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DRAWING THE BULL’S-EYE AROUND THE ARROW
Cherry-picking
On their websites, hotels present themselves in the very best light. They carefully
select each photo, and only beautiful, majestic images make the cut. Unflattering
angles, dripping pipes and drab breakfast rooms
are swept under the tattered
carpet. Of course, you know this is true. When you are confronted by the shabby
lobby for the first time, you simply shrug your shoulders and head to the
registration desk.
What the hotel did is called
cherry-picking
: selecting and showcasing the most
attractive features and hiding the rest. As with the hotel experience, you approach
other things with the same muted expectations: brochures for cars, real estate or
law firms. You know how they work and you don’t fall for them.
However, you respond differently to the annual reports of companies,
foundations and government organisations. Here,
you tend to expect objective
depictions. You are mistaken. These bodies also
cherry-pick
: if goals are
achieved, they are talked up; if they falter, they are not even mentioned.
Suppose you are the head of a department. The board invites you to present
your team’s state of play. How do you tackle this?
You devote most of your
PowerPoint slides to elaborate on the team’s triumphs and throw in a token few to
identify ‘challenges’. Any other unmet achievements you conveniently forget.
Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of
cherry-picking
. Imagine you are the
managing director of a company that manufactures some kind of technical device.
A survey has revealed that the vast majority of customers
cannot operate your
gadget. It’s too complicated. Now the HR manager gives his two cents,
proclaiming: ‘My father-in-law picked it up yesterday and figured out how to work
it straight away.’ How much weight would you attach to this particular cherry?
Right: close to zero. To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story,
and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those. To prevent this,
cunning
leaders train themselves throughout their careers to be hypersensitive to such
anecdotes and to shoot them down as soon as they are uttered.
The more elevated or elite a field is, the more we fall for
cherry-picking
. In
Antifragile
, Taleb describes how all areas of research –
from philosophy to
medicine to economics – brag about their results: ‘Like politicians, academia is
well equipped to tell us what it did for us, not what it did not – hence it shows how
indispensable her methods are.’ Pure
cherry-picking
. But our respect for
academics is far too great for us to notice this.
Or consider the medical profession. To tell people that they should not smoke
is the greatest medical contribution of the past sixty years –
superior to all the
research and medical advances since the end of the Second World War.
Physician Druin Burch confirms this in his book
Taking the Medicine
. A few
cherries –
antibiotics, for instance – distract us, and so, drug researchers are
celebrated while anti-smoking activists are not.
Administrative departments in large companies glorify themselves like hoteliers
do. They are masters at
showcasing all they have done, but they never
communicate what they haven’t achieved for the company. What should you do?
If you sit on the supervisory board of such an organisation, ask about the ‘leftover
cherries’, the failed projects and missed goals. You learn a lot more from this than
from the successes. It is amazing how seldom such questions are asked. Second:
instead of employing a horde of financial controllers to calculate costs to the
nearest cent, double-check targets. You will be amazed to find that, over time, the
original goals have faded. These have been replaced, quietly and secretly, with
self-set goals that are always attainable. If you hear of such targets, alarm bells
should sound. It is the equivalent of shooting an arrow and drawing a bull’s-eye
around where it lands.
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