Place your Bets
I grew up in Pamplona, Spain, in a religious environment that had very clear definitions on what was right and wrong. This simplified decision making, giving me clear guidelines on how to live.
Initially, the framework was very effective, offering an immediate, precise and coherent stance on most issues. However, over time, I noticed contradictions between some of these beliefs and my own experience.
My first reaction was to rationalise these inconsistencies, framing them to ultimately support my beliefs. Eventually, I realised that this binary approach made me paint problems with a broad brush, ignoring individual variations and preventing me from updating my way of thinking. At the bottom of this attitude was probably a fear that rejection of one belief might put in question the validity of the entire system of beliefs.
Nowadays, I’m cautious of all-or-nothing thinking in all aspects of my life. In innovation, this is typically manifested in absolute terms, such as: ‘This invention will work. I guarantee it’, ‘Of course clients will love it, isn’t it obvious?’, ’There is only one way to solve this problem, and this is it’.
This total conviction is a signal that we are trying to artificially boost confidence and drown uncertainty. But while such statements might sound reassuring, they are misleading and unrealistic. To address this, I now aim to:
Label opinions as ‘hypotheses’. So, by definition I acknowledge that they are educated guesses; never facts.
Express hypotheses in terms of probability, ranging from zero (‘This is a total guess and I’m clueless’) to one hundred (‘I would bet my life on it’).
By placing hypotheses across this spectrum, I accept that there is no certainty and admit that luck is also at play.
Initially, I thought that sharing these doubts would weaken my arguments and put them at a disadvantage versus people sharing their arguments as unquestionable truths. However, my experience has been the opposite. The choices presented with probability confidence levels were perceived as more credible, and clients and partners would turn their attention to validating or invalidating those hypotheses with facts. Our energy would often switch to determining whether we were ready to make a decision with a particular level of confidence and, if not, what additional validation was required.
Conclusion
Assigning probabilities could help transform a battle of opinions disguised as religious truths into organised and productive questioning.
