Do you and your team want to get better at making decisions that are not status quo?  Would you like your team to take the right risks and encourage a culture that learns from success and failure?  Did you know that being too results oriented can get in the way of making the highest equity decisions?  If so, this is the podcast for you.  Annie Duke, professional speaker and Decision Strategist, will share her research and help you learn how to create a process that helps you make better decisions, while encouraging learning and risk taking.  She helps people have uncertainty with confidence.

Annie Duke is a woman who has leveraged her expertise in the science of smart decision making to excel at pursuits as varied as championship poker to public speaking. For two decades, Annie was one of the top poker players in the world. In 2004, she bested a field of 234 players to win her first World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet. The same year, she triumphed in the $2 million winner-take-all, invitation-only WSOP Tournament of Champions. In 2010, she won the prestigious NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded the National Science Foundation Fellowship. Because of this fellowship, she studied Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Well, Annie, thank you so much for being on the podcast today, really looking forward to hearing about some of the work that you're going and starting to think about now around resulting and how it gets in the way of learning. That's what your last book was really about, and also to the ways that we make decisions more defensively that can impact our productivity, something that is near and dear to the hearts of any leaders.

Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here.

Great. Well, tell us first what does resulting mean?

Yeah, so resulting is really something that I take a deep dive on in my book in terms of how it gets in the way of learning, and basically resulting is when we make too tight a connection between the quality of an outcome and the quality of the decision that preceded it. The issue is really we have an outcome, we have the way that the future turned out and that future can end up that way for a variety of reasons, and trying to work backward from the outcome to the quality of the decision that preceded it is really hard because these things are relatively loosely correlated. So, to get this into a concrete example that I think that people will be able to feel pretty deeply and I think that it really gets people to understand what resulting is, I want to take us back to the 2015 Super Bowl where the Seahawks are on the 1-yard line of the New England Patriots.

It's second down, there's one timeout left and the Seahawks are down by four with only 26 seconds left in the whole game. So, this is obviously a super important movement because if Pete Carroll can call a play that gets a touchdown, obviously they're down by four, that's gonna put them up by two. Let's assume they make the field goal, but even if they don't they're up by two and it's very unlikely that the Patriots are gonna have any time to get all the way down the field to score again so this is for the game. So, if they can score here this is gonna win them the game. So, with 26 seconds left they've got a running back, they're only on the 1-yard line, remember. They've got a running back named Marshawn Lynch who's an amazing short yardage running back and everybody's kind of expecting Pete Carroll to call a hand off so that Marshawn Lynch can just sort of barrel through, hopefully, the defensive line of the Patriots.

Instead, Pete Carroll does something super unexpected which is he calls for a pass play. So, Russell Wilson, the quarterback of the Seahawks, passes the ball and the New England Patriot's Malcolm Butler intercepts the ball in the end zone. So, let's agree this is a really, really disastrous result. This is a very, very bad outcome quality. So, obviously the Seahawks lose the game there and when you listen to the in game call, in other words the announcers, Chris Collinsworth, he's really pretty brutal about the whole thing, really saying he can't believe this call, this is the worst call that he's ever seen. Then when you look at the headlines the next day for most of the pundits who are doing a nice job here of Monday morning quarterbacking, they are not disagreeing.

So, it's a lot of this is the most horrible call in Super Bowl history repeated throughout all the headlines and then actually USA Today managed to say it was the worst call in football history period. Now, when Pete Carroll was actually asked about this on the Today Show, what he said was that he would agree that it was the worst result of a call ever, and I think that that's a really important distinction. So, what we know is that the result of this call was terrible but does that actually mean that the call itself was terrible? The answer is not necessarily. We'd have to go back and we'd have to really look at the mathematics of that call. Just super quickly, the chances of an interception there are somewhere between 1% and 2%.

So, once you know that fact that 99% of the time either the ball's gonna be caught for a touchdown or it's just gonna be dropped, which will stop the clock and allow them to go for another play, once you know that fact of what's the interception rate there I think we can agree that probably declaring it to be the worst call in the history of football is probably a little bit of an over exaggeration. I think that we can see how much the quality of the outcome, which was so bad, is yanking us around in our ability to see through to what the quality of the decision is and we can do that pretty easily by just imagining this.

Imagine that he calls the pass play and the ball is actually caught for a touchdown in the end zone, and I do this in front of audiences all the time. I ask them to actually just close their eyes and imagine this, and everybody can feel it immediately. What are the headlines gonna look like the next day? Everybody just says immediately it's brilliant, it was one of the most brilliant calls in football history, and we can actually see this because Philadelphia this year actually called a similarly unusual play but in this case it worked out and everybody hailed the coach of the Eagles, Doug Pederson, to be a genius. So, there's clearly something weird going on here, right?

You have the decision. The decision's the decision regardless of which future happens to occur. There's a variety of futures that can occur, and yet we can feel it very deeply that when the outcome is really bad we think the decision is really back, and when the outcome is really good we immediately think that the decision is really good, and yet based on one time that shouldn't actually affect in reality what we think about that decision, and that's just because in life the quality of an outcome and the quality of the decision are only loosely correlated. I can give you a super example. I've run a red light in my life, not gotten a ticket. I haven't gotten in an accident. I'm not trying to re-do that. I don't think that that was a good decision because the outcome happened to be good. You can see how this is a really big problem for learning.

So, what I've been thinking about recently is how is this a problem when we're results oriented? This is a very common thing that people say, we're results oriented. So, I've been thinking about that because we have this problem which is well what do you mean by results? Because clearly you can see what happened with the Seahawks, that people said oh here's this result and I'm gonna make this results oriented decision and what ends up happening is that Pete Carroll is getting excoriated for a decision that was actually mathematically pretty good. By the way, if anybody wants to geek out on it they can go look at Benjamin Morris on 538 to see some really good analysis of the play.

But, now what I've been thinking about is well what does that do to people's decision making if they know that they're gonna be evaluated based on the result? If they know that what's gonna happen is there's gonna be a collective outcry about the quality of the decision if you have a bad result? And, what are you doing to people in that situation? What I've been realizing is you really force people into a very defensive crouch when they're making decisions. In other words, you're gonna get it so that they're not making necessarily decisions that are going to create the biggest value. They're going to make decisions that are going to defend against being judged for a bad outcome.

So, if we go back to the Pete Carroll situation, I can give you an example of how this might happen and then we can take a deeper dive. If you go look at Benjamin Morris, there's a very good argument that the highest return play is the pass, and obviously Pete Carroll felt that way. He felt like the highest return play was gonna be a pass. Now, the lower return play would be a hand off to Marshawn Lynch. This also happens to be the status quo play. It also happens to be the expected play. This is what everybody expected him to do, but it's actually a lower return. You can imagine that if a coach knows that when you do this unexpected thing when you do the pass play, which happens to be higher return, that if it doesn't work out you're gonna be yelled at, then you can imagine that as a defensive maneuver they might just hand it off to Marshawn Lynch. Why? Well we can do that