The hospitality version of this is brutal. A guest's night can go right in forty invisible ways and one visible way wrong, and the night gets filed under the one wrong thing. Headwinds get remembered, tailwinds get adapted to. It's why removing one friction point usually beats adding three delighters. Great conversation, especially the zoom out advice.
The task-percentage study is the one that stings, because the bias survives even when the tasks are right in front of you. It makes me trust after-action reviews a little less: the list of what made it hard is real, but nobody writes down the tailwinds, so the record itself ends up tilted. Gilovich's zoom-out might be the cheapest correction we have for our own history.
The hospitality version of this is brutal. A guest's night can go right in forty invisible ways and one visible way wrong, and the night gets filed under the one wrong thing. Headwinds get remembered, tailwinds get adapted to. It's why removing one friction point usually beats adding three delighters. Great conversation, especially the zoom out advice.
The task-percentage study is the one that stings, because the bias survives even when the tasks are right in front of you. It makes me trust after-action reviews a little less: the list of what made it hard is real, but nobody writes down the tailwinds, so the record itself ends up tilted. Gilovich's zoom-out might be the cheapest correction we have for our own history.