An insight from the cockpit - Is life a game of poker or a game of chess?

Life is poker, not chess. Chess contains no hidden information and very little luck. Poker, in contrast, is a game of incomplete information. It’s a game of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty over time. Valuable information remains hidden and there is also an element of luck in any outcome. The real world is closer to poker than chess. Uncertainty and luck take part in the game. The outcome is a combination of both luck and the quality of our decisions under uncertainty. This is a what Annie Duke, an American former professional poker player and author in behavioural decision science and decision education, argues in her book “Thinking in bets”. She also writes:“What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of lt;I’m not suregt;.”Wonderfully put if you ask me. We tend to evaluate decisions upon their result, but is our decision making process that we should evaluate. Easier said than done of course, because as human beings we tend to experience the world through all sorts of different lenses /biases.Anne Duke speaks, among other topics, about motivated reasoning, which works wonders for our peace of mind but is terrible for our decision making. And in this matter, The Devil′s Advocate from the Choiceology podcast or Julia Galef′s Ted Talk can shed some light.In aviation, we are obsessed with developing good processes for decision making, and this industry has proven that contrary to popular belief, good judgement can be taught. Once aeronautical decision making was included in the pilot training in 1987, there was a statistically significant reduction in judgement error.Do you want to know how we do it? My long story short would be: we control the “controllable” which allows us head-space for taking complex decisions under pressure. But what is controllable? Well if we compare it with poker, those would be the cards that were dealt to you. And your first decision is to accept or decline them. To fold or not to fold, that is the question ;)...if it is justified, you can always cancel a flight, there is no such thing as a forced takeoff.In aviation there are 5P you need to have under control: Plan, Plane, Pilot, Passengers and Programming. If you ask me, these 5 P′s can be summed up with a big PREPARE. You would think ahead, and step by step like in a logic scheme and you would make sure that you didn′t miss anything. For this purpose, checklists are a must and also some mnemonics such as: IMSAFE, ARROW, PAVE… which all stand for things such as pilot wellbeing, aircraft revision, paperwork, environment and external pressures.You might say, well that sounds good Ana, I′ve checked my cards and it is a “GO”, or “CALL” if you prefer poker terms. But then you go flying and suddenly, whether you like it or not, it is an “ALL IN”. What do you do? Well, when you listen to those pilots who made the right call and got to tell their story, they all say: “It was back to basics”, “The training kicked in”, “I just applied the procedure”. Because in the end is that what we are, aren’t we? – Professional decision makers – Tammie Jo Shults was told that she had “nerves of steel” because after safely landing a damaged aeroplane her pulse and heart rate weren′t even accelerated.Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgement and decision-making, as well as behavioural economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences describes in his “Thinking, Fast and Slow” two systems that drive the way we think:System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional – in aviation it was called: Automatic Decision making.System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical – in aviation it was called: Analytical Decision making.Let′s start with the latter. Analytical Decision decision-making is a form of decision-making that takes both time and evaluation of options. For taking these kind of decisions we follow a process previously learned to help us logically make good aeronautical decisions. A form of this type of decision-making is based upon the acronym “DECIDE.” (Detect, Estimate, Choose, Identify, Do, Evaluate). There are many acronyms though, like the one I learned at during my training at Simtech Aviation: “T-DODAR” (Time, Diagnose, Options, Decide, Assign, Review). If you are a pilot, how did you learned it?Key for this kind of decisions is a skill that we absolutely love in aviation - situational awareness- in other words, have you heard of “What you dont know wont hurt you?” – well that′s the exact opposite.There is another situation though, one in which there is no time for thinking nor for making decisions. According to the Federal Aviation Administration: Automatic decision making is an emergency situation in which a pilot might not survive if he or she rigorously applied analytical models to every decision made; there is not enough time to go through all the options.For the past several decades, research into how people actually make decisions has revealed that when pressed for time, experts faced with a task loaded with uncertainty, first assess whether the situation strikes them as familiar. Rather than comparing the pros and cons of different approaches, they quickly imagine how one or a few possible courses of action in such situations will play out. Experts take the first workable option they can find. While it may not be the best of all possible choices, it often yields remarkably good results. We owe this knowledge to Mr. Gary Kleinn, a research psychologist famous for his work in the field of automatic decision-making.During our flight training we identify and learn to operate in both systems. An automatic decision making process governs our reaction to an unexpected event (stabilise the aeroplane, put oxygen mask on, react to wind shear, etc) and an analytical decision process is the one we would use to prevent an emergency situation or to address it once we are out of the danger.nbsp;Aeronautical decision making is an evolving and complex study and my purpose is only to give an insight to how aviation has approached this task of understanding human minds and translate it in a solid decision making process. Coming back to the poker and chess ideas, the game of chess is meritocratic and transparent. There is no room for interpretation and you can rationally and without bias pinpoint your best moves and your mistakes. It is the perfect environment to practice and learn and ultimately develop a good decision making process. The equivalent of chess in aviation could be the professional flight simulator, an environment in which we acquire a systematic approach to a mental process to consistently determine the best course of action in response to a given set of circumstances.When we suddenly find ourselves in a game of poker, we play our cards with confidence and courage, because we arenbsp;“the man - or woman in my case :) - in the arena”, we win and lose many times at the game of chess. Enough to know that while no victory is guaranteed we can put up a good fight.All this being said, my forced conclusion is that: If you want to increase your odds of “winning hands” at the game of poker, play some chess!