Lighting ?? on ??

“Have you ever built an extension on your house??It’s like Vietnam; you can’t get out.”

-Elliot Hirsch, The Newsroom

Whenever a Jewish organization I love launches a building campaign, I lose sleep.?

(Josh, you need better nightmares.?Point taken).

At some point, someone told you that the Jewish community has an “edifice complex,” and loves investing in buildings more than people.?I’m not sure if the evidence supports this claim, but I worry about our obsession with buildings for a different reason.?Tell me if this story sounds familiar:

1. Jewish organization X wants to build a beautiful facility, setting a significant fundraising goal
2. This organization raises some, but not all, of the money to complete the project
3. Rather than modify building plans and right-size ambitions, the organization decides to implement the original plan without the money, convincing themselves that, “When people see how beautiful it is, the rest of the money will come”

Tragically, I know Jewish organizations of every variety that took this path and suffered the consequences; some survived, many declared bankruptcy, and a few disappeared altogether. And in each instance, what I could not understand was why so many leaders chose to double down on the initial mistake. Too often, instead of finding a way out of the financial quagmire, leaders chose to pour every available dollar into a building that “anyone” could see would never attract the funding or interest promised in the original vision.

To me, this is the closest example of leaders falling guilty to the “hardened heart” we see from Pharoah in Parashat Bo.?Like Pharoah, leaders who make flawed commitments can, to quote Aviva Zornberg, become “imprisoned within the world of [their]…own critical choices.”??

Perhaps my analysis resonates with you because you lived or are living through this kind of crisis, but my interest is in understanding why so many people make this mistake, which leads us to think week’s heuristic.

Escalation of Commitment

Barry M. Staw coined the term “escalation of commitment” in a 1976 paper called “Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy,” an homage to Pete Seeger’s 1967 song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a song protesting President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War.?To quote Seeger,?

“Every time I read the papers

That old feeling comes on;?

We're waist-deep in the Big Muddy

And the Big Fool says to push on.”??

Ouch…I guess Peter Seeger was not a fan of LBJ (said Captain Obvious).

While many scholars of Staw’s era wanted to analyze why the United States government continued to pursue the Vietnam War, Staw’s analysis focused on how the instinct to escalate war is not that different from how human beings escalate commitment to other lost causes.?The human instinct that led a government to pursue an unwinnable war is the same instinct that allows people to avoid selling bad investments, managers to keep the underperforming staff they hired, or organizations to build something they cannot afford and spend money they do not have trying to salvage the unsalvageable.

Staw links the instinct to escalate commitment to two sources of self-justification, one internal and one external.?Internally, Staw argues that individuals choose to escalate commitment to “restore consistency between the consequences of…actions and a self-concept of rational decision making.”?Admitting a bad decision leaves a permanent mark on a person’s self-confidence; it can be easier just to try and the rightness of the original decision.

Externally, Staw argues that people, or groups, escalate commitment to “prove to others that a costly error was really the correct decision over a longer-term perspective.” Given that most decisions are not unanimous, bad decisions can be escalated in order to avoid someone else saying “I told you so.”?

Of course, neither of these justifications actually helps the person making the decision, and leads to what Staw calls a “negative cyclical process.”

Building campaigns are not the only kind of bad decision Jewish organizations make, but they are unique in the sense that after spending years raising money, making architectural plans, soliciting naming opportunities, getting people excited, and imagining the end result, it can be tough to throw all of that away.?However, the longer one postpones walking away, the more likely it is that the bad decision will compound to the point of dire consequences.

When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People

I was a philosophy major in college; this was an easy choice for me.?I figured that it would be a fantastic challenge to find the usefulness in a major often deemed to be useless.??Twenty years later, I feel great about my choice for a single reason: studying philosophy made me less afraid of thinking critically.

Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro believe that philosophy can save us from ourselves in a world rife with terrible thinking (and not just on social media).??When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People is their attempt to help people save others from their terrible thinking through philosophy.

To be honest, I’m not sure they entirely succeed in this goal.?Some of the worst thinking comes from people who love to say that they are just “stating facts” or “being rational”; so it’s hard to mess with their bad thinking by claiming the philosophical high ground.????

However, the reason you should consider reading this book is that Nadler and Lawrence argue convincingly that “the life of examination” is the kind of life led by a person who wants to avoid the kind of heuristics we are learning about in this newsletter.?They write that “This question of why we believe something may be the most important question of all and is likely the key to curing bad thinking.”

Leaders who have the courage to ask why they believe what they believe about their decisions are the ones most likely to identify traps before making unwindable mistakes.??Sometimes, this will require changing an earlier decision, and admitting a mistake, which is not easy.?But leaders who are effective and willing to admit when they are wrong are my favorite kinds of leaders, and I suspect I’m not the only one.

Weekly Links

1. 87% of Jews Feel Less Safe One Year After Colleyville: I find thinking about what it would feel like to live through a tragedy like Tree of Life or Colleyville impossible and necessary; it turns out many American Jews feel like I do.?Nobody at those synagogues went to shul thinking that something like that would happen, and we all need to stay informed.
2. Action Plan for Cyber Resilience: If your organization does not have a plan to deal with the potential of Ransomware or other Cyberattacks, you needed to create a plan yesterday.?Any organization connected to the internet is at risk.??Here is a great introduction to get you started.
3. Who Wants the Metaverse?: Turns out, not many people.?Read more at Jstor.
4. How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?: Going back to our discussion of hot and cold empathy, we are still learning the nuances of how different people approach solving problems. Here is a piece from the always fantastic Joshua Rothman of The New Yorker on how to approach this question.??
5. Why Do We Do Our Best Thinking in the Shower?: My college essay for Brown University was on why I do my best thinking in the shower (spoiler alert: I was rejected).?At least The Washington Post was paying attention???

Moneyball Judaism?is published every Sunday night at 8:00 pm ET on Substack, and republished on LinkedIn and Medium on Wednesday; click?here?if you would like to subscribe for the Sunday evening email.