Why We Make Bad Decisions (and have their effects fester for years with “no one noticing”)

In the world of Product Development and Software Engineering, it is not uncommon to read about turf wars between Engineering and QA, Product and Engineering, Engineering and Design… in fact, if there’s anything in common about all these conflicts, it’s the engineer! Just Google the text “Software Engineers are jerks” and you won’t find a shortage of articles and threads to indulge!

While this may be true in many sense, there are likewise articles about why people in sales are also jerks. Moreover, there are even more articles around why bosses are jerks!! In other words, there are jerkish behavior everywhere. This context is needed to unpack the heart of the article: why we make bad decisions?

To be clear, we’re not talking about decisions that, in hindsight, were bad. We’re talking about decisions whereby those who are part of it, or more importantly, those who attempted to influence the decision know full well that failure is imminent but went along with it anyway. Been in that situation before? Most of us should have been.

These situations normally happen when dissenting voices are shut down. Worse, in many cases, these things happen when dissenting voices are not even heard.

A research done several years ago shows that people are twice as likely not to speak up because of futility rather than fear. In other words, while many don’t speak up because they’re afraid, people are twice as unlikely to speak up if they think they’ll not be heard anyway. In other words, these are people bearing ideas that could help the organization but yet saw silence as a better option than going for a fool’s errand.

In general, a wealth of leadership advice actually tells us to assume good intent. However, assuming good intent becomes difficult when behaviors of those who constantly want to die on every hill are condoned. While there are many reasons why a bad decision is made, one type of bad decision whose effect festers for a very long time comes from scenarios where dissenting voices are drowned out.

A research done by Google shows that toxic people effectively shave off as much as $12,000 per year whereas superstars, those who are rare super productive unicorns produce only around $5,000 more per year.¹ What that means is that it takes more than two superstars to undo the damage of one toxic employee.

Eric Schmidt was once asked, “With all your success, what’s keeping you awake at night?” He responded, “The seeds of the destruction of a large successful company are inside of it. You could see it, people knew it, and the leadership did not act.”

At work, almost everyone reading this would have experienced the fact that the loudest voice (and not the best idea) wins the argument. We make bad decisions because the loudest voice gets in the way of rational decision making and the leader does nothing.

How do we solve this?

It turns out that solving it is not easy. Plato was adamant about the need for a Philosopher King. Suppressing jerkish behavior is only possible when the initiative comes from the top. In essence, there should be zero tolerance for brilliant jerks. In fact, there should be zero tolerance for jerks. Quantifying the damage they do is extremely costly and tedious because information collected around their behaviors from people they negatively affect are almost never transparent and honest.

Now suppose the leader is hell bent to stop this negative spiral. How does he do it? He should do it by going back to First Principles.

In business, the first principle is simply this: that the business has to win. Nothing more. Nothing less. Nothing else.

If the business is to win, it means that the business needs to thrive and survive and grow within the boundaries of ethical, moral, and legal standards. In order for it to do so, efforts must be made to make that happen. In problem solving, it is of fundamental importance to KNOW what the problem is. What that means is that if the problem statement is wrong, there’s no way to solve the actual problem. In an organization, people almost never tell you the way things are as they are. Every person has a vested interest around their self preservation(yes people are selfish). Unless sufficient trust is built, the leader is forced to work with surface level data without really seeing the root cause of the problem.

In SRE, one of the common practices in the event of an incident is to do a root cause analysis (or RCA). Toyota has an interesting method by which they do this. They ask five layers of whys. What this does is that it forces the person to really peel off layers of sugarcoating down into the real issue. For Toyota, such method yielded tremendous benefits.

Why do we make bad decisions and have their effects fester? Because people are not empowered to solve the problem at the root cause.

It is therefore imperative for the leader to create a culture of safety where such practice is encouraged and have such modeled from top down.

So to tie the threads together, we make bad decisions because people are not empowered to solve the problem at the root cause. To solve this, the leaders need to go back to first principles. More often than not, festering bad decisions are caused by brilliant jerks. Such behaviors should not be tolerated. Moreover, the leader needs to build trust and establish psychological safety. Should the leader achieve those, he will still run into bad decisions here and there, but their effects will not fester, because people will work towards solving the root cause.

Festering effects of bad decisions are not caused by incompetence. They’re caused by condoning jerkish behaviors.

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¹ The Google research considers them the top 1% contributor.