Duke: Expressing outcomes with probabilities makes leaders more believable than projecting certainty
Annie Duke · Annie Duke - Improving Decision Making [Capital Allocators, EP.39] · Feb 5, 2018 · at 28:54
Annie Duke, decision strategist and author of Thinking in Bets, discusses leadership communication and probabilistic thinking with host Ted Seides.
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“So not only do you end up with a richer conversation, but you're more believable as a communicator. So I think it's a little counterintuitive, but our intuition isn't always good. So, I mean, our intuition is that when I hear something, I vet it before I decide whether I believe it. We know that that's not true. Intuitively, I think we think that as leaders, we need to express things with confidence, and we confuse confidence and certainty. So we think if I say, I know it's going to be this way, I'm a hundred percent sure this is true, that we're going to be more believable communicators. Well, first of all, that's not an accurate representation of the world, because there's too much luck involved. So if I say to you, like, oh, I know the future is going to be this way if we make this decision, that's patently silly, because there's too many things that can intervene. So A, I'm just accurately representing the world that way when I speak that way, but I'm also more believable as a communicator because when I say to you, here are the possible ways I think it's going to turn out, and I'm going to make a stab at assigning probabilities to this variety of scenarios, now you look at me and you say, wow, she's put a lot of thought into this. She's clearly informed. She's telling me what she knows and what she doesn't know. She's acknowledging where her knowledge gaps might be, or where she needs help, or any of those things, and that in itself makes me a more believable communicator.”
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