A Forced Break in a Common Decision Pattern

In Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson about the original lexicographer and wit, Boswell recounts trying to get Johnson to travel.  He asks Johnson if he would like to see Dublin; Johnson says no.  Then Boswell probes: “Is not the Giant’s Causeway worth seeing?”  Johnson replied, “Worth seeing? Yes.  But not worth going to see.”  That’s a difference the pandemic highlighted.

The saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast” acknowledges the power of culture without saying what culture is.  Culture isn’t a statement about beliefs or values; culture is what we do.  Not just what we do but what we routinely do. 

Our default choices, the ones we make routinely without thinking about them, define our culture.

These choices aren’t so much responses to, or driven by, our wants.  They are primarily a reflection of the decision environment we are in and the routine choices of others in that environment. 

At the personal level, these default choices are more than just “what I do;” they are doing something to me, too.  They are shaping what I want; they are shaping me. 

The reason my set of default choices have this “shaping” power is that embedded in these routine decisions is a story about value; a narrative about what “the good life” looks like, and about how to have a sense of well-being and a life well-lived.

I’m actually absorbing the values in this story simply by practicing its daily routine decisions.  I’m mimicking the choices I’m surrounded by and the “value story” those choices imply.

The pandemic caused radical changes in many people’s daily choice patterns – it changed their culture. 

Understanding how we are shaped by our daily default choices allows us to look differently at the normal, almost monotonous, day-to-day culture of routines we are immersed in:  we can see ways these choices may be molding our definition of the good life and creating our values rather than reflecting them.  We can see how our habits are training us to pursue this story of “the good life.”

That is a gift of the WFH forced break caused for many by the pandemic: it broke the “culture” of routine, day-to-day habits, and made the story about the “good life” embedded in those routines easier to see. 

Working from home showed (for some) how their daily default choices – the logistics of going to a joint workplace daily – were shaping their life values in ways that weren’t as attractive when those decisions were segregated out and highlighted.  When “going to work” was no longer embedded implicitly in a daily culture, there was the realization that culture had never been explicitly chosen.  It was a culture that “happened” to them, that was accepted rather than selected.  It was the default culture of the job they took or the career they chose.

Most of our decisions, professional and personal, are the result of habit, so they seem benign.  But embedded in those habits are values, sometimes values that have not been chosen but mimic the routine choices of our environment.  Thinking clearly about personal choices, especially the “default” ones, is challenging. 

A forced change in routine is also a forced change in culture; that’s a prompt to notice our routine for what it is: a story about “the good life” that isn’t necessarily an expression of our values but, instead, is shaping them. 

Part of the reason that “getting people back to work” has been slow isn’t just the inconvenience; going to work is now counterculture for many who established a new set of “routine choices” that reflect a new story of what “the good life” looks like that is more compelling.  As Johnson might have said, they noticed that there’s a difference between a job “worth doing” and a job “worth going to do.”

A Movie About Making Decisions Under Uncertainty

The new movie Golda focuses on the tense days before and during the Yom Kippur War.  As the trailer shows, the tension was driven in part because of the number, magnitude, and timing of the decisions that had to be made.  The fact that many of the key decisions were group decisions only amplified the challenges.

A 2004 article from the Foreign Policy Research Institute made this comment about decisions made just prior to the start of the war:

 Prof. Baruch Fischhoff at Carnegie Mellon has used this complex setting as an example of “groupthink.”  When the Israeli military leaders looked at the information they were given – troop positions, movement of equipment, Soviet consultant changes, etc. – there were multiple possible interpretations.  One possibility was that an attack was not imminent.

The military decision makers knew each other well; they had fought together in past wars and skirmishes, and they respected each other’s opinions – in fact, many were good friends.  When person A proffered an opinion about the evidence, person B’s respect for A gave the opinion credence.  B’s support encouraged A to believe that the opinion had merit because A respected the opinions of B.  Person C respected both A and B, voiced that respect, further encouraging A and B to subscribe to that view since they both respected C’s opinions.  This is the launch of groupthink.  The setting is one of ambiguous information and genuine mutual respect.  The military leadership decided that an attack was not imminent and extreme emergency measures were not needed.

Naval leadership was not at that meeting – they were out at sea.  Their leadership – with the same information, same war experience, same time constraints – concluded that an attack was imminent.  Their groupthink went in a different direction.

Evaluating information is influenced by our perception of the information:  is our perception accurate?  Accurate perception is most difficult in circumstances exactly like those in which intelligence analysis is conducted: “making real-time judgments about evolving situations on the basis of incomplete, ambiguous, and often conflicting information that is processed incrementally under pressures for [making] early judgment,” as the Foreign Policy paper says.

In the article “Connecting the Dots” in The New Yorker (2003), the clarity after the attack versus the clarity of signals before the attack was summarized this way:

Take a quick look at the diagrams below:

What did you read?  Did you notice the double “A” or “THE”?  Most people don’t in their first glance at the figures.  This illustrates the fundamental challenge to accurate perception:  we have a bias toward perceiving what we expect to perceive.

Groupthink influenced the U.S. perception and evaluation of information regarding the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) before the Iraqi war.  The same Policy report quoted a U.S. Senate committee’s conclusions about U.S. intelligence:

Events that seem unlikely to occur in the future can appear to be almost inevitable looking back after they have occurred.  This hindsight bias is always present; after we know something has occurred, we see it as very likely no matter how unlikely we may have viewed it before it occurred.  In the same New Yorker article, this tendency is described:

This hindsight bias is dangerous because it not only fools us into thinking we understand the past perfectly, but that confidence carries over to therefore thinking we understand the future, too.   

Ironically, a movie about bad decisions by others has the effect of making us more confident about our own decision making.  Looking back, we see they missed the obvious; we wouldn’t have.  They were vulnerable to groupthink; we wouldn’t be.  There is a well-known comment from one of the earliest decision analysts, Amos Tversky:  A person “who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”

Groupthink is powerful because it is insidious; we are “inside” the effect, as it were.  It isn’t external pressure or coercion so much as it is a sense of group confidence based on mutual respect. When this happens, dissent is far less likely – not because it is suppressed, but because it never really shows up. 

There is an old saying that no jail is so secure as one from which no one wants to escape.  Therein lies the seductive power of group think.

Optimizing College Football Conference Membership

The most common reason given for the departure of eight of the PAC12 schools to other conferences is money.  The media rights fees were too small.  Saying media money was the cause is like saying gravity is the cause of plane crashes; it’s true but it doesn’t give much insight.

The product the PAC12 produces and sells to the media is an audience.  Media packages correlate pretty closely with viewership.  Media have to pay for the games in advance; they don’t know which teams will be ranked, which will generate national interest or land national coverage, or other details of the upcoming seasons.  So estimated viewership depends heavily on the average viewership in the past.

Consider the PAC 12’s TV viewership in the 2022 season (source: Medium).  The average weekly football viewership for 119 schools is reported, ranging from 5.8 million (Ohio State) to 9,000 (James Madison). 

Here is how PAC12 schools ranked in 2022 (average weekly viewership in parens): 

1.Oregon 12th (2M)

2.USC 14th (2M)

3.UCLA 24th (1.6M)

4.Utah 33rd (1 M)

5.Washington 34th (1M)

6.Wash State 41st (.9M)

7.Cal 45th (.8M)

8.Stanford 47th (.8M)

9.Oregon St 57th (.6M)

10.Arizona 62nd (.5M)

11.Colorado 67th (.3M)

12.AZ State 71st (.3M) 

Boston College, Boise State, and Air Force had higher viewership in 2022 than some PAC12 schools.

TV viewership isn’t the only measure of value, but still a key input to the media package.  Ohio State has a weekly average of 5.8M, the top four schools are all over 4M per week.  These schools had as many viewers in a week as most of the PAC schools had in 4 or 5 weeks, and more than ASU had in an entire 12 game season.

2022 viewership was consistent with the recent past.  The list below shows PAC school viewership rankings for the 2015 to 2019 period as reported by Nate Silver.  As he points out, Washington State isn’t typically viewed as a premium football brand yet there are six PAC teams with smaller viewership during that time.

Nate Silver’s Pac12 Team Valuation

Silver has an interesting valuation of the P12 teams based on a composite index.  It’s a proxy for how they are viewed as potential “adds” by other conferences.  His Big 10 “acquisition” forecast from a year ago was pretty spot on.  You can see his valuation estimates here:

For a slightly different view, you can look at the Wall Street Journal’s evaluation (2019) of college football programs as if they were professional franchises; they are ranked by estimated total market value.  The top-valued program in 2018 was Texas with a valuation of $1.1B; USC, UCLA, and ASU are ranked 23, 24, and 25 at around $300M, or a third the value of the top programs.  It also shows some of the decline in some PAC schools since then.

School rankings in other conferences tell the same story: a few schools draw big viewership while some schools add little to the media package value.  Since conferences split fees equally, big-draw schools have incentives to leave a weak conference, and other conferences have an incentive to add them because they increase the size of the pie more than the slice they will take.  Conferences add schools until the forecasted media pie stops increasing enough to cover the added slice.

In 2022, USC had seven times the viewership of ASU or Colorado, four times Arizona, more than three times Utah.  But they all get the same slice.  This is a recipe for instability; other conferences want the big media draws and big media draws want to quit carrying weaker programs.  That’s why Clemson and Florida State want to leave the ACC, another PAC in the making.

Conferences adding schools, like the Big 10 and Big 12, face something like the famous knapsack optimization problem:  add teams to your knapsack so the total value is highest given the amount of “space” each team takes up. 

PAC12 departures were a result, in part, of the management of the conference’s product.  Media buy audiences that they can re-sell, not games or events, and the PAC12 wasn’t aggressive enough in managing their audience.  They tended to stay local, replayed games to a regional viewership (PAC12 Network) with regional hosts, and they did little to address disparate conference viewerships.  They didn’t do enough to reach out-of-region viewers or schedule the big dogs in ratings and rankings.  One result was incentives for some to leave and, then, not much product left to sell when they did.

Money wasn’t the root problem that caused the PAC to fragment, but it was an important evidence of the problem.