When You're Too Excited to See the Risk

At Sur La Table, I was convinced online cooking classes were a big opportunity. We had a chance to move fast through a partnership with a third-party platform, and I was so convinced of the idea that I didn't hear the reservations from my team clearly enough. We moved forward, the classes launched, and the customers we attracted ended up belonging to the third-party’s ecosystem, not ours. The economics didn't come close to making up for that. We eventually had to go back and build it ourselves.

David McRaney, in You Are Not So Smart, describes what happened to me as the affect heuristic. The more something seems to benefit you, the less risky it seems overall. Your brain doesn't evaluate benefit and risk as separate questions, it bundles them together. So when you're genuinely excited about an idea, the risks get diminished in your brain. The reverse is also true. When you're skeptical of something, the benefits get harder to see.

This plays out in a predictable pattern in most organizations. Leadership comes in with an idea they believe in, and that belief makes the downside hard to weigh honestly. The team, on the other hand, didn't build the idea, so they don't feel its potential the same way. Leadership sees the opportunity. The team sees the problems. Both think the other is missing something obvious, and they're both right.

And this is where execution gets into trouble. Leadership pushes forward with more confidence than the situation warrants, and the team executes with less conviction than the strategy needs. Nobody is being unreasonable, but the affect heuristic is just doing what it does.

Coming together takes deliberate effort on both sides. Leadership has to genuinely pressure-test their own assumptions with an honest openness to critique, not just go through the motions of asking for input. Teams need a real opportunity to weigh in on the development, not just a task list. There are specific techniques for both—the premortem, the Six Thinking Hats, and others covered in The Strategy Trap, but the starting point is simpler than any technique. It's recognizing that your excitement about an idea might be exactly what's keeping you from seeing it clearly.