Concept
Ooching
Ooching is the Heaths' word for running a small, cheap experiment before a full commitment: freelancing before joining, renting before buying, a pilot before the rollout. It replaces a prediction with a result.
Most big decisions rest on a prediction about how something will feel or perform, and predictions are where overconfidence lives. An ooch buys real information at low cost. The Heaths note two limits. Some decisions cannot be tested small, because the commitment is the thing being decided, and for those you must predict as well as you can. And ooching can become an excuse to delay forever, so an ooch needs a defined scope and an end date, after which you decide. Annie Duke would describe the same move as buying information before placing the whole bet.
A real-life example
Rather than accepting or refusing a job offer, a product manager asks to consult for the company for six weeks on a defined project. Two of the four people who left in the past year tell him that is what they wish they had done.
How to use it
- 1Before committing, ask what small version of this you could run in two weeks.
- 2Give the experiment a scope and an end date, then decide.
- 3If no small version is possible, name the assumption you are betting on instead.