Underestimators, Overestimators, & The feel for the ‘game.’

This post will outline what I learned from spending 11 years and three months in a startup that became a small business, then a mid-size business, and finally part of a larger company. This is an attempt to describe a skill honed over thousands of pitches, workshops, readouts, preps, and many failures.

A recent book, Adam Grant’s latest in what looks like a series. Hidden Potential. The interesting nugget in the early portion of the book is the idea that I make more mistakes than others make attempts. That idea is compelling, and never underestimate the power of mistakes to make you better and less afraid of making mistakes if you make many of them.

So, what is the underestimating game?

Think of all the times you underestimate in a day while working; there are so many dimensions of underestimating. These also apply to overestimating. There are some symmetry and asymmetric effects of these two concepts. That is why the ‘short feel for the game’ is a valuable fulcrum for me.

• Time — is never enough, and time is relative to too many uncontrollable variables. This is one of the least understood things by humans doing sht.
• Scope of things — what and how underestimating is a chronic illness clients have and delivery teams suffer as the human condition, why god why.
• The scale of things—sizing is such a game ROM, Back of the Envelope, 30000 ft level estimate, bigger than a bread box. There are so many rules of thumb that I’d need all thumbs when crushing an underestimate.
• Abilities of others—When wandering down the path of under/overestimating, we turn toward our teammates, clients, vendors, engineers, and on and on and have zero clue how a human will perform a thing. The only reduction in variableness here is tenured teams perform better in the trenches. Rare
• Your abilities — You think more of your skills than you likely should. We overestimate our abilities and underestimate others, which are also baked into our genetics and epigenetics.
• Risk—This is obvious over/underling the Olympics here. Even probabilistic arguments struggle to rationalize risk estimation. Phil Tetlocs’s book is an excellent place to start if you want to understand more about forecasting risks. Spoiler alert: Information changes, so there are small updates to the risk of anything happening or not.
• Level of Effort: How hard or easy something is to do—Another chestnut. I don’t care what anyone says. Estimate your level of effort, maybe, but for others, there’s no shot. Cheers to the chronic underestimate. The oversimplification I have learned is what dooms estimates and that they were done once a hundred sprints ago.
• Impact — How will this land? I have no idea a solid answer. When we try to understand how something will land a pitch, an idea, or a proposal, we are kidding ourselves, again with the certainty that it is itself overestimated. Disappointment is bred and born and fought over in slacks of epic proportions. Post mortems are littered with the sad hopes of estimating the impact. Oppenheimer and others thought there was a nonzero chance we could have lit the atmosphere on fire when the Manhattan Project was wrapping up. They were more intelligent than most of us.
  • Key quotes include:
  • Compton: “Hydrogen nuclei are unstable, and they can combine into helium nuclei with a large release of energy, as they do on the sun. To set off such a reaction would require a very high temperature, but might not the enormously high temperature of the atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode hydrogen? And if hydrogen, what about the hydrogen in sea water? Might not the explosion of the atomic bomb set off an explosion of the ocean itself? Nor was this all that Oppenheimer feared. The nitrogen in the air is also unstable, though in less degree. Might not it, too, be set off by an atomic explosion in the atmosphere?”.
  • Bethe: “Ignition is not a matter of probabilities; it is simply impossible. No matter how high the temperature, energy loss would exceed energy production [by fusion] by a reasonable factor. The process would very quickly run out of steam, so that the impossibility of igniting the atmosphere was thus assured by science and common sense.”.
• Consequences—See impact, but add that there are things that we under/overestimate to death and catastrophize or ignore relative to what can happen based on a set of criteria and actions. Again, having the ‘feel for the game’ can mediate a lot of this.
• Correlation/Causation of things—This is another excellent nugget for how leadership or management views things. Often, we overestimate the relationships between things. Outside of quantum theory, entanglements, Schrodinger’s cat, and spooky action at a distance, teams always correlate causes and overestimate the relatedness of things or underestimate dependency. I listened to a few books on this to try to weed it out of my brain, but it’s challenging with confirmation biases, availability bias, etc.

The list is endless; humans have evolved to underestimate situations because of the contradictions in applying intuitions. This argument has many dimensions, but we will cover only a small portion related to the over and under-estimating humans do at work.

‘The short feel for the game’ When learning to pitch, I was trying to learn to play golf, terribly. I was told by someone I was playing with as a came out of the woods trying to find my ball per the uze. Mike, you need to have a short feel for this game and I asked what that meant. So here goes:

The concept of “feel for the game” refers to a player’s innate ability to understand and navigate the nuances of a game, often beyond mere technical skill. It involves a deep, intuitive sense of the game’s dynamics, spatial awareness, and strategic elements, allowing players to make decisions and execute actions with ease and efficiency.In sports, this concept is often associated with athletes who have a natural affinity for their sport, such as basketball players who can read the game and make instinctive plays. It is also relevant in other fields, such as video games, where players with a strong feel for the game can anticipate and react to situations more effectively.Key aspects of “feel for the game” include:

• Spatial Intelligence: The ability to understand and navigate the spatial elements of the ‘game,’ such as positioning and movement.
• Instinctive Decision-Making: The capacity to make quick, intuitive decisions based on a deep understanding of the ‘game’s’ dynamics.
• Strategic Awareness: The ability to read the ‘game’ and anticipate future developments, allowing for more effective planning and execution.

Overall, “feel for the game” is critical to high-level performance in various competitive environments, distinguishing exceptional players from merely skilled players.

Now, if you are in the world and are a chronic underestimator, you lack the feel; instead, you catch feels. Just kidding, the chronic self or another underestimator could also lack the feel for the ‘game,’ whatever the game is: work, home, relationship, you name it.

So what?

Well, as it turns out, I have been underestimated, and you likely have, too. You may also underestimate that most of that over/under comes from not having a feel for the ______. Well, let’s get some skills to be less by being more. More means gaining a ‘feel for your game.’

A couple of other things on intuition and the short feel for the game, and again, we under/overestimate the value of these.

Understanding Intuition from Multiple Perspectives

Intuition is a complex and multifaceted concept explored from various angles across different disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, and management. Here, we delve into the essence of intuition, its role in decision-making, and why research is fundamental to understanding and harnessing it.

Defining Intuition

Intuition is generally understood as a non-sequential information processing mode involving cognitive and affective elements. It leads to direct knowing without conscious reasoning and is characterized by rapid, non-conscious, holistic associations that result in affectively charged judgments.

Intuition vs. Insight

While intuition and insight are related, they are distinct processes. Intuition is often seen as an experience-based and gradual process, whereas insight is a discontinuous phenomenon involving a solution’s sudden and unexpected apprehension. The two processes, though different, can build upon each other, with intuition potentially leading to insight. Aha moments of insight along with a build up of intuition are a way to see how they play together.

While working on a CSTORE application, I intuitively felt that the emotions felt good here; it’s a regional love brand, but why? An insight was that a convenience store chain did not have automatic doors. It seemed like a miss until I observed people repeatedly holding the door for each other. Thanks, and you’re welcome(s) flowed freely at the door. That small, simple interaction at the door set the tone for the experience. Human connection, the woman singing behind the coffee bar, the old guy with the blue hat with gold letters identifying what his service was talking to the two police officers. Felt like a Cheers/Friends episode.

The Role of Intuition in Decision-Making

Intuition plays a significant role in judgment and decision-making, mainly when time and cognitive capacity are limited. It can serve as a basis for heuristics and valid strategies for making decisions under uncertainty. However, intuition can also lead to biases and errors, highlighting the need for a balanced approach incorporating intuitive and deliberate thinking.

Understanding this, when working on redesigning field service experiences for Cabletown, it occurred to us as a team that the amount of stress, anxiety, and intuition played a significant role in design decisions. We saw that the techs got centered in almost all design decisions. 30,000 techs, every truck roll taught us something else, and we built our borrowed intuition to make it work.

Research and Intuition

Research is fundamental to understanding and harnessing intuition effectively. Studies have shown that intuition can be developed and improved through practice and experience. For example, scientists can establish reliable expert intuition by carefully examining their initial guesses and tracking their success over time. Moreover, research has demonstrated that unconscious intuition can inform and improve decision-making, even when individuals are unaware of the information influencing their decisions.

Books and Resources

Several books and resources provide in-depth explorations of intuition and its role in decision-making. Notable examples include “Intuition in Judgment and Decision Making” by Henning Plessner, Cornelia Betsch, and Tilmann Betsch, which offers a comprehensive overview of the current understanding of intuition in judgment and decision-making.

Why Research Matters

Research is crucial for several reasons:

• Understanding the Mechanisms: Research helps uncover the underlying mechanisms of intuition, which is essential for developing strategies to improve intuitive decision-making.
• Improving Decision-Making: By understanding how intuition works, individuals can learn to harness it more effectively, leading to faster and more accurate decisions.
• Mitigating Biases: Research can help identify and reduce the biases associated with intuitive thinking, ensuring more balanced and informed decision-making.

In conclusion, intuition is a multifaceted concept that plays a significant role in decision-making. Research is fundamental to understanding and harnessing intuition effectively, helping to uncover its mechanisms, improve decision-making, and mitigate biases. By exploring intuition from various angles and through rigorous research, we can better understand its potential and limitations, leading to more informed and effective decision-making strategies.

If you made it down here, thank you. #keepmoving #keeplearning