Let Marty McFly run into Marty McFly

Let Marty McFly run into Marty McFly

Thanks to the success of the three Back to the Future movies, our go-to source on the rules of time travel is more likely to be Doc Brown than Dr. Stephen Hawking. The first rule, emphasized by the trilogy and repeated by nearly every time-travel movie since, is “Whatever you do, don’t meet up with yourself!” Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) explains to Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) in Back to the Future: Part II (1989) that “the encounter could create a time paradox, the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe. Granted, that’s the worst-case scenario. The destruction might, in fact, be very localized, limited to merely our own galaxy.”

“Don’t meet up with yourself” has become an unquestioned element of the “science” of time travel. In Timecop (1994), because “the same matter can’t occupy the same space at the same time,” Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character destroys the villain by pushing his past and future versions together. The villain turns into a liquefied blob and disappears from existence.

In real-life decision-making, when we bring our past- or future-self into the equation, the space-time continuum doesn’t unravel. Far from turning us into a liquefied blob, a visit from past or future versions of us helps present-us make better bets. When making decisions, isolating ourselves from thinking about similar decisions in the past and possible future consequences is frequently the very thing that turns us into a blob, mired by in-the-moment thinking where the scope of time is distorted. As decision-makers, we want to collide with past and future versions of ourselves. Our capacity for mental time travel makes this possible. As is the case with accountability, such meetings can lead to better decisions: at the moment of the decision, accountability to our group can pop us briefly into the future to imagine the conversation about the decision we will have with that group. Running that conversation will often remind us to stay on a more rational path.

Just as we can recruit other people to be our decision buddies, we can recruit other versions of ourselves to act as our own decision buddies. Remembering earlier decisions and imagining a later conversation about the current one can bring those other perspectives into the moment.*

Poker players have unique decision challenges that get them thinking a lot about how to get this collision of past-, present- and future-self to occur at the moment of making a decision and executing on it. Because decisions in poker are made so quickly, players don’t have the luxury of time in coordinating their rational, long-term, strategic plans with their decisions at the poker table. And all those decisions made under severe time constraints have immediate consequences expressed as an exchange of poker chips. The constant exchange of chips reminds players that there is risk in every decision. Of course, the direction in which the chips flow in the short term only loosely correlates with decision quality. You can win a hand after making bad decisions and lose a hand after making good ones. But the mere fact that chips are changing hands is a reminder that every decision has consequences—that all those execution decisions you make along the way really matter.

Away from the poker table, we don’t feel or experience the consequences of most of the decisions we make right away. If we are winning or losing to a particular decision, the consequences may take time to reveal themselves. If we make a losing eating decision, like substituting SnackWell’s for apples, there’s no immediate outcome that lets us know there might have been a cost to that choice. If we repeat that kind of decision enough, there will be consequences, but they take time to play out. In business, if a leader ignores the ideas of an intern because “What does an intern possibly know?” it could take years for that intern to become a successful competitor before that mistake becomes obvious. If the trajectory of that business suffers because of the poverty of new ideas, the owner of the business might never realize the effect of that attitude.

The best poker players develop practical ways to incorporate their long-term strategic goals into their in-the-moment decisions. Recruiting past- and future-us is one way to connect immediate choices with long-term goals. No strategy can turn us into perfectly rational actors. In addition, we can make the best possible decisions and still not get the result we want. Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them. Even when that effort makes a small difference—more rational thinking and fewer emotional decisions, translated into an increased probability of better outcomes—it can have a significant impact on how our lives turn out. Good results compound. Good processes become habits, and make possible future calibration and improvement.

Those methods involve a lot of mental time travel, and those poker players could teach Marty McFly and Doc Brown a thing or two.