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by
Chip Heath
Read between
July 15, 2020 - May 6, 2021
What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?
When people imagine that they cannot have an option, they are forced to move their mental spotlight elsewhere—really move it—often for the first time in a long while.
(In contrast, when people are asked to “generate another option,” they often halfheartedly shift the spotlight a couple of inches, suggesting a minor variant of an existing alternative.)
“Necessity is the mother of...
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Psychologists such as Barry Schwartz have written about the dangers of “choice overload,”
our tendency to freeze in the face of too many options.
How you react to the position, in short, depends a great deal on your mindset at the time it’s offered. Psychologists have identified two contrasting mindsets that affect our motivation and our receptiveness to new opportunities: a “prevention focus,” which orients us toward avoiding negative outcomes, and a “promotion focus,” which orients us toward pursuing positive outcomes.
Multitracking improves our understanding of the situations we’re facing.
It lets us cobble together the best features of our options. It helps us keep our egos in check.
we’ll get stuck in a mindset of prevention OR promotion.
1. Multitracking = considering more than one option simultaneously.
2. When you consider multiple options simultaneously, you learn the “shape” of the problem.
3. Multitracking also keeps egos in check—and can actually be faster!
4. While decision paralysis may be a concern for people who consider many options, we’re pushing for only one or two extra. And the payoff can be huge.
5. Beware “sham options.”
6. Toggle between the prevention and promotion mindsets.
7. Push for “this AND that” rather than “this OR that.”
Walton found clever solutions by asking himself, “Who else is struggling with a similar problem, and what can I learn from them?”
TO BREAK OUT OF a narrow frame, we need options, and one of the most basic ways to generate new options is to find someone else who’s solved your problem.
Sam Walton made a habit of sniffing around his competitors’ stores, looking for ideas that were better than his. Today, his style of eager competitive analysis has become conventional wisdom for most executives.
While these habits are useful, they are rarely transformative. Good ideas are often adopted quickly.
we shouldn’t forget, when hunting for new options, to look inside our own organizations. Sometimes the people who have solved our problems are our own colleagues.
Playlists should be as useful as checklists, yet your organization has many checklists and probably zero playlists.
A checklist is useful for situations where you need to replicate the same behaviors every time. It’s prescriptive; it stops people from making an error. On the other hand, a playlist is useful for situations where you need a stimulus, a way of producing new ideas. It’s generative; it stops people from overlooking an option.
one of the reliable but unrecognized pillars of scientific thinking is the analogy.
Notice the slow, brute-force approach that had to be used by the lab that didn’t use analogies. When you use analogies—when you find someone who has solved your problem—you can take your pick from the world’s buffet of solutions. But when you don’t bother to look, you’ve got to cook up the answer yourself. Every time. That may be possible, but it’s not wise, and it certainly ain’t speedy.
“regional analogy”—learning from another organism that is similar to the one being studied.)
multitracking—thinking “AND not OR”—is a powerful way to compare options and that we can create more “balanced” options by toggling between the prevention and promotion mindsets.
Finally, if we get stuck, we should find someone who has already solved our problem. To find them, we can look inside (for bright spots), outside (for competitors and best practices), and into the distance (via laddering up).
the confirmation bias, which tempts us to collect only the information that supports our gut-level preference.
Unlike narrow framing, the confirmation bias is not easily disrupted. Even the smartest psychologists, who have studied the bias for years, admit that they can’t shake it. It can’t be wiped out; it can only be reined in.
Find Someone Who’s Solved Your Problem 1. When you need more options but feel stuck, look for someone who’s solved your problem. 2. Look outside: competitive analysis, benchmarking, best practices.
3. Look inside. Find your bright spots.
4. Note: To be proactive, encode your greatest hits in a decision “playlist.”
5. A third place to look for ideas: in the distance. Ladder up via analogies.
6. Why generate your own ideas when you can sample the world’s buffet of options?
The confirmation bias53 leads us to hunt for information that flatters our existing beliefs.
researchers concluded that we are more than twice as likely to favor confirming information than dis-confirming information.
The first step is to follow the lead of Alfred Sloan, the former GM CEO, and develop the discipline to consider the opposite of our initial instincts. That discipline begins with a willingness to spark constructive disagreement.
