Process or Results

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman has this to say about “outcome bias”:

“We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly.”

He says we forget that what appears obvious with hindsight “was written in invisible ink that became legible only after the event.”

That part of the invisible ink, Nassim Taleb (of The Black Swan fame) would dismiss as “narrative fallacy”: our inability to attribute things to luck (or randomness); which in turn makes us come up with well defined reasons, events and choices behind whatever it is we saw happen.

(On a related note, maybe this is why we never learn from history? Does narrative fallacy do exactly what Taleb warns about: “It severely distorts our mental representation of the world”?)

Most of us, in our rational moments, think that we should value process over results. Because we believe that over time, the luck aspect will even out, and the better process will triumph more often.

Here’s the problem with that belief: how do we know which is the better process even though it failed? How many chances should we give a process before deciding the problem is with the process, and not just a streak of bad luck?

There are no easy answers to those questions, but as always politicians know when to pay more importance to process over results (yes, they actually do that when it suits them). Don’t believe me? Then check out what Michael Tomasky wrote:

“But Washington is a place where most people care far, far more about process than results. The reasons for this should be obvious. The process is the game. It's what is ongoing and visible, so it's the part that people get to judge and assess and gossip about and declaim on. And most people love to make snap judgments, and the more dramatic the better, because that gets you more hits and tweets and so on.”

This is even more true when the consequences of the decision may take long to show up, and as we know, a week is a long time in politics!