So said Bart Simpson, and according to a new study from the University of Toronto Rotman School (which I caught via Idea Festival), he was exactly right:
Strategic managers, lacking training in how to build their own situational models and reasoning strategies as opposed to 'implementing' blueprints and recipes, tend to choose easy problems to make sense of their predicaments and use sub-optimally simplistic methods of framing complex problems, shows new research from the Rotman School of Management.
“Managerial problems are not given – they are co-created, by the manager and his context, and what the manager's mind does often matters more than other features of the context,” says the study’s author, Mihnea Moldoveanu, who has articulated a new research field called managerial algorithmics. “This model shows managers systematically avoid certain kinds of problems (logically hard ones) in favour of others (logically simple ones) when they try to make sense of their predicaments." When applied to a vast array of data about the ways in which managers make judgments and solve problems, Moldoveanu's model shows that by and large "managers are logical sloths, even if they are sometimes informational hogs.” Managers seem to systematically avoid 'deep thought' about the situations they face and rather seek 'data', 'stories', 'frameworks' and 'prescriptions' that stand a very good chance of being logically incompatible, he says. However, because they are 'logical sloths', this logical incompatibility will go un-noticed....
This is the kind of research that makes me worry about futurists' love of stories, scenarios, and other pieces of vivid narrative. They have their virtues, undoubtedly, but we've pretty much burned through the narrative turn in business, and I think it's now time to pay more attention to how people tend to misuse or be led astray by good stories.
There was also this interesting bit:
[E]ven though thinking more deeply will almost always help, acting on the deepest possible logical analysis is not always the optimal course of action: being logically omniscient in an environment of logical sloths could also lead to losses. Moldoveanu's argues that managers need to seek out 'adaptive' intelligence, which he defines as 'the right level of logical depth given what you know about others' level of logical depth.'
This reminds me of something that author, neurologist, and expert poker player Robert Burton recently told me: that many serious poker players don't play their own hands, they first try to figure out how their opponents would play whatever hands they have.
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