In the remote, cold, Labrador, Canada there are hunters searching for caribou. These Reindeer can range in size from 80 – 120 kgs for the females (cows), and for the males (bulls) from 160 to 180 kgs, some bulls have been weighed up to 318kgs.
The hunters want to catch the caribou and unsurprisingly, the caribou don’t want to be caught.
The caribou will not go to the same place over and over again to avoid the hunters. To combat this the hunters developed a strategy of reading caribou bones.
This is how anthropologists believed divination started. The soothsayer/priest/shaman would read the “signs” in this case a burnt caribou shoulder bone and tell the hunters where they should hunt.
This reading of the bones created randomness in the hunt. This helped give the hunters an advantage because the caribou didn’t know where the hunters would be striking from because the hunters didn’t know themselves.
Right or Correct
The outcome the hunters wanted was to catch the caribou, the randomness created by the reading of the bone allowed the hunters to be more successful. The soothsayer was right in that they picked the right place to go.
However, they were not correct in that the means of making the decision didn’t create the correct outcome, it was the randomness in the decision-making that was leading to more successful hunts.
The process creates a good outcome and so it is justified and then because of part of the tradition. It doesn’t matter if the bones lead you astray because they were right that other time and confirmation bias kicks in.
Tradition isn’t right
Tradition is just a way of thinking. Simply a process for how to approach the situation. It can be codified or ritualised so that it just feels like the way.
People default to tradition because it is easy. Someone else has already approved it. It doesn’t rock the boat. Why change something that isn’t broken.
The problem with tradition is that if you don’t know all of the factors and assumptions in the decision-making process then you can’t know if this traditional way of thinking is going to be beneficial for you.
Highs or Higher
The traditional way of doing things might work. It might give good results year after year. The question is does it give the best results.
The tradition might be helping you have a local maximum. If you do sales this way you will get 4x return. However, if you change the system and approach it another way potentially your environment could have 8x return.
Your thinking or their thinking?
The problem with tradition is that you are defaulting to someone else’s way of thinking.
Take the hiring policy, if someone got a job at X company then they must be good. Why?
They could have known someone that worked there. They could be the child of someone important. They could be related to an important customer and they wanted to grease the wheels. There are many reasons why they might be a great employee but also many why they might not be so just taking for granted that they worked somewhere doesn’t transfer to them supernatural abilities.
‘This is the way we have always done it is something you hear a lot. Just because something was done at one time doesn’t mean it should be still done now.
If you don’t understand the thoughts of the decision-maker then potentially there are ways to improve.
You have to ask yourself :
- Why did the people making the decisions at the time make the decision they did?
- Has the environment changed?
- Have the tools changed so that something that was a pain point has now been removed?
Inspired by The Secrets of our Success by Joseph Henrich
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 