A clear and obvious error
It’s safe to say that most football fans hate the addition of VAR. But are they right to? And what does it teach us about making decisions under pressure?
Football refereeing is no stranger to controversy. As a proud Liverpool fan myself, I at least have the self-awareness to see that fans are incredibly biased in favour of their particular team. And so these “injustices” crop up at least two or three times a weekend. Every set of fans thinks the referees are against them. Make of that what you will.
But in recent years, the controversy has been fueled by a new tool in the referees’ toolbox, and it’s always making the headlines for the wrong reasons. Video Assistant Referee, or VAR as it’s more commonly known, was essentially introduced to give referees a second chance at getting a decision right. The idea is that they can make the call in real time, as it happens, but the big game-changing calls are reviewed by a separate team who can watch things back from different angles, in slow-motion, and in far more detail than the on-pitch referee could possibly see.
But VAR’s rollout was compounded slightly by a very specific set of wording that instructed how it should be used. The words, now infamous in footballing circles, were: “clear and obvious error”. The rule was simple. When the VAR officials checked the referee’s decision, they would only intervene if the referee had made a “clear and obvious error”. In other words, if they’d made an outrageously terrible decision that you wouldn’t reasonably expect them to make.
Adequate, not accurate
Despite the seemingly simple nature of that rule, fans were not happy (that’s putting it mildly) about VAR. And even now debates rage on about whether it’s ruining the game. But this isn’t a blog about football, it’s about decision-making. And when it comes to decision-making, only intervening for a “clear and obvious error” actually makes a lot of sense.
In 2016, researchers Schweizer and Plessner proposed a model of decision-making for referees (and other sporting officials) they called “adequate, not accurate”. Their thinking was that a referee is having to make dozens of decisions at speed throughout a game, and “accurate” is an insanely high bar to achieve.
An “accurate” referee would be making the correct calls, according to the rulebook, pretty much all the time. An “adequate” referee, however, would also be taking into account the context of the game and other actions around the decision. The bar would be set a little lower. Accuracy would be encouraged, but adequacy would be a more reasonable expectation.
This might sound like lowering the bar just because something is hard. But Schweizer and Plessner realised something most of us don’t; it’s near-impossible to make highly-accurate decisions 100% of the time. The rulemakers behind VAR recognised this too, hence their “clear and obvious error” rule. The aim isn’t to become decision-making robots that only see in black and white, right and wrong. The aim is to let the on-pitch referee decide in the moment, and only step in when there’s a glaring mistake.
Whether or not VAR has actually been implemented in this way I’ll leave my fellow football fans to debate. But there’s an interesting lesson here when it comes to how you make decisions.
We aren’t robots
Like football referees, we’re only human. Which means we have inherent limitations to how we process information, how we perceive events, and how we think about decisions we need to make. The key is to see that as a feature, not a bug.
The fact of the matter is that most decisions, at least the kind we really wrestle with, aren’t binary. Instead of one right path and one wrong path, usually we’re met with dozens of potential paths to choose, each with their pros and cons. Aiming for accuracy in this kind of scenario is a ridiculously high bar to set. And yet that’s exactly what we end up doing. That’s why we go round in circles, endlessly delaying the decision until we’re burnt out and exhausted. We’re trying to achieve a level of accuracy that we simply can’t achieve.
The solution is to aim for adequate. Given the data you have, the situation and context you’re in, are you making a rationally sound decision. Not the “right” decision, necessarily. Not the accurate decision. A decision that anyone else could reasonably expect you to make. That’s step one. Because it gets you out of the Decision Delay spiral and at least helps you make the call and take action.
The second step is to be your own VAR (or even have a decision buddy who can be your VAR). After making a decision, look at it again from some different perspectives and ask yourself: “Have I made a clear and obvious error?”. If the answer is no, then consider the decision made and move towards actioning it. If the answer is yes, then maybe you need to take a step back, undo the decision, and better understand what led you to make that error.
By employing a VAR-esque process into your decision making, you bypass that little voice in your head that says “I NEED to get this right” and you go straight into making the call. The sense check afterwards then provides a guardrail to make sure you haven’t done something utterly stupid. It gives you a bias towards action and prevents Decision Delay.