Episode 17 – Reality Test your assumptions with Ooching

“Always ooch before you leap!”

Think about a student, Steve who has decided to go to pharmacy school. He thinks he likes working in healthcare and he enjoys chemistry. This is thin evidence for such an important decision. He is placing a huge bet with paltry information -. An obvious decision would be to work in a pharmacy for free to get the job for a few days to understand what it entails and how he takes to it – this calls for ‘ooching’. Imagine spending 2-3 years studying and then startign a career that never suited you.

The concept of Ooching refers to constructing small experiments to test out one’s hypothesis.
Rather than choosing ‘all’ or ‘nothing’ – we choose a ‘little something’. When we ooch, we bring in real-world experience into our decision

For business executives this translates to firing bullets, then cannon balls – i.e, run small experiments and then doubling down on ones that work best!

So Why then is ooching not more instinctive?
The reason it isnt is because – we are awfully confident about our predictions. The ‘I just know in my gut’ attitude is in all of us to bother with ooching since we think we know how things will unfold.

In a study, Phil Tetlock studied 284 experts he found that experts predictions was worse off than a crude extrapolation algorithm.
Ooching provides an alternative – a way of discovering reality than predicting it

If you’re thinking of moving to a new city, maybe first try working remotely for a month in that city.
Thinking about becoming an Datascientist – spending time working on real business problems and getting your hands dirty with data might be a worthwhile exercise for you to test your assumptions that this is the next career for you.

Whenever possible, we should ooch, conducting small experiments to teach us more – why do you need to predict when you can know?

This concept is again from the Book – Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath.

“Always ooch before you leap!”