"All Things Considered" is a Lie
John was a test pilot with a problem. He didn’t know it, but everyone on his team did. They had been alerted to a situation inside John’s test vehicle that threatened not only the test flight, but John’s life as well. As they considered what to do, the team was able to determine that the problem was one of two things: a deadly, catastrophic failure, or just a bad sensor.?
John’s team worked feverishly to resolve the problem, but they had very little information to go on and the team’s leaders were split on the solution. One side wanted to proceed normally, where the other faction thought that they should alter their test plans on the fly and hope for the best with an improvised landing. If the problem was indeed just a bad sensor, there was nothing to worry about. However, if the malfunction actually was mechanical, failing to do something would mean certain death for John. They were quickly running out of time.
The team’s leader decided to go with the new, untested procedure and hoped that John would be safe as the test flight concluded. Updated instructions were given to John, who could do little other than follow the directions given to him to get back safely.
Minutes later, John landed in the north Atlantic Ocean, but this was the plan all along. He had just become the first American to orbit the Earth. The success of the mission was monumental and a huge victory for the United States space program. Eight years before the “successful failure” of the Apollo 13 mission, John Glenn’s team had brought their hero back to Earth, focused solely on keeping him safe. In the end, it wound up being a faulty heat shield sensor after all.?
Consider the term “Perfect Information.” Sounds nice! Imagine if you could face each of your decisions with perfect information. Another way to put it would be “without hidden information.” Every single possible outcome has been calculated and you can use all of those solutions to inform your final decision. If this were true, you would always make the right choice and you would never be wrong. Sign me up!?
Chess is a (normally) two-player game, waged on a playing board with 64 squares. Each player begins the game with sixteen pieces:?
Each piece can move in only a certain manner, and only one piece can be moved at a time. And though this is relatively simple, the variation in the game is far beyond our comprehension. In 1950, Claude Shannon, an American mathematician, calculated the lower bound of the game-tree complexity for chess. He estimated the number of possible games and outcomes given the restrictions of the pieces and their movement. His number? 10 to the 120th power.?That’s a 10 with 120 zeroes behind it.?
It is worth pointing out the number of atoms in the known universe is estimated to be 10 to the 80th power (10 with 80 zeroes). After only 5 moves by each player, there are more than 69 trillion possible games. Most championship chess matches involve around 40 moves for each side. These are huge, impossible numbers. Humans aren’t capable of processing 60 million positions per second the way that modern chess engines like Stockfish can. These computers are mainly effective because chess is a game of perfect information. Every move from beginning to end is known. Nothing is hidden. There is no chance or randomness. Player choice drives everything.?
The grandmasters at the top of the sport of Chess haven’t memorized quadrillions of outcomes to help inform the decisions they make in a match. The game can be distilled down into a simple, single objective:?
Checkmate the King.?
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Strategy before Tactics
With the end goal in mind, there must be a series of actions that move in that direction while adhering to the rules of the game. In Chess, they might be minor related strategies revolving around controlling the center of the board, improving position, or eliminating your opponents pieces. In the real world, the same is true. We build our actions and tactical decisions around lesser included objectives surrounding the main goals.?
Life is not a game with perfect information. I know, understatement! We often make decisions with considerable ambiguity, and chance is nearly always part of the equation, if not a significant factor. Because of this, it is rare that we can completely and exhaustively plan for every possible outcome, even when variables and past history are taken into account.?
Your professional and personal worlds are infinitely more complicated and subject to chance than a board with sixty four squares and thirty two pieces that can only move one at a time. Even still, you manage to make it through most days with a pretty simple set of objectives: Sleep, eat, work, play, and repeat. Certainly there are more specific objectives that you navigate as well. The variables are generally known to you and most of the time, you achieve your objective, at least in the short run.?
First responders handle tens of thousands of emergency calls for service over the course of their career. Every single one of them is inherently different. Over time, however, experienced professionals recognize the overarching solution to the situation they’re facing and come to understand that they’re really only dealing with the same 20-30 types of problems over and over again. The who, where, when, why, and how are variable. The same is true for you and the challenges you face. After a while, you’ve seen the same general things over and over again in variation. This is true in other professions as well. All the more reason to seek a strenuous life so that your wisdom and experience can help guide you though a challenge knowing that you’ve faced similar obstacles before.?
“Good outcomes are CAUSED.” - Michael Hyatt
If we cannot control chance, or calculate every possible outcome in our lives, it is critical to instead have a cohesive set of actions to accomplish our objectives, whatever they may be:
Think about the tough decisions or problems you’re facing in your life now, either at home or work. There’s a good chance you know what outcome you want for each of them. For each of these tasks or objectives, the end goal is a start, but not enough to ensure success. The tactical steps must still be developed, and they must align with the overarching objective. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time or resources. Reducing ambiguity, risk, and chance doesn’t hurt either.?
No need to memorize quadrillions of possible outcomes or unnecessarily account for unknowns. Resolve yourself that you cannot take every single scenario under consideration or calculate its variants to find the perfect choice in every instance. You'd better get comfortable with some degree of uncertainty and operating with accepted unknowns. The good news is, you can still take purposeful, proximate actions that will make your ultimate outcome more possible than if you started "in the weeds."
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1 年Really well written, Matt! Good analogy on first responders. It brings to mind the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule, formally referring to the idea that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. Applied loosely in other ways in a professional context, what are the systems we can build that address 80% of situations that arise in order to repeatedly achieve a set of outcomes? Focus on building THAT system, knowing (and being ok with the fact) that there are going to be other unique circumstances that arise from time to time that are not foreseeable for which the system is less effective. Because to attempt to create a system that DOES contemplate all these infrequent and unique situations will then take a disproportionate amount of effort in a classic curve of diminishing returns. Closing the loop on the Pareto thought... the 20% of effort spent building a system that addresses 80% of the situations is more impactful than the other 80% of effort spent trying to build a system that also addresses the remaining 20% of unique situations, which realistically, would be impossible.