Ooching

1

In 2006, John Hanks, a vice president at National Instruments (NI), faced a decision about whether to invest heavily in wireless sensors. The technology was promising—sensors could monitor methane in coal mines or relay data from rotating oil drill heads where wired solutions failed—but customers were skeptical. Could the data be secured? Would the sensors survive harsh environments? Hanks didn’t have enough information to proceed with confidence. What he needed to do, he realized, was ooch.

To ooch is to construct small experiments to test a hypothesis. The term, common in parts of the South, may blend “inch” and “scoot.” Hanks’s team didn’t design an elegant product; they cobbled together a prototype that looked like a “brick in a bucket.” They partnered with UCLA professor Bill Kaiser, whose biologists were measuring carbon dioxide flux in the Costa Rican jungle. The NI team rigged zip lines so sensor buckets could move between trees, capturing data at different heights. It was a rugged, real-world test. The test gave Hanks evidence that the sensors could work under demanding conditions, helping him decide to commit $2–3 million to development.

Ooching is a diagnostic: a way to reality-test your perceptions before leaping. Consider a student, Steve, who decides pharmacy school is right for him. He enjoyed chemistry, envisions good pay and reasonable hours, and ruled out medicine and law. But that’s thin evidence for a multiyear, high-cost commitment. An obvious ooch would be working—or even volunteering—in a pharmacy for a few weeks. Yet thousands of students every year enroll in graduate programs (law, medicine, physical therapy) without ever testing the daily reality. The book describes a requirement at Hunter College’s physical therapy program: applicants had to spend at least a hundred hours observing therapists before enrolling.

Small experiments can also test anxious predictions. Therapists Matthew McKay, Martha Davis, and Patrick Fanning describe Peggy, a perfectionist legal secretary who proofread documents obsessively, terrified of mistakes. She agreed to a sequence of small ooches: take a brief home for three extra passes, then two, then one; then leave it at work after one extra pass, then with no extra pass; finally, deliberately leave in a punctuation error, then a grammatical error, then a spelling error. Each step provoked intense anxiety, but the sky didn’t fall. Nobody even noticed the errors. Peggy gradually eased into a strict but not obsessive routine, ooching her way into bolder decisions.

This philosophy appears under many names. Designers call it “prototyping”—hacking together a quick mock-up to get customer reactions, iterating from real-world feedback rather than polishing in isolation. Healthcare leaders advocate “small tests of change.” Jim Collins and Morten Hansen recommend “firing bullets, then cannonballs”: small experiments followed by doubling down on winners. Peter Sims’s book Little Bets is a book-length embrace of the concept.

Why isn’t ooching more instinctive? Because we’re overconfident in our ability to predict the future. Steve, the pharmacy student, doesn’t feel confused—he knows pharmacy fits him. A diva designer “just knows” the product is right and scoffs at a quick-and-dirty prototype. We think we already see how things will unfold.

Prediction is less reliable than confidence makes it seem. Philip Tetlock’s research on expert political judgment found that expert forecasts often failed to beat simple rules. The book also draws on research comparing human judgment with statistical prediction. In his words, “it is impossible to find any domain in which humans clearly outperformed crude extrapolation algorithms.” Media prominence did not make the pundits in Tetlock’s research better forecasters.

Entrepreneurs can sometimes learn more from a small sale or trial than from another forecast. Saras Sarasvathy’s studies of seasoned founders show they prefer active testing: “I wouldn’t do all this research… I’d just go sell it.” Their mindset: “To the extent we can control the future, we do not need to predict it.” The book describes several such tests: Bill Gross tested online car sales by simply slapping up a rough website for CarsDirect; the initial orders supplied evidence of demand, and the company launched rapidly. At Intuit, Scott Cook initially dismissed an idea to give Indian farmers crop price information via cell phones, but a crude prototype test changed his view; the book reports that the product eventually served over 325,000 farmers and raised their incomes by 20%. Even in family life, ooching works: Gabe Gabrielson allowed his son Colin to wear pajamas to breakfast for three days, on the condition he still be punctual for school. Colin succeeded, the policy stuck, and morning arguments disappeared.

Use an ooch to answer a question that matters to the decision. A student uncertain about marine biology might shadow a biologist or audit a course. Before starting, decide what the test can reveal and what result would justify proceeding, changing course, or stopping. Repeating small trials without acting on their results can become another way to postpone the choice.