Objectives
The objective of stroke play in golf is to make your way through 18 holes in the fewest strokes possible. This requires avoiding mistakes as each mis-hit adds one or more strokes to your score.
Too many amateurs ignore this and choose the risky, hero shot. This shot is typically an attempt to salvage a chance to make birdie or par. Like when you try to hit a 30-yard fade with a 7 iron through an 18 inch opening in the woods. You choose the low probability, high reward shot instead of the high probability, damage mitigation shot that keeps your round on track.
This is a mistake.
If you aren’t shooting under par on a regular basis, your best strategy is to focus on reducing mistakes. This is hard to do because our natural decision-making software comes with some bugs, known as cognitive biases.
Reframing
First, we are risk-seeking when a decision is framed as a loss and risk-averse when the decision is framed as a gain. In other words, when faced with losing something of value, you will make the choice that eliminates that loss regardless of the probability of success associated with that choice. When you are deciding to make the hero shot, you are framing the decision as a lost chance at birdie or par, thus choosing the higher risk option.
Second, the way the objective of your round is framed leads to solving the wrong problem. Reframing the objective from “go out and shoot your best number of the season” to “reduce the frequency and magnitude of mistakes” changes not only your approach to each round you play but also your long-term game improvement strategy.
During the round, you now focus on maximizing your odds of success for each shot. This likely calls for a more conservative strategy that reduces the odds of making birdie on some holes, but greatly reduces the odds of double bogey or worse. It’s not sexy, but it’s the best strategy for shooting lower scores more consistently.
Approaching the game in this way requires increased self-awareness. It requires that you objectively assess your strengths and weakness, which shots you can execute most consistently and those that you can’t. Without this knowledge, it’s much more difficult to implement your strategy of mistake reduction.
Blending short and long-term…
Achieving this self-awareness has an added derivative benefit to your long-term development as a player. As you get comfortable with the shots you can rely on, you start to discover the shots you need to learn. This sets you on a path of continuous incremental improvement, helping you to prioritize and focus on the most important thing, one at a time. Instead of mindlessly pounding balls on the range, you can work in some deliberate practice on the shot you need most to lower your scores.
This approach requires a long-term perspective and patience. Too many of us want to run before we walk in many aspects of our lives. This causes us to incorrectly define and/or misunderstand problems, which leads to sub-optimal strategies and solutions, and leaves us more exposed to the flaws in our natural decision-making software.
Beyond the golf course
In my eyes, the implications of this reach far beyond the golf course. Much of what business leaders do today can be boiled down to the fundamental activity of making decisions on where to allocate resources. Which project should we invest in? Which candidate should we hire? How can we increase employee engagement?
When problems are misdiagnosed and objectives are poorly framed resources get wasted on bad strategies with low odds of success. This is a drain on any organization.