How Ed Smith makes decisions
England's chief cricket selector on hidden errors and the long term impact of Moneyball on a generation of sport and business leaders
I’ve worked with Ed Smith a few times over the years, at conferences and when he was in the early days of what is now the Institute of Sports Humanities. He was very kind about my book, The Captain Myth, offering a nice quote for the cover.
I mention the book not just for a quick plug (although, if you’re short of a golf-meets-obscure-leadership-theory xmas stocking thriller, I may have some left in the garage), but as a bit of context to this podcast. The original pitch for the book was a ‘how to win the Ryder Cup’ type idea, which talked to all the US and European captains past and present, who then offered their collective wisdom on leadership more broadly.
But…about halfway through the research I got the nagging feeling that I was writing a book I wouldn’t want to read. It was just a bunch of war stories post rationalising success or failure. Then I read The Halo Effect by Philip Rosenzweig and realised my whole approach to the subject of leadership was deeply flawed. As I say to Ed during our conversation, I just couldn’t get beyond the obvious attribution error - we see the result and then build stories (captain myths) that support it. This halo extends beyond the individual captain and covers the decisions they make. This is how most books and journalism approach the topic of leadership, encouraged by a 500billion quid industry that stretches across corporate, military and academic spheres. (See a Radio 4 talk I gave on the subject here).
As chair of England selectors, Ed Smith is now in a position to make and break professional careers, so the way he approaches decision making matters. And it’s an area in to which he’s invested a great deal of time and energy. Here he is on dealing with attribution error.
How can we guard against that as decision makers? One question I ask fellow selectors is, which decisions were the wrong decisions that weren’t reflected in the outcome, ie when did you win but there were mistakes within that victory, and conversely, which decisions were good and brave, but didn’t have a good outcome? Because it’s clearly the case that you can make a good decision and not succeed, and vice versa. So you need to be constantly interrogating that issue and not just float along on the momentum of outcomes because that’s a dangerous place to be. There’s a distinction between the decisions that lead in to a game and the actual game as it plays out. They are overlapping concepts but they aren’t the same thing. In particular, if you can ask yourself, where were the mistakes you made that other people didn’t notice, I think that’s a healthy thing to do, it’s hard and painful but part of good process.
I then asked whether Mike Brearley was an overrated captain, whose leadership myth has been retrofitted around the events of 1981 Ashes turnaround, one of the most dramatic and exciting sporting moments of the last half century.
I’ll leave you to listen to Ed’s answer…Listen to the whole conversation here, or wherever you get podcasts.
The Moneyball Legacy
Finally, it’s nearly twenty years since Moneyball was published, so at 24:23 in the pod, I ask about the influence of Michael Lewis’ book on Ed personally - he wrote the foreword to the original British edition - and the current generation of sports leaders.
As a bit of additional reading, here’s Simon Kuper in the FT on the same subject.
Books about decision making
A bit of further reading, via Farnam Street.