像个科学家一样行事

Many leaders overrely on their gut instinct or personal experiences when making decisions—despite decades of admonitions about the dangers of doing so.

许多领导人在做决策时过度依赖他们的直觉或个人经验--尽管几十年来人们一直在告诫这样做的危险性。

The Root Cause

根本原因

Executives often think that what worked for them in the past—the successes that earned them their leadership roles—will work in the future. And their subordinates often reinforce those feelings.

高管们常常认为，过去对他们有用的东西--为他们赢得领导地位的成功--在未来也会有用。而他们的下属也常常强化这种感觉。

The Solution

解决方案

Senior managers should take a scientific approach to making decisions. They should challenge assumptions and investigate anomalies by articulating testable hypotheses and conducting rigorous experiments that generate conclusive evidence.

高级管理人员应该采取科学的方法来做决定。他们应该挑战假设，并通过阐述可测试的假设和进行严格的实验以产生结论性的证据来调查反常现象。

Every day, managers make decisions about products, customers, resource allocation, employee pay, and more, basing them on assumptions that have never been critically examined, much less challenged. “I’ve always been successful doing it this way and never thought about doing it another way” is what we often hear when managers are asked why they didn’t question practices that turned out to be faulty. But when skeptics show that ideas underlying practices are wrong, confounding, or even costly, leaders grasp the importance of systematically testing assumptions.

每天，经理们在产品、客户、资源分配、员工薪酬等方面做出决策，而这些决策的基础是从未被严格审查过的假设，更不用说挑战了。当经理们被问及为什么不对那些被证明有问题的做法提出质疑时，我们经常听到这样的话："我一直都是这样做的，从来没有想过用另一种方式来做"。但是，当怀疑论者表明实践背后的想法是错误的、令人困惑的，甚至是代价高昂的时候，领导者就会把握住系统地测试假设的重要性。

Consider what happened at the hotel and casino company Harrah’s Entertainment in the early 2000s, when one of us, Gary, who was then its chief operating officer, worked with his analytics team to reevaluate the company’s approach to marketing incentives. The leaders of Harrah’s had subscribed to the industry’s conventional wisdom that financial incentives such as reduced room rates, food credits, and vouchers for retail stores heavily influenced customers’ decisions to visit Las Vegas and that offer...