for the players, in their randomly selected roles, to work cooperatively to stop the spread of four diseases and cure them before a pandemic occurs.

So how can we use Pandemic as a Metaphor (PaaM hereon out) for decision making? Here are a few examples.

Paam #1: The Decision-Making Process

Each Pandemic turn, players go through a similar process to make decisions about what they should do.

Very generally, strong play takes the form of looking at your progress towards winning or losing the game (cures gained, outbreak count, cards left), observing the current state of the board (where the player pieces are, infection rates in various cities), what moves will hit the optimal medium between preventing outbreaks and finding cures, and then talking through the planned moves while actually doing them.

In other words, it’s like an OODA loop (orient, observe, decide, act).

Startups have to do this constantly. What are the winning conditions? What is the current state of things? What’s the most effective move to hit the winning conditions? Alright, let’s do it.

PaaM #2: Fires vs Downstream Potential

That’s a good strategy for not losing. But I don’t think it will help us win.

– JB explaining why my positioning strategy wasn’t a great idea.

Each Pandemic turn, players try to decide the optimal combination of reducing the infection in particular cities vs sharing knowledge and building research stations in the hope of finding a cure.

This is an excellent metaphor for making a decision to solve urgent problems vs one to set up for ultimate success.

On the one hand, if players lean focus too much on curing diseases and ignore the cities that are heavily-infected, they’ll lose the game rather quickly.

Neglect your current customers because you’re busy planning the future? Well that will certainly burn some bridges.

But that doesn’t mean you should spend all of your company hours on customer service. Time is limited, after all.

Similarly in Pandemic, if players lean too heavily towards reducing infections (short term urgent play), they may run out of turns and will lose the game (this happened to our team in my first game).

In business, this kind of over-optimizing for urgent tasks could be those customer emails…or tweaking homepage copy for the next campaign…or refactoring the code, or whatever.

And all of these tasks are valuable! So is saving cities from outbreaks.

But time is a non-renewable resource. And that’s why the decision-making is hard.

So back to the first part of this metaphor, Pandemic is a great metaphor for the tradeoffs you face when making decisions about whether to solve urgent problems or to do important work that sets up for later success.

PaaM #3: Information Completeness & Stability

So if we do this in five turns, we should be able to win.

– Shortly before drawing an Epidemic Card

The final metaphor is focused on how complete and stable your information is at a given time.

In Pandemic, like in real life, things can change quite quickly. One Epidemic card can transform an unassuming North America city into one turn away from a potential game-losing Outbreak.

So when making decisions, players have to consider the current state of the board as well as the probability that they’ll draw a card that might change everything.

Of course, the players usually don’t know what the next card to be drawn will be so their knowledge isn’t complete. They just have to guess to the best of their ability.

How often do we have incomplete information in real life? Almost always?

Like Pandemic, having incomplete information in real life means we have to guess to the best of our ability. Life and business are not “solved games” (though there are certainly patterns that lean towards better outcomes).

Regarding information stability, the game is also quite fitting. What players know about the game board changes each turn and they adjust their strategy accordingly. Players often try to plan out what to do five turns later, only to find out that the game board has made their plans unusable.

In business, planning too far ahead at a point when information is rapidly changing seems like a waste of time. It’s an exaggeration, but would it make sense to spec out the details for version 5.5 of your app when you’re still putting together the alpha version? Of course not.

But it does make sense to think a few steps forward. Or even further into the future if the detail is less granular. Perhaps the pattern is that the less stable the information, the less granular plans can be.

Of course, I don’t want to do any of these.

But thinking via inversion can illuminate otherwise invisible paths.

On Workism:

A mother sent her son with an empty bottle and a ten-rupee note to buy some oil from the nearby grocer’s shop. The boy went and had the bottle filled, but as he was returning he fell down and dropped it. Before he could pick it up, half of the oil spilled out. Finding the bottle half empty, he came back to his mother crying,“Oh, I lost half the oil! I lost half the oil!” He was very unhappy.

The mother sent another son with another bottle and another ten-rupee note. He also had the bottle filled, and while returning fell down and dropped it. Again half of the oil spilled out. Picking up the bottle, he came back to his mother very happy: “Oh look, I saved half the oil! The bottle fell down and could have broken. The oil started spilling out; all of it might have been lost. But I saved half the oil!” Both came to the mother in the same position, with a bottle that was half empty, half full. One was crying for the empty half, one was happy with the filled part.

Then the mother sent another son with another bottle and a ten-rupee note. He also fell down while returning and dropped the bottle. Half of the oil spilled out. He picked up the bottle and, like the second boy, came to his mother very happy: “Mother, I saved half the oil!” But this boy was a Vipassana boy, full not only of optimism, but also of realism. He understood, “Well, half of the oil was saved, but half was also lost.” And so he said to his mother, “Now I shall go to the market, work hard for the whole day, earn five rupees, and get this bottle filled. By evening I will have it filled.”

This is Vipassana. No pessimism; instead, optimism, realism, and “workism”!

From The Art of Living by S.N. Goenka (PDF Link)