The Decision Strategist

I have spent the last couple of months incredibly addicted to this little game called nethack. It’s free and completely old school, and just terribly awesome. I have yet to beat it. Someday I’ll post a story of my exploits.

I was gearing up the other day to start working on new projects again, and went over my primary goals for 2007. It turns out I did ok. I was officially out of debt in November (not counting the dreaded student loans), made a lot of progress on projects, have been running, and maintained a pretty healthy diet. I could have done better, especially without the devil game referenced above, but I’m not as disappointed as I thought I would be.

Which brings me to two different but related thoughts. First, I feel like my life is composed of a number of cycles. It’s vary noticeable with respect to my work on individual projects. I tend to have a few months of hard work and extreme motivation, followed by a few months of a lack of enthusiasm. But there are other areas: exercise, games, jobs, etc… In fact, I’m starting to think that I only enjoy a particular job for about 2 years before I start to get bored. I spent two years at REMI, have spent two years at BBER, and am now looking at spending two years in the Peace Corps (by the way, I received my medical clearance the other day).

The second thought is about my expectations as I pulled up my list of personal goals for 2007. Why did I feel like I had failed? Are we predisposed to feel unsatisfied with our efforts? To some extent it seems like this is common-place, even in areas where other people think our work is spectacular. At work people and clients have been pretty happy with what I’ve done, but I tend to focus on the aspects of any given project that I didn’t explore fully, or had to make uncomfortable assumptions.

So is it just a difference of information? Clients have only the end results of my work to evaluate, and don’t see all the missteps or excluded possibilities. They don’t have access to full information. Is it yet another case of the signal to noise ratio?

Unequal information and the signal to noise ratio have something to do with it, but then why was I convinced of my own failure to achieve my goals? My perfect information of my own thoughts and actions should have kept me online with how I was actually doing. Of course part of feeling like I didn’t do well has to do with the non-trivial impacts of environment and my state of being, which could be related to any number of factors.

But a bigger force was at work. The major source of my disappointment came from my work on launching decyder. I had hoped that by the end of 2007 I would have a working framework for group decision-making, not to mention well-developed web application development skills. In reality I have only a basic framework, and though I know much more than I did at the beginning of 2007, I still have a long way to go.

This means that one goal, ‘launching a decision-based startup’, overrode my other goals and became a proxy for my success in 2007. Why is this? If you asked, I wouldn’t put it above my other goals, especially ‘developing stronger connections with the important people in my life’. But I think there are several reasons why it naturally rose to the forefront:

• It is measurable. My success or failure can be easily discerned by the health of the project, especially in metrics like number of users (0) and income generated (0).
• It has glamor. The idea fits into a society-wide story in which a lone person creates a business with spectacular success.
• It is perhaps most closely related to my future career (in my mind at least). If ultimately I’d like to be more involved in creative idea implementation, this is a good building block for my development.

The other possibility is that we, or at least I, are inherently optimistic about what we can achieve, and pessimistic about what we have achieved. Most people, programmers especially, have a terribly difficult time estimating how much they can accomplish in a given amount of time, often largely overestimating their abilities.

The key for me was that I realized that even if I didn’t accomplish all of my goals, I had made some fairly significant strides in all of them. Perhaps then the point of goals isn’t so much to accomplish them, but to give you something to work towards if you are floundering.

Baby steps

-zot

Popularity: 46%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Between an office move and having the flu I haven’t had much of a chance to write posts, but don’t worry, I’ll be back on it starting tomorrow.

-zot

Popularity: 16%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

As what is essentially a research consultant, I run into a fair amount of joking, nudging, and winking when I start to talk about ’surveys’ and ‘focus groups’.

Fortunately I work with data and statistics, so I get to claim a little bit of distance from the more laughable methods.

Regardless, it has me thinking about how consultants are generally perceived and very expensive and ineffectual. I think the idea of hiring someone to research and evaluate a problem or policy, though it has it’s issues, isn’t inherently bad. The methods themselves are terribly bad. It really comes down to one thing:

A few consultants are exceptionally good and the rest spend a lot of time surfing the web.

It’s true of any industry that there are a few exceptional people and/or businesses and the rest are mediocre, but with consultants the mediocrity is easily visible. The problem then isn’t that all consultants are hacks, but that it is difficult to tell whether a consultant has done a good job.

In other words, the signal to noise ratio (Paul Graham) is poor.

There are copious examples of situations with a poor signal to noise ratio (SNR). Consider the employer trying to figure out if the employee is working, the lender evaluating a potential borrower, regulators eyeing a company and any application process such as for school, work, Ycombinator, Peace Corps, or hiring a babysitter.

If you have a background in Game Theory, you might notice that poor SNRs tend to exist in a principal-agent situation. A principal-agent situation is one in which one person/organization has something and the other person/organization wants it. The possessor (the principal) has to decide whether to give it to the desirer (the agent). A poor SNR exists because the agent is always motivated to present themselves in the best light possible, and so the principal has to do their best to see through the presentation to determine actual quality. In other words, the agent is actively reducing the SNR.

So back to consultants. The mediocre consultant will choose to purposely increase the amount of noise in the presentation of their work because they realize that 90% of perception is how you look and not what you say (to cite an irrelevant and entirely made up statistic). Further, it is easier to increase the value of your work by making it look spiffy than by doing better quality work (to a point).

From the point of view of the person who hired the mediocre consultant, they have little incentive to attack the consultants work unless it is obviously shoddy. The hirer doesn’t want to be the person who hired a bad consultant, and so will only attack the consultant’s work if it is obviously shoddy.

Is it any wonder that the industry as a whole is a joke?

The consultants holy grail is to discover the aspect that separates excellent consultants from mediocre ones and make that the center of their work. It also has to be easily discernible but not easily faked.

Somehow I think the only thing that qualifies is thorough hard work.

-zot

Popularity: 25%

Vote for this post on: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.