[MUSIC] Welcome to this fourth video of week four of our course on unethical decision making. In our previous video, we discussed how organizations can contribute to ethical blindness. In this video today, we want to zoom into one particular aspect of strong context, namely the power of routines and habits over reason. So in this session, you will learn how powerful habits can develop, and how they can blind us for obvious things. Decision makers can be amazingly ignorant in front of disruptive changes in their environment. Since I'm a little boy I'm fascinated by stories of knights and vikings and pirates and the case I would like to share with you today comes from that context. It is about gunfire at sea. The first thing I learned when I dealt with this story is that pirate films are operating with big exaggeration. Think about the battles between ships that you see in these films. The cannons are always amazingly accurate. In reality however, this accuracy of gunfire is extremely poor. Just to give you an illustration. In a training session on cannon shooting in 1899 now, of the US Army. Five ships who fired for 25 minutes at a ship wreck only hit twice. And they only hit the sails. So, it was a pretty harmless attack. Now this was the rule. Gunfire at sea is highly ineffective, why? Because the sea is rolling and the shooter has to wait for the right moment in the rolling sea. When you can see the rolling target but it's even more complicated you have to fire before you can see the target because you have to calculate this rolling sea into, your shooting. You shoot before the enemy, the is at site. If you shoot when you see the objective you might be too late already. So, when you shoot you include this interval, it is highly dependent on your experience, it depends on how good you are as a person, as a shooter. Gunfire at sea is struggling with this uncertainty and this inefficiency. The best shootings take place when you have the best shooters. The best people on the cannons. This system is innovated in 1898, by an English officer with the name Percy Scott. He makes three little changes. Cannons on ships have an elevating gear so they can move up and down to fix a position for the firing. Scott makes this mechanism pure flexible. So he changed the gear ration, which means that the gunner can move up and down the cannon more flexibly. Second, he combines this with an adapted use of the telescope. The telescope, as you can imagine, is quite useless if you have to see, if you have to fire before you see the enemy. But now, when you can wait longer and you can adapt to the rolling sea, the telescope becomes highly effective. The third thing that Scott adds is he rigs a small item at the mouth of the cannon so that you can aim more effectively. With these three little innovations Percy Scott was able to increase the efficiency of cannon fire by 3,000% within six years. So, from that point on continuous aim firing was invented and possible. Any of this is not the result of a new technology. This is the result of the combination of three small changes with existing technology. Why do I tell you this story. Well the interesting part comes now. It's about what happens next. In 1900, Scott gets transferred to China and he meets a young officer of the US Army there, William S Sims. And Sims learns from him all these little changes to adapt to his own ships so he can also train his people in continuous a, aimed firing, with the same affect of explosion of accuracy. After a few months of training he makes remark, a remarkable process and within the following two years he sends one report after another to his headquarters in Washington to describe this amazing success that he had with his changes of the cannons. And he proposes to adopt, to role this out for the whole navy's gunnery. He reports on the data that shows the improvement. He describes the technical details of the innovation, and the weaknesses of the current system. What is reaction of the headquarter in Washington. Deadly silence. The Freeports are filed and forgotten. And Simms get frustrated. So he changes his strategy. He reports in a much more aggressive tone. He sends numerous reports to other officers, in other offices of the Navy. And now he receives a response from Washington. Now this response basically includes free thinks. First, the argument of the navy is that the equipment of the US Navy is good enough. It's as good as the British one, so there's no need for change. Second, the lack of accuracy has nothing to do with technology, it has to do with the training of the shooters. And third, for these two reasons, the data of Sim's must be wrong. The conclusion of the U.S. army at that point is continuous aim firing is not possible. Sims insists on his position and he sends more aggressive reports to Washington and he gets attacked, his loyalty gets questioned he's called an egoist and a falsifier of evidence. So, Sims decides to become a whistle blower. He writes a letter directly to the U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt. Who invites him back to the U.S. and makes him the inspector of target practice at the U.S. Navy, and then he can roll out this practice across the Navy. How is it possible that you come with such a powerful innovation to improve the efficiency by 3000% and you get ignored or even attacked. Before we look into some preliminary answers to that question let me give you a second example. And again it comes from a military context. The military is strong with examples of strong routines that resist reality. This second example comes from the war between France and Prussia in 1870-71. This war was won by the Prussians, and one of the reasons why they won this war was the overwhelming power of the cavalry. In this war, there was already a, a technological innovation used, but it played no decisive role for the war itself. It was the machine gun. The machine gun was invented roughly a decade before that war, and it was an invention that was regarded with suspicion at that time, and still with suspicion at the beginning of the 20 20th century. In 1950, the British General Haig called the machine gun an overrated invention. And similar thoughts must, must have been that normal perception of machine guns across various armies at that time. And this manifests in an event in 1914, The battle of Legarte. There was one strong routine in the armies of their time and it was established and trained and, and became a habit across centuries. If you want to conquer a hill you need a cavalry attack. On the 11th of August 1914, the German army tried to conquer, in the First World War the German army tried to conquer a hill that was held by the French army at Legarte. And they used their cavalry. The First Royal Bavarian Yulan Regiment. They knew at that point in time that there were machine guns on that hill. And they knew what machine guns do. But they could not see what is obvious for us, and what should have been obvious for themselves at that point in time. It turned out to be probably the last tech of a cavalry on a hill in modern warfare. And it ended with a disaster for the Germans because if there ae machine guns on a hill and you attack with a cavalry, you can imagine what happens. You never win an uphill fight against a machine gun. Uses, using horses against machine guns. Refusing a new technology that im, improves your efficiency by 3,000%. Is this madness of decision-makers? Well this would be too simple as an explanation. But how can we explain such bl, blatant irrational decisions. Let us look more into the role of context in these situations. First of all we have to realize that the anti, anticipation of the future is not that easy. If we are caught in powerful routines that have proven to be effective and appropriate across many situations in the past it is not evident that people are willing to change these routines. The psychologist who would describe the event at Lergate in one of his books, he called this a problem of struct, structural extrapolation. We predict the future on the basis of past experience and as a result the future looks pretty much like the past. We have difficulties to imagine the disruptive future, even if we see it front of us, even if the impact like the one of the machine gun is so obvious, we might lack the imagination to include this innovation into our imagination of the future. Jared Diamond, who as written a book on the collapses of civilizations he made a fascinating observation. He said well in many cases where civilizations face a crisis, that they do not understand what they do in reaction is they reinforce their routines. And these routines are the ones that put them into that crisis. That's why many civilizations collapsed. Improving your routines is even more difficult when there is no crisis. Why should you improve for instance your gunnery when there is no necessity? The U.S. and the British army had fought their battle successfully. The Americans just came from the Spanish-American War where they had won all the battles against the Spaniards. Okay. Out of 9,500 shoots, in one of the decisive battles, only 121 hit the target. But it was enough to beat the Spaniards. So why changing routines? Think about our first week when we talked about the fairy tale about the Emperor. The most amazing detail for me in this story is always the fact that the Emperor continues with his procession despite the fact the he his understood that his reality is wrong, that his perception of reality is wrong. Routine is stronger than reason. A second reason for the resistance against change is that technological change is not just the introduction of a new technology, it is disruptive for all kind of social, cultural, political aspects of a situation. Book print ended the 1,000 years of the, of the middle ages that were, more less without change. The internet is doing the same for us today. Change can be disruptive and destroy, and change the whole society. And that's why innovations often face resistance. People have to lose something if they are in good positions in the system as it is right now. The cavalry is at the top of the army until the machine gun is invented. They lose their power afterwards. So why should you embrace something that positions your reputation, your power, your interests, your resources? The same for continuous aim firing on ships. It will change the routines afterwards. It will change the organization of gunnery. The design of ships. The strategies of, of ship battles. It brings a lot of insecurity. So you resist, and you keep, keep your routines. In both cases, the radical change couldn't, couldn't be stopped. But we don't like change. When we feel that our stability, the stability of our system is threatened, we also feel that our identity is threatened because we are someone in that system, and we try to maintain the existing system. Our decisions build on previous experience and these previous experiences do not include these changes that we see around us. So we run into all kind of misinterpretations, and we defy, defend the context we have against better reasons. Especially if the context in which we have developed our routines and habits has built over long periods. There's an essay written by George Orwell on the bad quality of political language that very well adapts to this kind of observation that we make right now here. George Orwell writes in this essay, words of politicians like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary patterns. This matter illustrates the phenomenon that we have discussed right now. Experiences group themselves also automatically into the familiarly dreary pattern when we make our decisions. Routines can be dangerous. They impose interpretations on us that are very narrow because they're building on past experience, and they might be too narrow if the world around us is changing. Where we perc, perceive business as usual, something dramatically might have changed, but we cannot see it. Or worse, we can see it, but not understand it in the context fo our own perception of the world. We ride up the hill into the machine gun, we are blinded for the risk that we face. So, routines contribute extremely to the phenomenon of ethical blindness that we have described so far in this course. So let me conclude this session with four observations. First routines result from the experience we make and the positive feedback we get for our decisions. We build strong habits Routines switch off reason, because we do not need to think when executing them. We are cruising on autopilot. In times of disruptive change, routines become a trap. So we make risk to make the wrong decisions without even realising it because of these strong routines. [MUSIC]
