From Chip Heath “Decisive”
Test Ideas or “Ooch” Before Leaping into Them.
- “To ooch is to construct small experiments to test one’s hypothesis.” (p. 116)
- Ooching = “running small experiments to test our theories. Rather than jumping in headfirst, we dip a toe in.”
- “That strategy—finding a way to ooch before we leap—is another way we can reality-test our assumptions. When we ooch, we bring real-world experience into our decision.”
- “To ooch is to ask, Why predict something we can test? Why guess when we can know?”
Examples of “Ooching”
- Carsdirect.com quickly put a website up to see if they could sell cars. “In the brainstorming session there was a lot of resistance because some thought it was unlikely that people would buy a big-ticket item like that through the Web. At that time no one was selling cars through the Web. So rather than continue debating it, we put up a Web site with a couple of pages that looked like it would allow you to order a car. But actually the message went to a clerk, who looked up the price in the Kelley Blue Book and sent it back to the user. The next morning Bill discovered we had sold three cars. We had to quickly shut down the site because we were offering a heavy discount on the cars. Rather than continuing to debate, the team ooched and resolved the uncertainty. The ooch led to the founding of CarsDirect.com,”
- “In trying to meet the biologists’ needs, Hanks’s team didn’t bother building an elegant product. Elegance is expensive and time-consuming. Instead, they cobbled together a prototype using what they had on hand. Hanks compared the result to a “brick in a bucket.””
- “Rather than jump headfirst into the wireless market, Hanks and his colleagues decided to dip a toe in. Rather than choose “all” or “nothing,” they chose “a little something.” That strategy—finding a way to ooch before we leap—is another way we can reality-test our assumptions. When we ooch, we bring real-world experience into our decision.”
- “the notion of exploring options with small experiments has popped up in many different places. Designers talk about “prototyping”; rather than spending six months planning the perfect product, they’ll just hack together a quick mock-up and get it in the hands of potential customers.”
- Steve decided to become a Pharmacist. How did he decide to become a pharmacist? “He’s always enjoyed chemistry, after all, and he likes the idea of working in health care. He feels like the lifestyle of a pharmacist, with its semireasonable hours and good pay, would suit him well.
But this is pretty thin evidence for such an important decision! Steve is contemplating a minimum time commitment of two years for graduate school, not to mention tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and forgone income. He’s placing a huge bet on paltry information. This is a situation that cries out for an ooch, and an obvious one would be to work in a pharmacy for a few weeks. He’d be smart to work for free, if need be, to get the job. (Certainly if he can afford several years of school without an income, he can afford to take a monthlong unpaid internship.)” - “Surely this concept—testing a profession before entering it—sounds obvious. Yet every year hordes of students enroll in graduate schools without ever having run an experiment like that: law students who’ve never spent a day in a law office and med students who’ve never spent time in a hospital or clinic. Imagine going to school for three or four years so you can start a career that never suited you! This is a truly terrible decision process, in the same league as an impromptu drunken marriage in Vegas.”
- “HopeLab has begun to give potential employees a three-week consulting contract. Cole said, “It’s unbelievably effective. No more fear. How are we going to make our hiring decisions? We make our decisions based on the empirical performance of the employee in our community, on the kinds of jobs that we do. The job market totally prevents you from getting this kind of useful information. So collect your own personal performance data in your own personal context. In some ways it really doesn’t matter how well they did in their last job.”
“Next time you’ve got a job opening to fill, consider Steve Cole’s advice. What’s the best way you could give your potential hires a trial run?“ - Peggy is a secretary for a Law Office. She was a perfectionist and constantly worried about making mistakes on documents. She spent hours proof reading documents and took the documents home to make them flawless.
“So, in conjunction with her therapists, she created a list of ooches—small, incremental steps that would allow her to reality-test her fears—to see whether the sky would really fall if she eased up on her proofing regimen. If she survived one ooch, she’d move on to the next.”
She decided to ooch to see if she could spend less time proofreading. First she limited herself to taking the brief home and proof reading it 3 times. Then she limited herself to proof reading it 2 times. Then she limited herself to proof reading it 1 time. Then she decided to leave the brief at work and work for 1 hour. Then she decided to leave the brief at work and go home on time. At each stage, things worked out fine. This gave her more confidence. Then she purposely made 1 punctuation error, then 1 grammatical error, and then 1 spelling error. The firm didn’t fire her, and nobody noticed the errors! - A father has a rule for his 9 year old son. He must change his clothes before eating breakfast. This will prevent his son from being late to school. The son doesn’t like this rule. The father tried the ooch technique. He told his son, for the next three days, he doesn’t have to change his clothes before eating breakfast. However if he’s late for school, he has to go back to the old rule. The boy was never late.
Why people don’t like Ooching.
The “ooching” terminology is our favorite, but we wanted to be clear that these groups are all basically saying the same thing: Dip a toe in before you plunge in headfirst. Given the popularity of this concept, and given the clear payoff involved—little bets that can improve large decisions—you might wonder why ooching isn’t more instinctive. The answer is that we tend to be awfully confident about our ability to predict the future. Steve, the budding pharmacy student, doesn’t perceive himself to be in a state of confusion. Why would he waste his time getting a free internship when he knows pharmacy is for him? (If he drops out after a year, he’ll say, “It just wasn’t for me,” as if that were something he never could have anticipated.) In the design world, the diva product designer just knows, in his gut, that the product is right. The idea of a “quick and dirty prototype” just makes him roll his eyes. You don’t prototype elegance. That diva-ish, “I just know in my gut” attitude is inside all of us. We won’t want to bother with ooching, because we think we know how things will unfold. And to be fair, if we truly are good at predicting the future, then ooching is indeed a waste of time.
“Sarasvathy, the professor, found that this preference for testing, rather than planning, was one of the most striking differences between entrepreneurs and corporate executives. She said that most corporate executives favor prediction; their belief seems to be, “To the extent that we can predict the future, we can control it.” In contrast, though, entrepreneurs favor active testing: “To the extent that we can control the future, we do not need to predict it.”
“To avoid that trap, we’ve got to Reality-Test Our Assumptions. We’ve seen three strategies for doing that. First, we’ve got to be diligent about the way we collect information, asking disconfirming questions and considering the opposite. Second, we’ve got to go looking for the right kinds of information: zooming out to find base rates, which summarize the experiences of others, and zooming in to get a more nuanced impression of reality. And finally, the ultimate reality-testing is to ooch: to take our options for a spin before we commit.”