Poker in the Pandemic (Part One)

If my life story didn’t give me a personal commitment to the rowing analogy I use to talk about organizational goal-setting, the fact that my kids and I have become poker fiends during the pandemic might make me consider re-branding CXN Advisory.
 
About 10 weeks into having everyone at home, my kids — ages 20, 18 and 14 — wanted to add variety to our existing board game rotation. They found a set of poker chips I bought 20 years ago and hadn’t used in maybe 18 years and told me they wanted to learn to play.
 
Given my minimal experience, it was less about me “teaching” than all of us learning together. Now, we spend hours each week playing small-stakes Texas Hold ‘Em — usually a $5 buy-in and blinds of a dime and a quarter.
 
Everyone has learned to shuffle properly, we’ve worked out a system for keeping two decks of cards in rotation and we’ve fallen into a routine where we play quickly and efficiently. Once you get into that rhythm, the logistics fall away and the core of the game — and our individual approaches — starts to reveal itself.
 
My 14-year-old youngest son plays recklessly and unpredictably, as one might expect of a teenage boy. His 20-year-old older brother, our rule-following first-born, plays a sometimes predictable but opportunistic grinder’s game. My 18-year-old daughter, a competitive swimmer, plays fiercely and aggressively, like she’s attacking a tough set in the pool.
 
In her new book, The Biggest Bluff, the psychologist and writer Maria Konnikova notes that Texas Hold ‘Em, particularly in its No Limit variation, is thought to be the version of poker that best simulates real-world decision making. Players receive two “hole cards” that only they can see and use those cards to make their strongest hand from five community cards that are dealt face-up on the table. 
 
“Because the only other cards (beside the community cards) you know for sure are your own, you’re in a game of incomplete information,” Konnikova writes. “You must make the best decision you can, given the little you know.”
 
She continues:

The amount of incomplete information in Texas Hold ‘Em creates a particularly useful balance between skill and chance. Two hole cards is just about as practical a ratio as you can have — enough unknown to make the game a good simulation of life, but not so much that it becomes a total crapshoot. …
 
In No Limit, you can bet everything you have at any point. And that’s what makes this game a particularly strong metaphor for our daily decision making. Because in life, there’s never a limit.
 
Two aspects of this insight struck me when I heard Konnikova discuss them with Stephen Dubner in a recent Freakonomics podcast — and made me realize the similarity between poker and the OKR (Objectives & Key Results) goal-setting systems on which I advise many clients.
 
First, there’s the role that unknown factors play in any form of planning. In goal-setting, I coach clients to build Objectives & Key Results that allow for what I refer to as “contingency” — the reality that unforeseen and unknowable outside forces will often upset what the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns described as “the best laid schemes of mice and men.”
 
In poker, you can be dealt a strong hand, calculate odds accurately, benefit from a great set of community cards, bet your hand in the most rational manner possible — and still lose to another player holding an even better hand! This is the proverbial “bad beat.”
 
If I’m running OKRs for my business, I can set a clear and compelling Objective, identify and track clear, measurable Key Results that advance the organization toward that Objective, hit all of my marks — and fail to reach it because of unforeseen or low-likelihood outside forces.
 
In both situations, it’s critical to conduct an after-action review, understand the reasons why you played the hand or pursued the Objective the way you did, make any necessary adjustments and — most important — drive on with confidence. 
 
Your conclusion might be: I picked the wrong Key Results to track and will adjust my approach next quarter.
 
Or it might be: I did everything right; it was just a bad beat.

Unfortunately, the more common response is what you commonly see around poker tables and corporate conference tables anytime a bad beat happens: shock, confusion, uncertainty and blind hope that the bad thing won’t happen again.

Next week, we’ll look at the second big similarity between poker and effective goal setting.