Working with limited information means making decisions that might turn out to be bad ones down the line. I agree with your statement, but the opportunity cost of figuring out the exact right problem to solve is inaction, and inaction is often worse than making a poorly-informed judgement.
Not every decision has to be done with maximum research. That’s usually a waste of time. It’s more efficient to try a couple things until something works and move on (“satisficing”). A key skill you learn over time is why decisions actually matter. But it’s not inherently bad that there’s no good reason for something, it really depends on the context. And sometimes things that had good reasons turn out bad anyway because the assumptions proved wrong or circumstances changed.
Nobody actually wants to make the most informed decision, what they really want is to make the right decision. There's all kinds of places where additional information leads to worse decisions:
That's very true. The middle ground of that is that smart people, making a series of reasonable decisions, can still lead to a terrible destination. I've done it myself, and I've had teams describe multi-year developments where I can't point out a specific place they went wrong. People get caught up in that though, and they're often blind to it until a fresh set of eyes get on it.
[I've spent a lot of time this morning trying to articulate further, and I'm too distracted by the work I'm trying to do. Sorry.]
The key realisation for me was that it's nearly impossible to get perfect information to make a perfect decision, and the longer you chase the impossible, the quicker your competitors catch you. I try to place decisions in one of two categories:
* Expensive if it's wrong (hard to undo, might hurt a business relationship, costs a lot of cash to find out if it's right, etc.)
* Inexpensive if it's wrong
Expensive: requires more upfront rigour, so you don't make catastrophic mistakes (not that it's possible to get perfect information still); Inexpensive: just get on with it, and see if it's right. The vast majority of decisions are inexpensive ones, where team instinct should win out - you employ smart people, hopefully with a reasonable amount of experience, trust them and get on with it. This stops the analysis paralysis that some companies get into.
Hum, I think both of you provide a good point. Ultimately though, I have to agree with snowwrestler, public policy often needs to make a decision with incomplete information. There's probably a middle ground here, I'd say having 70% of the information, something like that.
Otherwise, it is too slow to act to prevent future problems.
In that regard, I feel it's best paralleled with business. Business decisions are often made with incomplete information, to get a competitive advantage. But you always need to weigh the risk/reward potential.
Feel it's the same for public policy. Depending on the potential risk of a particular policy, pitched against the level of confidence in the information that supports it, and you can arrive at a decision. I don't think it make sense to say, always wait for the confidence level to be approaching 100%. You've got to take calculated risks sometimes.
I'm inclined to think that having perfect information (or as close to it as possible) can lead to "analysis paralysis". Generally speaking, the more information you have, the more you can see all the possible upsides and downsides that might occur as the result of a given choice. This makes everyone prone to not making a choice at all -- some people manage this tendency better than others -- and this can be worse than making even a bad choice. While you were trying to optimize an outcome, the opportunity passes you by.
In this respect, imperfect information can make a difficult choice easier to make. So yes, so there is such a thing as too much information. Some people just manage it better than others.
The problem isn't really bad choices, it's uninformed choices.
What difference is there, in practice? The world is getting more complicated every day. The amount of information being created in a single day is more than a person could consume in a lifetime.
At some point we should ask ourselves whether it's possible for anyone to have a fully informed opinion on every issue that could ever effect them.
For sure you can make good decisions based on the info available and still lose. You can also make bad decisions and still win. Sometimes decisions that seem vital are totally pointless etc. etc. etc.
Making occasional mistakes while applying formal knowledge seems to be qualitatively quite different from making suboptimal decisions because you’re improvising due to lack of such formal knowledge.
In some domains you don’t have a choice; there are too many moving parts, decision making is of necessity based on noisy and incomplete information, the domain is too messy for formal models to be useful. You just have to intuit and improvise. This is more often than not the case when human interactions are involved. Trying to impose engineering solutions to social problems usually ends in disaster.
I understand your point, but mediocre decisions made quickly are sometimes better than no decisions made ever; there is a spectrum, and being on either extreme is not good.
On that, we absolutely agree! Im the end so, those who let some calculation decide for them and those who just throw solutions at the wall, are equally bad at decision making.
I know, because I made my share of bad decisions, especially early on in my career.
If you need to make good-enough decisions on the spot, you need to have people be willing to take responsibility for being wrong, and they need to have decent information available (the decision-maker needs the information, not some other person somewhere else--in companies, information is hoarded horribly).
The big problem is that the majority of people with 70% of information will go into f*ckup 100% certain. You need to have a talent of some sorts to make right decisions or at least reversible ones.
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