Can we teach leaders to become better strategic decision makers? Our guest Zach Shore says we can. 

Part of the problem he says is that people get stuck in rigid mindsets, which often involve the failure to take alternative perspectives.. In his books “Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions,” and “sense of the enemy’ he aims to create a taxonomy of blunder causing mindsets and recount examples of effective strategic empathy through historical story telling. 

Zach Shore is a historian of international conflict. He focuses on understanding the enemy. He is currently a professor of History at the Naval Postgraduate School and Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies, University of California, Berkeley. 

Greg and Zach discuss types of empathy, pattern breaking moments, definition of a “blunder,” an analysis of Putin, and the importance of truly understanding our enemies.

Breaking down rigid mindsets

Part of the problem is that people get absolutely stuck in rigid mindsets. And what I tried to do in Blunder was break them down and create a topology of what those rigid mindsets were. I call them cognition traps and each chapter of the book, I tried to show how different decision-makers, over time, fell into that particular rigid mindset. Cure-all-ism was just one of them. The idea that you have a solution that works well in one situation. And then you insist that it must work well everywhere and apply it to every situation. And that's when the disasters come.

Three challenges every human faces

There are three hard challenges that humans struggle with. And one of them is the ability to think like others. Another is understanding causation and the third is attaining wisdom.

Why having data isn’t enough

Big data has a role, but it's a type of number worship. People have gotten carried away with what it can tell us. And usually, the reason is it leaves out the human factor. For example:polls. We've seen election after election, how wrong the polls are, and that's because they're dealing with humans, and they forget that humans lie. Humans lie sometimes. And sometimes not intentionally. Sometimes they lie to themselves. They convince themselves of things that are not true, that they will vote for someone they never would, or embarrassed to say whom they will vote for. Anytime you're dealing with humans and numbers, you have to be much more circumspect. And our number worship has let us astray like I mentioned in Afghanistan and Vietnam, in our elections. It's ridiculous to overvalue big data at the expense of human behavior.

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Naval Postgraduate School
• Professional Profile at Discourse Magazine
• Contributors Profile at The Globalist
• Zach Shore Website

His Work:

• Grad School Essentials: A Crash Course in Scholarly Skills
• A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind
• Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions
• Breeding Bin Ladens: America, Islam, and the Future of Europe
• What Hitler Knew: The Battle for Information in Nazi Foreign Policy