Well-calibrated decisions matter for your organisation's people and culture
It turns out most humans are overconfident as a default. I always overstate how much sightseeing I can pack into a day of holiday. Although my holiday plans aren't consequential, overconfidence can erode trust in domains that matter.
Ever had a contractor confidently tell you that your bathroom renovation will 'be done in 3 weeks'? If they are still going after 7, would you book them again?
Ever heard a politician confidently claim their plan will work better than anything that came before? If it doesn't, what happens to your vote next time?
McKinsey and Oxford's Saïd Business School studied over 5,400 large IT projects and found 81% of public-sector ones ran over schedule. The study states that this was driven by unclear objectives, unrealistic scheduling, and skill gaps. To me, this sounds like the kind of thing that can happen on any business project, including those about people and culture: well-intentioned people are often overly optimistic about their plans.
Let's focus on people and culture work. This pattern shows up there too. A leader says "we need a two-day training course on how to give better feedback." The easy, confident-sounding move is to agree and say you'll make it great. The better move is to pause and ask, 'how confident am I that training is the answer? If it isn't, what risk does that create for my reputation? How much time of our staff will be wasted?' This kind of pause is where Core-4's decision moments live (see Core-4 if you haven't already, it's a four-phase structure for solving business challenges).
So if calibration, where confidence and accuracy are similar, is rare, how can we improve our ability?
Like learning your scales on an instrument, we can improve through practice. To get started, here are two things you can try this week:
Run a pre-mortem. Grab a team of trusted colleagues. Cast your minds 6 months ahead and assume your project has failed. Ask what likely caused that failure. A premortem forces your team to consider a wider range of failures and update their estimate before you launch, not after.
Listen for overconfidence in others. When a leader tells you what they need, notice which Core-4 stage they're making a claim about (defining the problem, diagnosing the cause, or designing the fix), then ask them how confident they are in that call. That question, asked with compassion and critical thinking, tends to build credibility and minimise overconfidence.
Take it from me - practice does make better. I now plan much calmer holiday schedules than I did 7 years ago.
References
Much of my thinking on calibration is shaped by time spent around the Behavioural Insights Team's research and the people there who think about it properly - the framing and the tools here are mine, but the inspiration is theirs.
Behavioural Insights Team, "Stay calibrated: a practical guide to debiasing decision-making" bi.team, link
Hallsworth, M. & Egan, M. (2018), "Are you well-calibrated? Results from a survey of 1,154 BIT readers" BIT blog, 21 May 2018, link
Bloch, M., Blumberg, S. & Laartz, J. (2012), "Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value" McKinsey & Company, in collaboration with the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, link
