Decision-Making in the NFL Draft

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The largest live decision-making event was held last week in Detroit — drawing 775,000 people over a three-day period. 

During the NFL Draft, 32 teams were challenged to make lightening-quick decisions, with hopes of improving their team’s talent base for the upcoming season and the not-too-distant future. 

Months of preparation went in to providing teams with the insight necessary to hopefully make the right choices. Decisions were judged as the media filled with so-called “experts” evaluated each pick. When the event ended, they provided letter grades for each team. 

Essentially, these grades are based on matching the selections to the grader’s evaluation, which then assumes the grader is correct and the decision-makers wrong. Think of it this way, the student is grading the teacher.

Making matters worse, it takes at least three years before the actual decisions can be properly evaluated. Even the teams are unsure of their decisions. 

They believe they made great choices, but with so many variables in each decision, it’s hard to predict. So most teams will optimize for error reduction, instead of optimizing for insight maximization. 

For example, Rory Sutherland, in his talk about how billionaires behave, starts with the story of why the chicken crosses the road. Most give the standard answer because he wanted to get to the other side. 

For Sutherland, this is all wrong. He calls this “the lazy why.” 

It’s lazy because we all assume there is one chicken and one reason. Because we don’t look deeper into the possibilities, we become too content with one explanation. We lack a search for more insights. 

Gary Klein, a research psychologist who specializes in decision-making, has the same belief as Sutherland. He has spent the last 50 years studying how and why people make the decisions they do and is the founder of ShadowBox LLC, a cognitive skills training company, and the author of five books, including the popular Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights.

In talking with Shane Parrish on his podcast, he explained that finding the right insights is challenging for most decision-makers because it requires change. 

“Insights are disorienting and they make you change the way you think; organizations think they want insights and innovation and say that they want innovation, but in reality, they don’t, because insights force them to change,” he said.

The enemy of change and the biggest deterrent of gaining insights is the fear of making mistakes. 

We all know organizational mistakes are costly, and in the NFL, they’re very public. Most often, the decision-makers are people with experience. And because experience brings an element of scar tissue from past mistakes, innovation and the search for insights dissipates.

For Klein, the best decision-makers are experts, not experienced. People tend to reach a certain level of performance, and then they stagnate; the ones who continue improving engage in a process of “unlearning,” where they question their previously-held notions about the given subject and explore new depths that would have otherwise remained unexplored had they not questioned their mental models. 

In essence, all great decision-makers are curious and constantly trying to innovate. 

So, are you making decisions with curiosity? Are you satisfied with one reason? 

How many of those 32 teams had an expert making the decisions, as opposed to someone with experience? 

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