much negative space there really is, we shrink down the positive space to a size that more accurately reflects reality and less reflects our naturally optimistic nature.
We make better decisions, and we feel better about those decisions, once we get our past-, present-, and future-selves to hang out together. This not only allows us to adjust how optimistic we are, it allows us to adjust our goals accordingly and to actively put plans in place to reduce the likelihood of bad outcomes and increase the likelihood of good ones. We are less likely to be surprised by a bad outcome and can better prepare contingency plans.
It may not feel so good during the planning process to include this focus on the negative space. Over the long run, however, seeing the world more objectively and making better decisions will feel better than turning a blind eye to negative scenarios. In a way, backcasting without premortems is a form of temporal discounting: if we imagine a positive future, we feel better now, but we’ll more than compensate for giving up that immediate gratification through the benefits of seeing the world more accurately, making better initial decisions, and being nimbler about what the world throws our way.
Once we make a decision and one of those possible futures actually happens, we can’t discard all that work, even—or especially—if it included work on futures that did not occur. Forgetting about an unrealized future can be dangerous to good decision-making.
Dendrology and hindsight bias (or, Give the
chainsaw a rest)
One of the goals of mental time travel is keeping events in perspective. To understand an overriding risk to that perspective, think about time as a tree.
The tree has a trunk, branches at the top, and the place where the trunk meets the branches. The trunk is the past. A tree has only one, growing trunk, just as we have only one, accumulating past. The branches are the potential futures. Thicker branches are the equivalent of more probable futures, thinner branches are less probable ones. The place where the top of
the trunk meets the branches is the present. There are many futures, many branches of the tree, but only one past, one trunk.
As the future becomes the past, what happens to all those branches?
The ever-advancing present acts like a chainsaw. When one of those many branches happens to be the way things turn out, when that branch transitions into the past, present-us cuts off all those other branches that didn’t materialize and obliterates them. When we look into the past and see only the thing that happened, it seems to have been inevitable. Why wouldn’t it seem inevitable from that vantage point? Even the smallest of twigs, the most improbable of futures—like the 2%–3% chance Russell Wilson would throw that interception—expands when it becomes part of the mighty trunk. That 2%–3%, in hindsight, becomes 100%, and all the other branches, no matter how thick they were, disappear from view.
That’s hindsight bias, an enemy of probabilistic thinking.
Judge Frank Easterbrook, a leading jurist and member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, warned about the danger in the legal system of assessing probabilities after one of the potential futures has occurred. Jentz v. ConAgra Foods involved a “hot” grain bin owned by ConAgra and the company it hired (named West Side) to investigate and deal with the cause of the burning smell, smoke, and raised temperatures from the bin. After failing to solve the problem, West Side’s foreman told ConAgra to call the fire department. He then told some of his employees to remove tools from a tunnel to the bin that could impair firefighters’ access.
While the workers were in the tunnel, the bin exploded, severely injuring the West Side employees. Those injured sued ConAgra and West Side. The jury awarded $180 million in compensatory and punitive damages. In addressing the punitive damages against West Side, Judge Easterbrook, writing for the court, pointed out that Illinois law required a “gross deviation” from the standard of care to award punitive damages.
Finding no evidence in the record of any foreseeable likelihood of explosion at the time the foreman ordered the workers to remove tools from the tunnel, he concluded, “The verdict appears to be a consequence of hindsight bias—the human tendency to believe that whatever happened was bound to happen, and that everyone must have known it. If [the foreman] believed that an explosion was imminent, then he is a monster; but of that there is no evidence. Hindsight bias is not enough to support a verdict.”
Once we know there was an explosion, it’s difficult to imagine the actions of the parties when the explosion was only one of several possible futures. The members of the jury had a conflict of interest. When they heard the story of the men entering the tunnel to retrieve the tools, they knew the outcome. The jury lopped off the other branches of the tree, all the other ways things could have turned out given the situation in the grain-storage bin and, in hindsight, all they could see was a confluence of circumstances with an inevitable tragedy at the end.
Imagine how things would be different for the protagonists throughout this book if more of us acted like Judge Easterbrook.
Steve Bartman could have used a stadium full of Cubs fans with Judge Easterbrook’s perspective. They would have recognized that the Cubs losing the game was only one of many ways it could have turned out. At the moment Bartman and others around him reached for the foul ball, the branch of the future where Steve Bartman touches the ball was a small one, and the chance of the Cubs losing after that was the tiniest of twigs, requiring a number of unlikely on-field developments (like the pitching ace giving up hit after hit, and the great-fielding shortstop committing a rare error on an inning-ending double play). Just as the foreman ordering workers into the tunnel didn’t cause the explosion, Bartman touching the ball didn’t cause the loss. He just got an unlucky result, based on all the things that happened over which he had no control after the foul ball touched his hands.
Pete Carroll and the world of Monday Morning Quarterbacks could have used the judge’s reminder that we tend to assume that, once something happens, it was bound to happen. If we don’t try to hold all the potential futures in mind before one of them happens, it becomes almost impossible to realistically evaluate decisions or probabilities after.
This turned out to be a big part of the problem for the CEO in the wake of firing his president. Although he had initially characterized the decision as one of his worst, when we reconstructed the tree, essentially picking the branches up off the ground and reattaching them, it was clear that he and his company had made a series of careful, deliberative decisions. Because they led to a negative result, however, the CEO had been consumed with regret.
When he looked back at his decisions, he couldn’t see all those branches
and their likelihoods. He could only see the trunk. All he saw was a bad result.
The CEO removed all those other branches with a chainsaw and ran them through a wood-chipper. They disappeared and he acted as if they never existed. That’s what hindsight bias is, and we’re all running amok through the forest with a chainsaw once we get an outcome. Once something occurs, we no longer think of it as probabilistic—or as ever having been probabilistic. This is how we get into the frame of mind where we say, “I should have known” or “I told you so.” This is where unproductive regret comes from.
By keeping an accurate representation of what could have happened (and not a version edited by hindsight), memorializing the scenario plans and decision trees we create through good planning process, we can be better calibrators going forward. We can also be happier by recognizing and getting comfortable with the uncertainty of the world. Instead of living at extremes, we can find contentment with doing our best under uncertain circumstances, and being committed to improving from our experience.
Reaction to the 2016 election provides another strong demonstration of what happens when we lop branches off the tree. Hillary Clinton had been favored going into the election, and her probability of winning, based on an accumulation of the polls, was somewhere between 60% and 70%, according to FiveThirtyEight.com. When Donald Trump won, pollsters got the Pete Carroll treatment, maybe no one more than Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight.com and a thoughtful analyzer of polling data. (“Nate Silver was wrong.” “The pollsters missed it.” “Just like Brexit, the bookies blew it.” Etc.) The press spun this as a certain win for Clinton, despite the Trump branch of the tree being no mere twig at 30%–40%. By the day after the election, the Clinton branch had been severed, only the Trump branch remained, and how could pollsters and the polling process have been so blind?
One of the things poker teaches is that we have to take satisfaction in assessing the probabilities of different outcomes given the decisions under consideration and in executing the bet we think is best. With the constant stream of decisions and outcomes under uncertain conditions, you get used to losing a lot. To some degree, we’re all outcome junkies, but the more we wean ourselves from that addiction, the happier we’ll be. None of us is
guaranteed a favorable outcome, and we’re all going to experience plenty of unfavorable ones. We can always, however, make a good bet. And even when we make a bad bet, we usually get a second chance because we can learn from the experience and make a better bet the next time.
Life, like poker, is one long game, and there are going to be a lot of losses, even after making the best possible bets. We are going to do better, and be happier, if we start by recognizing that we’ll never be sure of the future. That changes our task from trying to be right every time, an impossible job, to navigating our way through the uncertainty by calibrating our beliefs to move toward, little by little, a more accurate and objective representation of the world. With strategic foresight and perspective, that’s manageable work. If we keep learning and calibrating, we might even get good at it.