The Half-Happy Horror
June 21, 2019·2 comments
Organizations claim to balance multiple competing objectives at once. Yet when pressed, they optimize ruthlessly for one while performing ritual gestures toward the others. The cartoons they construct to hide this tradeoff grow more sophisticated with every rule designed to enforce transparency. What happens when everyone knows the game but keeps playing it anyway?
• Institutions tell themselves they're balancing three or four competing goals. A closer look reveals they've optimized for exactly one and dressed up the others in measurement systems that confirm everything is fine.
• The more elaborate the measurement framework becomes, the less it actually measures. A liquidity risk report filed to satisfy regulators tells a happy story right up until the moment it becomes catastrophically irrelevant.
• Investment managers aren't lying when they claim their processes balance multiple objectives. They've simply built cartoons so convincing that they believe them. The cartoon becomes indistinguishable from strategy.
• Every mitigant offered to justify a decision is also a tool of confirmation bias. Naming a problem solved is easier than admitting tradeoffs exist, so institutions name their problems solved.
• The real horror isn't the deception. It's that half-happy solutions satisfy no one but feel honest enough to preserve the systems creating them. The game continues because everyone has learned to stop asking if it's real.
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Comments
The first thing you need to do to succeed in Corporate America is when you are given your “goals” or “objectives” for the year is to figure out which one (usually it’s one) matters and which ones you just need to wave your hands at. Whether you are just out of college or running several businesses, figure out what really, truly matters to your boss - do that - and smartly wave your hands at the others and you’ll go far.
Triple +1 Mark. College students please take good heed of this great advice. Corporates are so awash of doublespeak and secondary objectives. To swim you need to crack the truly important thing that needs to be got right. Investment professionals have to work out what benchmark really matters when clients give a mix of objectives (beat inflation, not lose money, good returns).
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