Contextually Speaking

Reading is simply the fuel of thought. We eat to get energy for life. We read to get energy for thinking. Of at least to have something to think about. I just finished reading Signal and the Noise. Prediction. I have often noticed that fantasy football or simply trying to pick the winners of the games offers some pretty good insights into trying to figure out what's going to happen next in all kinds of different arenas. That book is a very big expansion on the idea that looking at how predictions work in very select cases offer general insights into making other kinds of predictions.

While reading this book, I realized that a good chunk of what I do professionally is about prediction. We expend all kinds of resources to develop a process that can produce something with very predictable behavior. Nate Silver is a big proponent of Bayesian thinking. My self-definition of this idea is that data has context. Abstracting a series of observations as some small sample of a much larger series and drawing predictions from that information, the standard statistical approach taught in the typical statistics class, robs data of meaning. In Bayesian thinking, the more you understand the context of your data, the better your prediction.

In thinking about making predictions, I thought about what kind of things I could do to train myself to think more probablistically. I looked in a statistics textbook that I have from one of my MBA classes. The discussion of the Bayesian theorem and conditional statistics in general was about 5 pages. I'm not surprised. That textbook was a piece of highly conventional crap (which reminds me of another post I mean to write about whether more education makes you more conventional in your thinking) so I'm not surprised that it's pretty free of discussion of anything interesting. But as I was looking through this book, I realized that I'm already pretty good at making predictions in the context of existing information.

One of the biggest decisions that I've made in my career over the last couple of years was to lead the development of a few new products. I made this decision after participating in one of the first conversations that we had with a potential partner company. Having been part of the team that dealt with the company that we were looking to replace, I had a good understanding of the risks involved in this type of project. When I asked myself if the situation was likely to repeat itself with this new company, I estimated that the probability of that would be pretty low. I was warned about the risks of taking on this project, but I trusted my assessment of the situation (a situation where I had better information than the people giving me advice).

Pushing back against 20 years of stagnation

I managed to finish that career plan that had been giving me trouble. Right before sending it on to my manager, I removed those couple of paragraphs where I proposed that I lead a group that is contrarian by design. That was my surrender to staying within the safety limits of my organization. I felt that it was particularly pertinent to do that at this phase as my manager is one of the most conventional people in the organization. He cautioned me against taking on a moderately risky project (where most of the risk was really in the visibility of the project, a failure in this case would have been more costly than a failure on a similar by lower profile project). I'll need his support going forward. I didn't see the value in threatening that support for no real benefit.

I'll need to take some other steps to firm up his support tomorrow. He sent me an email asking about the status of one of my (very minor) projects. He's scared that we might get noticed. Rapidly responding to unreasonable demands is often viewed as a desirable trait in my group. Let other people set the priorities. i know that his fears are unfounded because I actually asked about the project timing. We're nowhere close to  being on the critical path for this project. He doesn't know that because he's relying on second hand information that is pretty incomplete.

I'm trying out this plan where I force myself to notice my assumptions. Asking about the project timing is one way that I have broken out of some common group think (just rely on the information handed to you from the person making the request without asking any follow-up questions). My manager's been doing this kind of thing for something like 20 years. Who am I to challenge all that experience. But he's probably been doing his job pretty much the same way for 20 something years. He found a way that gets the job done and he hasn't done anything to change that approach in all of those years. He has 20 years experience doing his job one way. He never notices his assumptions. He doesn't notice that's he's not seeing the whole picture.