Why embracing randomness is sometimes better than having a
strategy.
There is a really cool article about the science of
randomness over at: http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/is-the-most-rational-choice-the-random-one/ The tag is – if you can’t choose wisely,
choose randomly.
Here’s a synopsis of the article and the research cited by
the article.
Rationality is great – but there is often a randomness to
what is going on and can’t be avoided. If we strive for perfect (which is not
attainable), we often miss the good.
To make this make more sense. If you can’t find a good reason for doing
something, finding a reason, any reason, even a bad reason is our default as
humans. That’s why rationalizing has a negative connotation. It means that in
the absence of good reasons, we are making up reasons in an attempt to bring
order to our decision making.
And while that’s normally a good thing, it turns out
that if we use bad reasons we often end
up with bad outcomes. Which means, we
would have had better results if we had chosen what to do at random. And yes, there is evidence this is true in
some situations.
So, for a situation in which choosing randomly is better,
it’s best to accept that and embrace randomness through a process called, sortation.
Let’s take hiring for an example. Often our reasons for
hiring people is arbitrary. We rationalize why we pick one candidate over
another. But actually, we would probably
have better results if … once the criteria for basic qualifications are met –
the person who gets the job out of several candidates is chosen by random
lottery. This would replace arbitrary
bad reasons with randomness, which is actually likely to give us a better
outcome, despite the counter-intuitive nature of this approach.
The benefit of adding randomness into the hiring process would be evident. Imagine what our work forces would look like if we did hire people randomly – assuming our basic hiring criteria were met. We would probably have a more diverse workforce.
