Outcome bias

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If you’ve read some of my posts over the last few years, you’ve probably seen some of my fascination (and struggle) with the idea of separating decisions from outcomes. Brent Menswar’s book “Black Sheep” gives a simple name to it: outcome bias.

Using an outcome to justify whether a decision is good or bad is something behavioral scientists call “outcome bias.”

It’s so easy to look back on a decision to determine the quality of it based on how things played out in the end. That can sometimes be helpful, but often will lead you to poorer decision-making in the future.

Two easy examples that I’ve likely shared before:

  • You’re playing poker and you’re dealt two aces to start, so you stay in. You eventually lose the hand. Does that mean it’s a bad decision to stay in when you get two aces to start? Of course not. That was a good decision that happened to lead to a bad outcome.
  • You get quite drunk and decide to drive home. You make it home safely; no accident, no ticket. Does that make driving home drunk a good decision? Of course not. That was a bad decision that happened to lead to a good outcome.

Outcome bias is tricky, but recognizing it can help you to really judge the quality of a decision based on the merits of the decision itself (and your information at the time), versus simply seeing how things played out in the end.

The Sunday Summary: Marking automation, hopeful AI, and bad ways to go viral

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In an effort to help me keep up with everything I post each week, here is my latest “Sunday Summary” of my posts from the week.

Mon, September 30: Reflecting on experiences
John Dewey, American philosopher, educator, and cofounder of the philosophical movement known as pragmatism, once said, “We do not learn from experiences, we learn from reflecting on experiences.”

Tue, October 1: Marketing automation works best when it’s backed by humans
If you want to run some automations with your company, they can be a great way to provide value — just make sure to keep some humans in the loop as well.

Wed, October 2: The hopeful side of AI
I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to see far too many companies touting AI advances of “Send 10x the email to your prospects” or “Outsource your customer support to our new AI bots”, but there is a lot of good coming too.

Thu, October 3: Train people well enough so they can leave
“Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

Fri, October 4: Satisfying your customers isn’t nearly enough
“If you merely seek to satisfy your customers, they’ll only stay with you as long as you’re not worse than the competition. However, if you invest in the customer service experience to exceed expectations and build trust, your customers will be so impressed and happy that they’ll willingly contribute to your success.”

Sat, October 5: Hatred for outgroups is the best way to go viral on social media
“Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%.”

I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Hatred for outgroups is the best way to go viral on social media

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I have a great tip for you today to help you go viral more often on social media: show a lot of hate. While we all say that we want to more uplifting content on social media, hate spreads much more quickly.

I know you’ve all seen it, often from very “nice” people online that show outright hatred for certain groups. In a recent podcast from Adam Grant, Jay Van Bavel shared a massive study that made the numbers very clear:

Analyzing posts from news media accounts and US congressional members (n = 2,730,215), we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%.

The idea of “ingroups vs outgroups” is something that I first shared a few months ago, but it’s something I notice all the time now that I’m aware of it. As Jay points out in that show, we also see similar actions at the Olympics, when “patriotism” goes too far and turns into “nationalism”. Rooting for your side to win is great, but actively working against others is where the problems come in.

Jay’s solution?

“Just because you identify with the group doesn’t mean you’re going to discriminate against outgroups. If the norm is inclusivity, the more you identify with the group, the more inclusive you become, and the more you embrace other people and differences in other groups and cooperate more, it’s not a bad thing as long as we have healthy norms.”

Fight for your side and fight for what you believe in, but be a good human.

Satisfying your customers isn’t nearly enough

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Satisfying your customers is a good thing, and it absolutely beats the alternative. In most environments, though, “satisfying” falls far short of where you need to be.

In the book “Raving Fans“, the authors argue for this very point:

Blanchard and Bowles argue that there’s a clear distinction between satisfying your customers and exceeding the expectations of your customers. If you merely seek to satisfy your customers, they’ll only stay with you as long as you’re not worse than the competition. However, if you invest in the customer service experience to exceed expectations and build trust, your customers will be so impressed and happy that they’ll willingly contribute to your success.

In the book they share the story of a very popular gas station and the simple focus behind it:

In Raving Fans, the owner of the successful gasoline station explains how to continually surprise and delight your customers: Always deliver more than you promise.

This is key, but it can be tough. Essentially, to pull that off, you need to under-promise. That’s great when you’re in the midst of a project, but then selling the project in the first place becomes much trickier.

I remember a few years ago we were talking to someone who needed a website built fairly quickly, and I told her it’d be around 12 weeks to build (which was accurate). She insisted she needed it more quickly, so I talked through it with the team, figured out where we could shave a bit of time, and got it down to nine weeks. It would have been a stretch, but I knew we could pull it off. That wasn’t good enough, so she went with someone that said they could do it in six weeks.

The site launched 23 weeks later.

Solving that one is tricky. As long as people are willing to stretch the truth to make a sale, they’re hard to beat. The antidote to that is trust. If you spend the time to build up trust with your potential customers, they’re no longer going to try to shave a week off here or there. If people are searching specifically for our company (rather than something like “web design companies in Atlanta”), that’s a huge first step.

It’s like the story of how we chose our CPA firm. When it came time to make the hire, I didn’t search for “CPA firms for creative agencies”, I searched for “Jason Blumer”.

Because Jason came in with that kind of head start (at least in our mind), he been able to take opportunities to surprise and delight us over the years.

Satisfying your customers is table stakes, but delivering more than they expect can turn them into raving fans.

Train people well enough so they can leave

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There’s a maxim I’ve heard a few times over the years that goes something like: “You should invest in your team to make them the best that they can be. This may mean that some leave for better opportunities, but that beats the opposite of just not investing in them at all.“

This came to mind while recently listening to Richard Branson on Adam Grant’s ReThinking podcast where Branson said:

“Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”

It’s vitally important to do both.

  • If you fail to train people “well enough so they can leave”, you’re stuck with a bunch of employees that aren’t very valuable.
  • Of course, if you train them super well but treat them poorly, then you’re going to have never-ending churn.

The challenge is that it takes time, effort and resources for both sides of that. You’ve gotta commit to continue to train and treat them well perpetually, but if you can do it the payoff will be amazing.

The hopeful side of AI

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There is a lot coming because of AI, and much of is not good. There’s not a ton of awful things to expect, but a lot of just… yuck. Like I shared yesterday, I suspect we’ll see more spam email, more AI-powered chatbots, more automated social posts, and just a lot of “we don’t need humans for that anymore”.

However, there are things to love about what AI can bring that go beyond just saying “we can be more efficient”. For example, here are three simple ones that we’re already starting to see:

Search and augment my notes
AI is doing some neat things with note-taking, among them being the ability to search and synthesize my notes, as well as add a bit more context to them. Being able to talk to an AI about my notes while I’m in them is pretty neat, and it will continue to improve rapidly.

Search my team’s notes
I thought we’d have this by now, but hopefully soon. For our team, essentially everything is in Google Workspace. We use it for email, calendars, documents, spreadsheets, video calls, Analytics, and more. I expect very soon to be able to ask “how many design comps did we promise Acme?” or “when did Sara and I discuss her challenges with MailChimp?” and get an instant answer. It’ll be awesome.

Medical care
I’m perhaps most excited about this, because the current and near future implications are giving us the best of both worlds; AI help, but with a doctor backing it so you don’t need to be scared of the outcomes. For example, AI is becoming quite good at identifying abnormal x-rays and when it finds a problem a doctor can pull it up to confirm or deny. This is huge time-savings, it will decrease missed findings, and should lead to better outcomes for many.

I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to see far too many companies touting AI advances of “Send 10x the email to your prospects” or “Outsource your customer support to our new AI bots”, but there is a lot of good coming too.

What are some good things you hope to see from AI in the coming years?

Marketing automation works best when it’s backed by humans

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If you’ve followed my writing for very long, you know I’m not a big fan of automated emails. There are cases where they are done correctly and can be valuable, but the most common implementation seems to be “cool, let’s blast stuff out!”.

If you’re going to automate, I suggest two main rules:

  • Send it from a real address, not from “noreply”.
  • When someone responds, engage with them like a human.

It seems pretty easy, yes?

A few years back I shared the story for the bizarre marketing automation when I was looking to trade my car at Mountain View Ford, and now I’m back with a similar tale of woe. This time I was looking at lease rates on a Mustang Mach-E with Wade Ford, and the email automation and chaos was something to see. Here’s a quick look at what happened:

Note that the Mountain View story above was from five years ago. Surely dealerships have improved their technology since then, right? I guess not.

Again, this is very simple. I can make a case for some light automation in these kinds of situations, but the degree to which these salespeople ignore my actual requests for information is stunning.

As I mention in the video, I fear that AI is going to make this even worse. I still consider email to be the perfect vehicle (ha!) for working on a deal for a car, as the nature of asynchronous communication means that both parties can take some time to formulate offers and responses, but you can still move forward fairly quickly. It seems I’m in the minority here, but that doesn’t excuse the kind of sloppiness shown in that video.

If you want to run some automations with your company, they can be a great way to provide value — just make sure to keep some humans in the loop as well.

Reflecting on experiences

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We all experience many things, and there is a lot to be learned from those experiences. The question is: how do you actually learn from them?

As explained in Tara Jaye Frank’s book “The Waymakers“, it’s not the experience itself that creates the learning. She shares:

John Dewey, American philosopher, educator, and cofounder of the philosophical movement known as pragmatism, once said, “We do not learn from experiences, we learn from reflecting on experiences.”

That’s a big part of why I write every day. I have experiences, I learn things from reading, and I pick up ideas in conversations, but they all disappear if I don’t properly reflect on them.

Journaling can do a great job of this as well, so if you journal in private you’re likely gaining most of the benefits that I get from writing on here. In either case, finding time to reflect is key to making your experiences something that will create real growth.

The Sunday Summary: Making assumptions, multitasking, and seeing every animal at the zoo

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In an effort to help me keep up with everything I post each week, here is my latest “Sunday Summary” of my posts from the week.

Mon, September 23: Finding material to deploy attention
“Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.”

Tue, September 24: Of course we make assumptions about others
“We can’t not make assumptions about people. Assumptions are how we navigate a complicated world where we don’t know and can’t know everything about everyone. All we can do is notice the assumptions we’re making and ask why.”

Wed, September 25: Multitaskers are the worst at multitasking
“The people who multitask the most tend to be impulsive, sensation-seeking, overconfident of their multitasking abilities, and they tend to be less capable of multitasking.”

Thu, September 26: Interleaving your skills
“I assumed it would be ideal to practice one skill until you make progress, and only then move on to the next one. But rather than repeating the same challenges over and over, Brandon mixes them up. In twenty-minute intervals, Brandon Payne has Steph Curry bouncing from one shooting-and quickness challenge to another. The variety isn’t just motivating—it’s also better for learning. Hundreds of experiments show that people improve faster when they alternate between different skills. Psychologists call it interleaving, and it works in areas ranging from painting to math.”

Fri, September 27: You can’t be perfect, but it’s easy to be good
When I first became a mother at twenty-five, someone gave me a quote on a tiny piece of paper by Jill Churchill that read, “There is no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.”

Sat, September 28: Covering the zoo
Maybe it will hit you that you’ve been acting as if the goal of the outing was to “cover every inch of the zoo,” rather than to “have fun and see some interesting animals.”

I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Covering the zoo

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The difference between a stated goal and what the goal really is can be staggering. Take this simple idea from Madeleine L. Van Hecke’s book “Blind Spots“:

Maybe it will hit you that you’ve been acting as if the goal of the outing was to “cover every inch of the zoo,” rather than to “have fun and see some interesting animals.”

This stood out to me because our family went through this very thing years ago. For a while, when we’d rarely visit the zoo, we’d feel a need to cover every inch of it. That shouldn’t have been the goal, but for us it mistakenly was.

However, on one visit the zoo was offering a great deal on a season pass, so we took them up on it. From then on out, our goal shifted to just having fun and seeing some interesting animals, since we knew we’d be back again soon.

It shouldn’t have taken a season pass for us to understand that, but I’m glad it worked out well in our case. This has me thinking of other places where this might apply, as it’s always essential to understand the real “why” of everything we do.