So what are the implications of this model for you as you think about your organization and the organizations you're trying to navigate and negotiate with? So, first, the models reveal sources of power and constraints on power. So each of these models point out ways in which decisions get made. Those are opportunities, but they're also limitations. So this suggests that savvy analysis requires using multiple perspectives. One of the reasons this is so important is that we tend to bring a particular lens to situations. We tend to have chronic ways of thinking about situations. So Allison's entire motivation was to push the field of political science away from their chronic lens of rational analysis. What is your chronic lens? Do you tend to think of organizations and actions as rational actions? Some of you might have a chronic lens of bureaucratic politics. You think all of it is fed up from the individual bargains that are cut at the lower levels. And then, few of us, and we're going to emphasize this more, few of us have this middle model, this model two, the scrutinize process, where a lot of organization's behavior is just inertia, it's just routine. But it's not a very interesting one, so it usually doesn't draw our attention. We don't tend to explain behavior that way. Allison's point is we're going to better understand organizations if we bring multiple perspectives. If we move from one to the other as we try to understand what happened or predict what is going to happen in the future. This is connected a little by some recent research by Phil Tetlock. Tetlock is now here at the University of Pennsylvania. This book was written when he was at Berkeley. And it was a unique study of judgement in the field of psychology. Usually when judgement study in psychology, especially historically, is done with experimental research, often using students. And they're short little stimuli. Tetlock did something quite unusual. He decided to study the judgement of real world experts, economists, political commentators, political scientists, about real world problems. Things like, what's going to happen in South Africa? What's going to happen with the dissolution of the Soviet Union? What's going to happen in future elections? Where is the economy going? So, over a ten year period of time, which at the time was unheard of to study judgement this way, over a ten year period of time Tetlock captured people's predictions. And then followed what actually happened in the world to figure out how good they were at making these predictions. And what he found was that there is rampant overconfidence. The overconfidence we observe in the lab, we also observe in the real world. And importantly, he was trying to understand what distinguishes those who are overconfident from those who are well-collaborated, and he couldn't find anything. Nothing that you might think would predict that, education, political orientation, gender, these things don't relate to that. He did find one difference, though, and he called it Cognitive Style. And he differentiates what he called foxes, borrowing framework from Irving Berlin, foxes from hedgehogs. This actually differentiated those who were overconfident from those who were better calibrated. What does he mean by it? Hedgehogs, Tetlock says, are thinkers who know one big thing. They aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains. They display bristly impatience with those who don't get it. And express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long-term. Foxes, on the other hand, are, Tetlock says, thinkers who know many small things, tricks of the trade. They're skeptical of grand schemes. They see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises, but rather exercises in flexible ad hocery that require stitching together diverse sources of information. And these judges are rather diffident about their own forecasting ability. This is the big distinction, and this is the only distinction he found, that predicts good judgement in these real world, meaningful situations. We bring it up now because foxes are exactly the kind of folks that would use all three levels from Allison's models. Foxes are those who don't go to the mat believing in model one, or go to the mat believing in model three. They just think, well, I need to look at these situations from multiple perspectives. I'm going to be a better judge of what happens next if I bring multiple lenses to the situation. Finally, on the implications from Allison's models, not all models are equally appreciated. My hypothesis is, that while Model 1 has been long dominant in political analysis, and many of us obsess on Model 3, especially in our own organizations. We're all too familiar with the bureaucratic negotiations that go on in ours. We sometimes might neglect what happens in other organizations. But we tend to think some about Model 3. What really gets neglected is Model II, these organizational processes. So you might think, just to make it a little more real. What are some examples in your organization where routinized processes are driving what you guys are doing? Routinized processes would be the best explanation of why some outcome occurs or some decision is made. Over time, I've collected some examples from students of these things. They talk about things like the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf a few years ago. How BP responded to that. Some of the MMS licensing issues that led to in the first place. How the government responded after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Al ot of it was just routinized behavior not well adapted to the circumstances that were taking place then. The intelligence gathering that took place before and after 9/11. These are all government examples, but there are non-governmental examples as well in hospitals. Many routinized procedures in hospitals, and for good reason. Sometimes they have those procedures in order to protect downsides, but so much becomes routinized as a result. An example, some students gave a few years ago was campus recruiting. This at the time I was at Yale and some students said, I'd like to think that these organizations come and they recruit at Yale because we're the best school. But it could just be, and in fact sure is in some cases, just because that's what they've been doing. Or somebody set it in motion ten years ago because they were close or they knew somebody and now it's just the way things are done. We have examples of students who worked at newspaper. How much of newspaper's operations are just built around that daily cycle of producing the newspaper? So again, pushing you on this kind of underappreciated aspect of what happens in organizations, this underappreciated model for why organizations do what they do. What organizational processes are driving your organization? What organizational processes might you attend to if you want to influence what happens in organizations? We have one more implication, and it doesn't flow as immediately for Allison as from all of the psychology research that's come since Allison. And that is, don't forget about chance. A danger of the framework that Allison is suggesting is that you can fully explain what happened. But if you fully explain what happens, you're going to leave out the rule of chance. And that's going to make you a bad predictor of what happens in the future. Because there's always a lot of uncertainty and chance in what happens in the future. So, one last admonition, don't forget about chance. So it turns out that even those in the administration at that time were thinking about chance. I mentioned before that this was where the terms hawks and doves comes from. But in subsequent analysis, people have talked about there's kind of an owlish group, neither hawk nor dove. This included McNamara, Bundy and Ball, and it came from the weight that they assigned to the risk of desperate irrational Soviet action or inadvertent escalation. In other word, they knew that things may not happen exactly according to plan. They knew that there was a chance of accident that would lead to disaster or the initiation of nuclear war. And that consideration of chance informed their decision making. McNamara, late in life, they did a documentary on him, and he talked about this crisis. This is 45 years after it happened. And he says, I don't think the Cuban missile crisis was unique. The Bay of Pigs, Berlin in 1961, Cuba and then later events in the Middle East and Libya and so on, all exhibit the truth of what I'll call McNamara's Law. McNamara's Law is, it is impossible to predict with a high degree of confidence what the effects of the use of military force will be because of the risks of accident, miscalculation, misperception and inadvertence. In my opinion, this law ought to be inscribed above all the doorways in the White House and Pentagon, and it is the overwhelming lesson of the Cuban missile crisis. Again, he's talking about military, but we know that chance applies to non-military situations as well. And the last implication is, we've got these perspectives, we've got these models, but we need to also account for chance.
