"an escalation of commitment"

"an escalation of commitment – sticking with a once-successful strategy for too long. So how can companies avoid making a similar mistake when facing disruption? They must challenge mutually reinforcing biases that see people being influenced by a prior commitment to a particular course of action.
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This happens for six reasons:"

As seis razões são listadas em "Why leaders invest so much in failing strategies" e são uma chamada de atenção para os que crêem incondicionalmente na racionalidade humana.

Não sejas amarelo!

Parte I.

"Conformity
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For an individual to see opportunity instead of risk in transformation, another force presents itself: Conformity.
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Group pressure on the individual’s mind is powerful.
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So what do these biases mean for CEOs who need to effect change in their own organizations?
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First, CEOs need to understand that most transformation agendas are delayed or crippled by risk aversion, operating at the individual level. They are then compounded at the organization level, and reinforced by pressures to conform. By the time the organization recognizes the necessity for change, it is reactive and often too late. The business landscape is littered with failed companies that ended this way."

Trechos retirados de "How Loss Aversion and Conformity Threaten Organizational Change"

Para reflexão

"CEOs need to be especially aware of how the subtle forces of bias can operate in our subconscious and influence our choices. Let’s take a look at the two I see most often: loss aversion and conformity.
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Loss Aversion
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we possess a negativity bias. Simply put, our fear of losing is greater than our thrill of winning.
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This tendency to prefer avoiding losses over achieving equivalent gains drives powerful risk-averse behaviors that can hold us in place like gravity, leading us to prefer the status quo even when change is very much in our best interest.
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At an organizational level, this tendency increases exponentially. The compounding effect of risk-averse behaviors across thousands of individuals — each preferring known working patterns over the perceived risk introduced by change — generates overwhelming organizational inertia. The end result: we don’t change, and the organization suffers."

Vendo as coisas sobre este prisma ... é possível sentir isto nas salas de reunião de muitas empresas.

Trechos retirados de "How Loss Aversion and Conformity Threaten Organizational Change"

Correr atrás do prejuízo, não é português é humano

Interessante este exemplo prático da aversão à perda:

"When it comes to getting people to participate in workplace weight loss programs, financial rewards may not be much of an incentive. Penalties, on the other hand, work great.
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For three months, 281 employees at the University of Pennsylvania participated in a step challenge. The goal was to walk at least 7,000 steps a day. Researchers used different incentives: One group got $1.40 for each day they met the goal, while another got $42 up front each month, and lost $1.40 for each day they didn't finish. Also participating in the study, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was a group that got to enter a lottery to win $1.40 each time the goal was reached, and a control group that got no money at all.
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Rewarding people with money, it turns out, didn't inspire more people to achieve their goal. About 30 percent of people who got no money performed their 7,000 steps, compared with about 35 percent of those with a potential reward, a statistically insignificant difference, according to lead researcher Dr. Mitesh S. Patel.
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The people who faced a penalty for failure, however, reached their goal 55 percent of the time."

A velha lição, nós humanos, somos satisficers não maximizers. Por isso, tantas vezes, só mudamos quando nos retiram da nossa zona de conforto. Por isso, só agimos a correr em resposta a um "prejuízo" em vez de actuar proactivamente.
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Trechos retirados de "Why Pay Employees to Exercise When You Can Threaten Them?".

Acerca das escolhas que fazemos

Um excelente resumo dos vários mecanismos que afectam as escolhas que os humanos fazem em "The Psychology Behind How We Make Choices":

• Bias;
• Priming and Behavior;
• Priming and Choice;
• Bias and Choice;
• 1) Anchoring bias
• 2) Framing effect bias
• 3) Ingroup bias
• 4) Loss aversion bias
• Choice Overload;
• Choice and Willpower;
• How to Make Choosing Easier
• 1) Cut
• 2) Make things concrete
• 3) Categorize
• 4) Condition for complexity

"The reasons we make decisions are not always rational and can’t be isolated from who we are, where we are, or maybe even how long it took us to decide what outfit to wear that morning. But by being aware of the psychological factors that affect our choices -- and recognizing how a decision we make at 8 a.m. affects one at 3 p.m. -- we’ll be able to not only make better decisions for ourselves, but help others do the same."

Aversão à perda: posicionamento, pricing e argumentação

"responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)
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When directly compared or weighted against each other, losses loom larger than gains.
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Most graduate students in economics have heard about prospect theory and loss aversion, but you are unlikely to find these terms in the index of an introductory text in economics. I am sometimes pained by this omission, but in fact it is quite reasonable, because of the central role of rationality in basic economic theory."

Fui reler Daniel Kahneman em "Thinking, Fast and Slow" sobre a aversão à perda, motivado por algo que li em "Elevate" de Rich Horwath:

"positioning your offering's benefits as preventing a loss versus attaining the equivalent gain has a significant influenceon a potencial customer's decision making process." 

O que me leva logo a fazer a ligação ao pricing e a uma experiência pessoal com bombas... e a fornecer uma alternativa para o negociador que foi ultrapassado por alguém com o preço mais baixo, mostre o quanto o cliente irá perder por usar a alternativa mais barata.