Matches matter

Jess Phillips thinks she’d be a good PM. I tweeted this morning that this is more a sign of her overconfidence than it is of her ability. I did so for two reasons.

First overconfidence, whilst not universal (pdf), is widespread among those in prominent positions. Underconfident people don’t apply for such jobs, unless pushed, and so are filtered out whilst there is no similar filter against the overconfident. Quite the opposite. Hirers tend to mistake overconfidence for actual ability and so hire the overconfident: one can easily imagine Ms Phillips fluent confidence making a good impression at her CLP.

My base rate probability, therefore, is that Ms Phillips is expressing an opinion typical of MPs – or at least those who court publicity – rather than giving us a diagnosis of her actual ability.

Overconfidence, though, can be hugely damaging. Daniel Kahneman has called it the most dangerous of all cognitive biases. The three worst decisions in the UK in the last 20 years – Blair’s war in Iraq, RBS’s takeover of ABM Amro and Cameron’s calling a Brexit referendum having created the conditions in which he might lose one – were all motivated in large part by overconfidence.

A useful corrective here has been provided by Charlie Munger. It’s important, he says, to know the edge of your competence – to know what you’re good at and what you’re not.

There’s a second reason why I think she’s being overconfident. It’s that the honest and true answer to the question: “would you be a good PM?” is “I don’t know.”

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer shows us why. His CV as a manager is vastly inferior to Jose Mourinho’s, comprising a mediocre spell at Cardiff and some success in a third-rate league. But he seems to have transformed Manyoo. This is because Mourinho was a terrible match for the Manyoo job: his brand of safety-first football was ill-suited to a squad of young attacking players and to a fanbase that expected expansive football. Solskjaer on the other hand is a much better match.

This applies to many top jobs in business and politics: what matters is not just somebody’s strengths and weaknesses but rather the match between these and the job requirements. If a company’s problem is poor cost management, for example, it needs a cost-cutter as CEO rather than a marketing man, and vice versa. As Boris Groysberg has shown (pdf), what matters for corporate performance isn’t so much a bosses’ CV as the match between his strengths and the company’s needs.

Winston Churchill’s life embodies this point. He was a terrible match for the job of First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915 and for the job of Chancellor (pdf) in 1925. But he was the right match for the position of PM in 1940.

Which is why we cannot say whether Ms Phillips would be a good PM or not, leaving aside her personal policy preferences. For any complex job we must ask what qualities it requires and what personal weaknesses can be forgiven or glossed over, and we must then ask who fits those strengths and weaknesses. Churchill was a great PM in 1940 because we needed his belligerence. Cameron was a disaster because his overconfidence was misplaced, and May is doing badly because her lack of interpersonal skills is a terrible weakness when we need a good negotiator.

But we don’t know what exactly the job requirements of PM would be at the time when or if Ms Phillips becomes a plausible candidate for the job. She might make a good PM. Or she might not. It depends upon the circumstances.

Herein lies one of my (many) beefs with politics. Many people don’t think this way. Instead, they have a cargo cult mentality. We saw this in the recent row about Churchill: too many wanted to see him as either hero or villain and not as what he was - sometimes the wrong man for a job, and sometimes the right. Too many people think a great leader will transform an organization without asking what the mechanism is or whether what makes a great leader is context-dependent. Churchill and Attlee were both great PMs, despite having utterly different characters: they were good matches for what was needed at the time. Many people rightly deplore the cult of Corbyn. But they themselves fall into a similar error. I’ve called Bonnie Tyler syndrome – holding out for a hero.

The truth is, though, that there are no heroes – or at least we cannot rely upon one turning up. All we can look for is to put round pegs in round holes. And this requires sober analysis, not wishful thinking.

Comments

[JWH]

"All we can look for is to put round pegs in round holes. And this requires sober analysis, not wishful thinking."

Your post is incomplete - what is the nature of today's round hole and who is the politician that would best fit it?

[E Kelowna]

Great speech! Loved it.

[Dipper]

"The three worst decisions in the UK in the last 20 years – Blair’s war in Iraq, RBS’s takeover of ABM Amro and Cameron’s calling a Brexit referendum having created the conditions in which he might lose one – were all motivated in large part by overconfidence."

well, this is obviously not up to par as a diagnosis. It may be that all big decisions are motivated by over-confidence, and many of those pay off. Also, the last two of those decisions may have come from underconfidence in the leaders' ability to navigate the alternatives.

I'm reminded of a comment on capital ratios in banks. Too low, and you risk a quick death; too high and you guarantee a slow death. Perhaps that is the logic behind some of these decisions.

I think of all the available options Jess Phillips would be quite a good PM. By good, I mean better than average.

[chris]

@ Dipper. You're right. In fact, I've said myself that underconfidence has its own costs: https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2015/12/costs-of-under-confidence.html
One issue here is the payoff structure. If upside is high & downside low, overconfidence is a good thing. If the upside is limited and the downside great, it's not. The decisions to go to war in Iraq or takeover ABN Amro both had limited upside but lots of downside (a view I don't think depends upon hindsight). It's in those cases that overconfidence is dangerous.

[Twat dillow]

"The three worst decisions in the UK in the last 20 years – Blair’s war in Iraq, RBS’s takeover of ABM Amro and Cameron’s calling a Brexit referendum having created the conditions in which he might lose one – were all motivated in large part by overconfidence."

Really? What is your evidence?

[georgesdelatour]

The reasons political parties choose their leaders have almost nothing to do with competence, as conventionally understood. The process is best understood in terms of game theory.

All political parties are coalitions of different groups, many of whom strongly disagree with each other on substantive matters. A supremely competent group X candidate will usually meet more vigorous opposition from group Y than an indifferent group X candidate. What group Y usually fears the most is the party becoming group X supremacist in character. They may even prefer losing an election to that.

John Major beat Michael Heseltine for the Tory leadership essentially because he wasn’t considered too worryingly effective. The “bastard” wing of the Tories feared Heseltine would establish a permanent “wet” supremacy. Major was just as wet as Heseltine, but at the time of the leadership election he seemed less forceful and effective in his wetness. It enabled him to become the “stop Heseltine” candidate of the anti-wets.

Competition also operates at the individual level. After David Cameron resigned, the pro-Brexit faction of the Tory party basically ruled itself out of leadership because neither Johnson nor Gove was prepared to allow the other to have the top job.

There’s also the “old Pope” principle. When the college of cardinals can’t agree on a new Pope, they usually choose the most senile candidate. The different factions assume he won’t do very much, but will buy them time to prepare for the next election in a few years time. I think the election of Jeremy Corbyn had an element of this. Probably the most disastrously misjudged example of this principle was the ascent to power of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. He was then 77. The leftist secular faction of the Iranian revolution assumed that Khomeini would be a temporary figurehead. Instead he ruled Iran forcefully for 10 years, and the country today is still living under his shadow.

Ultimately the selection process, however set up, will tend to reward dissimulators: people who can appear to be one thing to group X and another to group Y. That’s why poor compromise candidates like John Major and Teresa May often win.