If you genuinely enjoy understanding why something didn’t work and why your mental model was wrong, you will improve your decision-making. If you find it threatening, I’m betting you won’t.
Here’s the rub. Knowing why we make mistakes doesn’t always stop us from making them. As you’ll see. But I believe you’ll improve your odds. Improving our odds is what decision-making is about.
In 1951, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote The Hedgehog and the Fox. The book divided the great thinkers of the world into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs believed in having a big unifying idea that explained everything. They have a single lens through which they see the world. They can explain everything through their ideology. Foxes, on the other hand, pursue many different ideas. Scattered. Often unrelated. Even contradictory. They have no single ideology or theory on how things work. Berlin told us that, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”.
Dante was a hedgehog. Plato, Pascal, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Proust – all hedgehogs. Foxes include Shakespeare, Aristotle, Montaigne and Joyce. Tolstoy was, according to Berlin, a fox by nature, but believed in being a hedgehog.
I’ll pause here to clarify that I can add absolutely nothing to Berlin’s categorisation of the world’s big thinkers. I’d struggle to even pronounce half of these names. My interest in Berlin’s categorisation is due to a man called Philip Tetlock, a political forecaster and author. When it comes to understanding prediction and better decision-making, all roads lead to Professor Tetlock.
Tetlock analysed the characteristics of political forecaster experts. He found that they fall into two groups. One group of experts tended to organise their thinking around big ideas or ideologies. Some were socialists. Others in favour of a free market. Others still favoured state control. But the common thread was that their thinking was ideological. They would always find a way to explain what happened or what would happen through their ideology. Things that their theory couldn’t explain, they discarded as irrelevant distractions. Tetlock dubbed this group the ‘hedgehogs’ (of course).
The other group were more pragmatic experts. The ‘foxes’. These experts relied more on observation than theory. They had multiple unrelated ideas and approaches, used many different analytical tools. They chose the appropriate tool depending on the specific challenge, and gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. They talked in possibilities and probabilities. Not certainties. And – hugely important – they changed their minds when the data conflicted with their initial view.
What Tetlock found was that foxes were better forecasters.3
Predicting how people will respond to our marketing initiatives is difficult. Ideally, we are trying to accurately predict what will happen. I’d wager a bet that much of the time we don’t even know afterwards. Isolating and measuring the full effect of our activity is not easy. We often move on without truly knowing. Or worse – we move on, thinking that the decisions we made were effective, when they were not. And when we’re making the decision – the right answer isn’t always intuitive. Not to ourselves and especially not to our non-marketing colleagues. This marketing stuff is messy.
It is easy enough to measure how people respond to our marketing in the short term. It is far more difficult to measure how our marketing is influencing people’s behaviour over the long term. Because every situation is different in some way, we don’t have many hard and fast rules. So we base our decisions on theories. We hypothesise what we think will happen.
There’s nothing wrong with having marketing theories. We need them. The problem is that we fall in love with unsubstantiated theories. We see all results through our preferred theory of choice. And we are not good at changing our minds, even when the evidence starts to stack up.
What I’m getting to is – we are hedgehogs.
3
A hedgehog that believes in being a fox
My dad was a doctor. A professor of pathology, a man of science and a teacher. He was a humble, quiet-spoken man, despite his reputation as one of the world’s most respected pathologists. Whenever I met his students, they would corner me for hours telling me how much they adored him. A year after he died, University College Dublin created a student award: the Peter Dervan Memorial Medal for Excellence in Cancer Pathology.
He was my hero.
If there is a polar opposite profession to my dad’s, it is advertising. He told me I used to quiz him about the press ads in his Sunday newspapers when I was as young as ten or 11. Some years later, he bought me my first advertising book, Ogilvy On Advertising. Not a bad choice for a man with no marketing experience or knowledge himself.
Medicine and marketing are miles away from each other, but both rely on decision-making. As a pathologist, my dad had to make high-stress decisions on a regular basis. I remember one story where he had to recommend treatment for a young boy who had discovered a tumour in his arm. It was growing rapidly. Do you amputate to stop it spreading, but lose the arm? Or do you treat it and wait, but risk that the cancer spreads? Two of the world’s most famous pathologists advised the parents that they should amputate. My dad disagreed. He recommended they wait. He believed that the cancer was benign and would stop growing. The boy’s father bet on my dad and didn’t amputate. The tumour continued to grow. But then it stopped, and started to shrink. The young boy recovered fully, and went on to live a healthy life.
Decisions like this are not just about facts and knowledge. Doctors are human. It is less risky to recommend amputation. If you amputate, you lose the arm, and perhaps save a life – but you wouldn’t know for sure if it were the right decision. If you wait – you find out, but it may be too late. I often wondered, many years later, how he made these decisions under such pressure, week in, week out. How can you become confident in your prediction, while not becoming overconfident? How do you push for the decision you think is correct, when it is personally less risky to go in the other direction? I think the answer is that he had all the characteristics of an effective decision-maker. He was a fox.
“Study the past,” he’d tell me over and over. He’d remind me that any fool could learn from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from mistakes of others. But Dad was only partly right here, at least when it comes to marketing. We often don’t even make fool status. We do not learn from our own mistakes. We make them over and over. We get blinded by our views about how marketing works. We trip ourselves up with simple schoolboy errors. We believe things without questioning them. And we won’t open the door to the possibility that our beliefs are flawed. Ego plays a role. As does fear. And pain.
But we can learn to make fewer mistakes. We can learn to make better decisions over time. I’ve been lucky to work with, and learn from, people who think and behave in ways similar to what Professor Tetlock described. Fox marketers. They study the past. They challenge assumptions. They have theories, but look for the evidence. They understand that human behaviour is messy and communications are nuanced. They are sceptical but not cynical. They have strong opinions, but these are loosely held. They are open to discovering that they are wrong. They think, not in certainties, but in probabilities. Which is why they experiment.
While I suspect they were born foxes, I do believe that these characteristics can be learned. I say this, because I am a hedgehog. A hedgehog that believes in being a fox.
4
The first thing I’d do
In every role I’ve had in the past decade, the first thing I’ve done is set out to do better work. Try to understand what most needed attention, and address that. Sometimes it was brand positioning. Sometimes media planning. Very often the creative.
But that is not what I would do now. The first thing I would do is get a definitive number on what the payback is on marketing spend. So how much profit do we get back for every dollar, pound or euro spent? I won’t expect this process to be easy, fast or straightforward. But my initial hiring, focus and resource prioritisation would be on this.
Without a number, we can’t make progress. We can’t improve