I feel fortunate that my schooling led me to discover my professional calling. Based on undergraduate and graduate work in statistics and engineering, I now help people improve their leadership, teamwork, and decision-making skills. The most challenging decisions I have encountered are those involving a family health crisis.
One of the key concepts I learned early from my teachers (especially Professor Ron Howard) was the difference between a good decision and a good outcome.
In theoretical terms, you can look at decision-making in terms of coherence or correspondence. The coherence approach says, "How coherent is this decision at the time you make it?" In other words, you judge the quality of a decision at the time you make it, along a continuous spectrum. The correspondence approach says, you can't tell how good a decision was until you see the outcome.
The implications are significant for medical decision making. But before I get into that, let me illustrate them using an example from everyday life.
In early February, 2011, we had a busy father/son day in my family. The Giants were celebrating FanFest and we were given passes to get in early. My son was also looking forward to his playoff game in a local basketball league. Then we were celebrating Chinese New Year with my in-laws. (None of us is Chinese, but we live in San Francisco where this feels like a national holiday for all to enjoy.) To conclude this busy day, we had an invitation to go to a Cal basketball game as guests of my in-laws, or stick with our plans to watch USF play Santa Clara.
As the day progressed, we faced a series of decisions. It started early in the morning. I was intent on getting my son out the door so we could catch the bus (my wife and our daughter had the car). We needed to look ahead at all the gear we would need that day. I printed out a color map of the FanFest events. My son was sure that with our early passes we would have unlimited access to autographs etc. I figured out the bus schedule online and off we went. I was feeling pretty good. Ten minutes into the bus ride, my son asked me if I had the FanFest tickets. No! We jumped off the bus and headed back home.
Now we were going to be running late for the 9:30 gates at FanFest. As we rode another bus home to get the tickets, I formulated some scenarios. First I called my wife to see where she was with the car. No answer. I didn't leave a message, figuring I shouldn't bother her. We can work this out on our own, right son?
Next I told my son we could call a cab. But cabs are notoriously unwilling to come out to our house on the outskirts of San Francisco. They almost always pick up rides off the street even after accepting the dispatch to our house. Another alternative was to call Uber. This is a unique company that dispatches airport limos that have downtime, and redeploys them as city taxis during each hiatus between booked rides. You can order them using your smartphone and see their progress on a map as they come and pick you up. But it's two or three times as expensive as a cab.
My son thought we should just call a cab. I did, and got an estimate of 5-20 minutes. Twenty minutes later, no cab. Now we were really stuck because going with Uber would cost a lot and still not get us there on time.
How am I doing, son, with my decision-making?
Just at that moment, we got bailed out. My wife came home with the car. I called and canceled the cab (still no sign of it). We all dashed down to FanFest. We got there in time for the opening of the gates at 9:30 am.
Now here's where things get interesting from a decision making point of view. The gates did not open at 9:30 as scheduled for us special pass holders. And when we got there at 9:30, as opposed to waltzing in with no line (as in previous years), we had to find the back of the line... which was a 20 minute walk down the Embarcardero, practically at the Ferry Plaza. Apparently winning the World Series changes the dynamics at the Giants FanFest.
I despaired of ever getting into FanFest. I asked the kids, "Should we bail on the line and go get an ice cream sundae at the Ferry Plaza?" I don't EVER offer food bribes as distractors, so this captured their interest. But they were more intent on FanFest.
The line started moving at 10:10 and we got in at around 10:30. It was jammed. No hope of getting autographs by noon (our departure time for my son's basketball game). My son lamented the timing of his game - without it, he would have gotten in line for the autographs and grab bags, and maybe even viewed the World Series trophy (longest line for that one). But one of my management principles, for family and work alike, is that we keep our commitments in the order we make them. We attended some Q&A, watched some video highlights of backstage at the World Series, and wandered around. Then left for my son's game. As we left the attendant reminded us, no coming back in.
As soon as we got to a quiet place, my wife checked her voicemail and indeed there was a message. Our son's game was canceled - rescheduled to Monday. Aargh! Had we known this 10 minutes earlier, we would have stayed at FanFest for another couple hours before meeting my in-laws for lunch. There was much wailing and gnashing of the teeth and bemoaning of our fate, particularly by a certain 10 year old for whom this was a big big deal.
For the second time that day (an all-time record), I offered a junk food bribe as a distractor, this time successfully, and we all went to Jamba Juice.
Of course, when we got to lunch at Shanghai Dumpling, the line was long and we then faced the decision of, should we stay or should we go? We stayed. Service was slow. The food, when it arrived, was divine.
Finally, we went to the USF game. This was a make-up game because I had been too sick to take my son to the USF-Gonzaga game earlier in the month. Which turned out to be a cliffhanger pulled out by the home team, USF. This one, against Santa Clara, was OK. Meanwhile, the game we didn't go to turned out to be a triple-overtime thriller at Cal.
So how did we do in terms of decision-making?
Let's recap. First, except to my son, there was nothing terribly high stakes on this afternoon. I would say I made a low-quality decision when I spent a lot of time printing out a color map of the Fanfest events and lost sight of what should have been a higher priority, locating and bringing the tickets. This was a low-quality decision regardless of the outcome: I would recognize that as an error even if it never cost me anything.
I also made a foreseeable error when it came to ordering a cab. At that point, my son and I believed that arriving by 9:30 would be critical to our enjoyment of an event we had been looking forward to for weeks. Given what I value in clear-headed moments, this was not the right time to save a few dollars, particularly given my long and negative experiences getting cabs out to our neighborhood in a timely fashion. The Uber airport limo service, in contrast, is a lock. I should have splurged. Note that I feel that way even though we had a happy outcome, in that my wife and daughter showed up with the car.
With the benefit of hindsight, some would say, "Fanfest was over-run. You would have wasted money on a car service, and the delay associated with returning to get your tickets turned out to be immaterial." True, but given what I believed and what I valued at the time I made those decisions, they were lower quality decisions than I could and should have made. Regardless of the outcome.
Leaving FanFest was, in contrast, a good decision even though the outcome was unhappy. We experienced much regret over leaving when we learned we did not have to be at my son's playoff game. But again, given what we believed and valued, it was the right thing to do and I would do it again under the same circumstances. Perhaps my wife could have checked her voicemail before leaving the park, but it was too noisy, and anyway we share a family value of not being obsessive about checking our voicemails and emails when we are together.
At the restaurant, we chose to wait because my mother-in-law assured us the food would be worth it, based on her prior experience. We loved it. It would have been a good decision, based on what we believed and valued at the time, even if the food had turned out badly.
We attended a decent USF game and missed a splendid Cal effort in their triple-overtime loss to Arizona. My son doesn't quite subscribe to the coherence theory of decision quality (yet!), so his consolation was that Cal lost, and in retrospect, three overtimes preceding a loss would have simply prolonged his suffering. Better for him to have enjoyed the USF win. This logic is impeccable among sports fans, and matches the correspondence theory of decision quality. As a management scientist, I feel this is indeed incoherent. Attending the USF game over the Cal game was a good decision before the games took place, based on what we believed and valued that afternoon. How could the outcome of the night-time games change the quality of our decision?
Coming back almost full circle to the Chinese New Year, I just read my daughter a Buddhist fable that illustrates the different reactions we all may have to reversals of fortune. The gist of the fable is that a villager's most prized possession, his horse, disappears one night. Others come to express their condolences, or perhaps revel in his misfortune. "What bad luck," they say. "Good luck, bad luck, we'll see." shrugs the villager. Next, the horse returns with a dozen wild horses. "Congratulations on your good luck," sings the chorus. "We'll see" says the villager. Then the villager's son breaks his leg while taming the wild horses. "Such bad luck" say the neighbors. Again, from the villager: "We'll see." As the son is limping around, the Emperor's army sweeps through the village and drafts all able-bodied men. The son escapes this fate. "So lucky," say the other parents. "We'll see" says the son, who has internalized his father's attitude.
This fable illustrates that even the quality of outcomes cannot be judged in the short term! So even if you subscribe to the correspondence theory of decision quality, you are stuck waiting an arbitrarily long time before you can judge a decision. The correspondence view of decision quality is indeed incoherent.
The coherence theory of decision quality - judging a decision based on what is known and valued at the time it is made - allows us to surf on the sea of uncertainty without drowning in regrets at every reversal. This philosophy of decision making is perfectly captured in the Serenity Prayer - "Give me the courage to change the things I can change, the serenity to accept the things I cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Conversely, many in our culture tend to judge outcomes. If things turn out well, conventional wisdom supposes the happy events must have been preceded by good decisions. If things turn out badly, it was because of bad decisions.
Over the years I have directly worked with hundreds upon hundreds of patients making life and death decisions. I have reviewed hundreds more such cases through my work with organizations implementing decision support programs. Bringing the coherence theory of decision quality to the patient bedside or examining room has been rewarding because people recognize and embrace it as the most productive way to take positive action while recognizing the limits of our control. Decision support programs encourage patients to review information, ask questions of their doctors, and reflect critically on the responses they get. In practice, this usually means slowing down, challenging authority, and getting second opinions, among the seven steps I have described previously. And, having followed this process of critical reflection, we can move forward with confidence and recognize any reversals of fortune as simply bad outcomes that sometimes follow even good bets.
Recently one of my colleagues saw a patient who had experienced a recurrence of breast cancer five years after her initial treatment. In addition to suffering from the recurrence, this patient was experiencing significant distress over her recollection that she had declined the most aggressive possible treatment the first time around, opting instead for a slightly less aggressive strategy with significantly fewer side effects and a slightly higher rate of recurrence. My colleague showed this patient the list of questions and consultation records generated five years ago as part of our decision support program at UCSF. The patient was relieved to be reminded of the coherence of her original decision, based on what she and her doctors knew and valued five years earlier. Although no one likes to think of medicine as a gamble, she recognized that she had made a bet that was right for her at the time. With a reminder, our patient was able to separate her decision from a subsequent reversal of fortune. Indeed, she might have recurred even with the more aggressive and invasive treatment. Who knows? We will support her in moving forward with courage, serenity, and wisdom.
My personal and professional experiences leave me more resolved than ever to promote the coherence view of decision quality. Others have used fighting words such as logical or rational to describe this view of decision making. Fighting words because people can have different standards for logic or rationality, and will resist the imposition of someone else's definition. But decision quality is not binary like logical/illogical or rational/irrational. It is a spectrum. Please join me in asking this question, especially in high stakes situations: to what extent do our decisions reflect what we know and value at the time we take action?