“There’s a Kayfabe aspect to the roles that people play in organizations” — An Interview with Ben Cattaneo

Ben Cattaneo is creator of  The Decision-Making Studio Podcast (formerly “All Things Risk”), which explores the themes of decision-making, uncertainty, randomness and resilience as applied to sports, the arts, current affairs and just about any other domain. Cattaneo features long-form conversations with interesting, authentic guests who speak honestly and openly, and loads of fascinating stories, tips and tools. He is the founder of the consultancy firm The Decision-Making Studio.

What is your story with professional wrestling?

I grew up in Windsor, Ontario and was in grade school in the 1980s when the wrestling craze exploded. It was the WWE (WWF then) and my friends and I were pretty hooked on the storylines (I still vividly recall the day Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Ondorff turned on Hulk Hogan, for example). The conversations at recess were dominated by the latest events – including re-enactments, piledrivers and figure four leglocks included. I attended Wrestlemania III in the Pontiac Silverdome with a friend from school. My father begrudgingly took me to a card in Detroit’s Joe Louis arena once following some tickets I had won – my parents, and particularly my father, an academic, was far from pleased about my interest in pro wrestling.

I met Bob Stewart at the Unitarian Universalist Church our families both attended. We bonded quickly over the squared circle. The thing I found with Bob is that, unlike my friends at school, we were able to take our interest in pro wrestling to another level – making connections between some of the storylines with things we had heard at church, to current affairs, other aspects of pop culture, and other things.

We were both interested in role-playing games and it just seemed obvious to combine the two. We created the Role Playing Wrestling Alliance, which was our roleplaying wrestling game. We spent hours upon hours playing the game and building the world around it.

I’m now based in the UK, in London. I currently run my own consultancy, which is called “The Decision Making Studio.” In hindsight, I find many connections between that experience and what I do now.

I’ve had a long career in risk management. I spent previously eight and a half years in the risk management function at BT Group (British Telecom Group). I got into risk management because I studied international relations. Risk management is all about what could happen, and trying to help an organization prioritize and anticipate all the things that could happen. There is an element of probabilistic thinking (and I enjoy that). That relates to the Role Playing Wrestling Alliance, and the world of the game, shaped by all the probabilities of the die rolls. And then we build up storylines.

Fascinating.

I created a Linkedin post not too long ago, just talking about Kayfabe in organizations. We pretend all the time in big organizations. So there’s a there’s a Kayfabe aspect to the roles that people play in organizations. (Ben’s LinkedIn Profile can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-cattaneo/.) People in big organizations know that we’re playing a role. We’re playing a game.

Your interview is taking us in unexpected dimensions. Going back to the roots of the Role Playing Wrestling Alliance —

We watched a lot of pro wrestling, and we played Dungeons & Dragons, and we just could not tolerate a world in which these two things were not somehow combined. We spent hours playing this game. I found that that was also instructive. I can trace back founding my own business, or the way I navigated my career, to a spirit of “Why not? Why can’t you do this?” that was born in our project to design the game. “Why not? Why can’t we do this?”

The combat system of the role-playing game is something that I always found interesting. I watched a lot of wrestling matches, and I wrote down all the different moves (a flying elbow drop, a drop kick). I made an inventory of all of these moves and categorized them. It was a very, very simple combat system, which I think was great because it just allowed us to create the storylines. That simple rule system set the framework for this fabulous, fabulous experience.

One of the things that I felt was… taboo… was blood, right? The WWF matches on TV were pretty tame, family viewing. I remember buying back issues of “Pro Wrestling Illustrated” which had photos from matches from the NWA and smaller southern US pro wrestling federations. Some these matches had weapons, and bleeding, but those types of matches were not on television where we grew up. That fed the imagination.

So, we brought some of that into the RPWA. I remember we created a “burning turnbuckle” match and the “Tower of Terror” match which had three steel cages stacked on top of each other. The wrestlers would start on the top cage and after 10 minutes, the floor would drop out onto the next one.

Wrestling is the most popular form of American theater. More people watch a live wrestling show in Minneapolis than we’ll watch all the performances of Shakespeare in Minnesota for the rest of the year. Knowing that you are also a Podcaster, is there anything about, you know, the storytelling or the theater of wrestling that affects your approach to the podcast is

I guess I’d  first go to something – “Why can’t I do a podcast? Why not?” I wasn’t quite sure what Bob was going to say when I showed him the first “prototype” of the game. I suspect that if he wasn’t interested, my podcast wouldn’t exist. We fed off of each other’s imaginations. I’m not sure what that says – but we also both studied Shakespeare in high school and had no inclination to start a Shakespeare-based role-playing game.

I call my organization “The Decision-Making Studio”, because it’s both art and science  – that is you know, risk and uncertainty is just like the rolls of the dice. There’s probabilities. And you think probabilistically, and you collect data. And you do all this stuff. But that’s boring – it’s the meaning we attach to that that’s interesting.

And so there’s a little bit that making good decisions is about, you know, having some data. But also it’s about thinking about possibilities and that that taps into your your imagination. So I’ve done work around scenario planning, which is basically a form of storytelling, about helping an organization prepare for the future, and that I think, you know, I think that kind of combines really beautifully with the way the game was set up. Where you have a system of, you know, categorizing and probabilizing what could happen.  But then, you know, you need to combine that with your imagination.

And in organizations, there’s a myth: that we make decisions rationally. That’s not how it works at all. We make decisions in a variety of ways, including  our emotions and biases. Then, we use our rational brains to justify and explain it. The science on intuition is trending in this direction. There are so many inputs, we make all these little micro decisions. In those circumstances, color and story and narrative are incredibly important, and we don’t fully appreciate that. As a consultant, I need to use and develop my story telling skills. That interplay is really interesting.

The most interesting people in the world are our polymaths and generalists — the people who can integrate lots of things and make connections between things that others aren’t seeing. I put myself in that camp. But it’s also difficult, because you’re not “in a tribe” (professions are tribes, too). I think that’s what made the game work so well to – we weren’t “narrow” pro wrestling fans. We brought in a range of other interests and that made the game great.

Tell us about what will be next for you.

The Decision-Making Studio Podcast – and my firm! It’s an esoteric podcast, in that I speak to loads of different people from all walks of life. And I try to integrate this theme of decision making. Lately I’ve been speaking to academics or experts in a specific field related to decision making.

One of the people whom I did interview, who left a mark on me, was Annie Duke1. . She has just a wonderful way of talking about decision making, which I think makes way more sense than a lot of other academic work. Basically, decisions are like a hand of poker where you make the best possible decision you can and you have no control over the outcome, because you don’t see all the other cards. That’s the only thing that we can really do, and you never judge the outcome of a single hand. Never judge the quality of how you play based on a single hand. But over many hands, your quality of being a poker player and good decision-making will come through. It’s a nice analogy.

For more information about Ben Cattaneo’s podcast, The Decision-Making Studio Podcast, visit https://thedecisionmaking.studio/podcast. To follow his blog posts on LinkedIn, visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-cattaneo/.