Imagine being an NBA coach, pretty sweet deal if you can get it, the trouble is that there is a lot of pressure to win. However, your team just lost, what do you do?
Do you change everything and start from scratch?
What if the game was a tight loss? Does that make you change more than a big loss?
Decisions and Outcomes
Would you change your strategy if you won the game?
An article in Management Science suggests that NBA coaches are “more likely to revise their strategy after a loss than a win—even for narrow losses, which are uninformative about team effectiveness,”
This is putting all of the emphasis on the outcome rather than the quality of the decision.
What are you trying to learn?
The great coach of the San Antonio Spurs, Gregg Popovich would be given a hard time for losing some regular season games. He was playing the long game.
He knew he would see these teams in the playoffs and he wanted to learn things about the teams he would be facing in the future. He would try different plays, matchups, and rotations (the five players on the court) to see how the opposition would react.
The outcome of the game was not as important as winning the championship. Learning more information to update decisions was more valuable to him. Side note, the Spurs won a lot.
Updating your decisions
It sometimes feels that strength is having conviction in your decisions. This is bullshit, strength is having conviction in your decision-making process. Don’t stay with a decision because you made it or it took a long time to make it.
If you get new information that means the old decision is incorrect you should change it.
If you knew what you knew now when you were making the decision would you change your decision?
If the answer is no then make a new decision.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 