In a game of basketball, the goal is to score more points than your opponent. To make scoring easier and to put the defence under pressure, teams create complicated plays where players move around the court in preplanned movements. These plays can be very complicated with multiple movements and multiple players involved, or be more simplistic with limited movements and fewer players.
Knowing that condition, which should you continue doing? The play that missed a shot and didn’t generate any points or the play that made the shot and generated points?
It is a simple question, and the obvious answer is the play that made the shot. More points more better right?
Outcome vs Process
This problem comes down to a simple question – Do you put more emphasis on outcome or process?
In the basketball scenario, is it better to score (outcome) regardless of how successfully the play was run, or is it better than the play generated the shot you wanted (process) regardless of whether the shot went in?
Deep Vs Shallow
In the book Think Again by Adam Grant, Grant talks about Process Accountabilty. This can be broken into two parts, is the process thought about deeply or only has shallow thought?
He mentions NASA’s performance culture that focused on outcomes. There would be issues but because the mission still worked, no consideration was placed on questioning whether the process needed to be improved.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Only when there was catastrophic failure did processes get assessed.
Grant agrues that performance cultures favour outcomes and silence critics. This creates short term gains but long term performance losses. Defining success as the outcome working or not is too simplistic a metric to understand if it was actually successful or just luck.
Wide Open Shot
Going back to the basketball example, the aim of an offensive play is to put a player in a position to create a high percentage shooting opportunity.
If the play was run really well and the team got the ball in the hands of the player they wanted, and they ended up taking an uncontested shot, does that sound successful regardless of the shot going in or not?
If the play was run terribly and the player had to take a highly contested shot, does that sound successful regardless of the shot going in or not?
Previously shot missing, bad. Shot going in, good. Now if we look at the process of creating the shot, the uncontested shot looks like the more successful approach, regardless of the outcome.
Luck or Skill?
The problem with focusing on outcome is that it doesn’t untangle luck from skill.
If the outcome is binary, i.e if x happens, good, if x doesn’t happen, bad. This creates a challenge to tell if what you are doing is a result of skill and talent or just luck. The more there is a chance it is just luck the more there is an opportunity for failure when luck stops.
What to do?
Obviously, outcome is important. If you are coaching a team or running a business, the point is to win. More money, more points, it is all the same.
With business, as with sports, it is not one thing you are doing. In basketball you take many shots in a game. This creates many chances to test processes. Over the course of a season, you take thousands of shots.
This creates thousands of test opportunities to improve and refine your approach to making scoring easier.
You want to consider the quality of the opportunity (process) as well as if you scored or not (outcome).
In business this means how efficient and effective are your systems? Where are the potential points of failure? Where the the bottlenecks? What happens if certain people aren’t at work?
Outcomes are great, but we also want to be routinely thinking about our processes to make sure they are supporting the desired outcomes or if our outcomes are just lucky.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 