Big batches tend to make failures less than they actually are

Remember the last time you faced a big failure. How difficult was it to acknowledge it and how long did that process take? As you know, sometimes we can go whole life without being willing or ready to face it.

Most of the time we’re biased towards the arguments that would cushion the failure. And nothing wrong with that; that’s just how human nature works. The bigger the failure, the bigger the emotional pain that comes with it and the more difficult it is for our brain to bear it.
Our brain’s typical coping mechanism is to desperately look for ways to make it less of a failure than it actually is. And when we’re making a failure less than it is, we’re also distorting our perception of reality, which distorts future reasoning and behavior. This doesn’t happen all the time, but we’re very much incentivized to behave in this way.

So, how does this compare to a small failure? Well, if facing a big failure is quite difficult, facing a small failure is much less difficult.

And here’s the plot twist. You thought that this post is a life lesson, while actually it’s a life lesson AND a story about small batches 😊

We, as humans, work in systems (organizations) which are susceptible to the same effect. Big batches inherently carry big risks, which often lead to big failures. And these failures are often not recognized as such since the emotional burden that they present us with can be too heavy to face. In turn, this can also hide the learnings essential for making a progress (one example can be too many successful experiments in a company).

There’s also another thing here at play. People in charge of a big failure will be even more incentivized to distort the reality since it’s not just emotional burden that they have to face, but also it is their job and reputation that is at stake.

“It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it” - Upton Sinclair

If we intervene in the system in a way that limits the amount of failure, the emotional burden to face it is going to be proportionally lowered. This, in turn, helps with limiting the distortion of reality, and future reasoning and behavior based on the perception of that reality.

Reducing the batch size (= reducing the inventory) helps a lot with limiting the amount of failure, which limits the amount of distortion of the results that the system is incentivized for. And this in turn brings more clarity to reality and learnings that come with it.

Summary

Distortion of the results is often proportional to the size of the batches. So, if you see a tendency for a system to distort the results, check the size of the batches.

You never thought that these two could be related? Neither did I 🙂