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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chip Heath
Read between
June 24 - July 2, 2019
In interpreting the sentiments of Americans, FDR created statistical summaries and read a sample of real letters.
Rather than choose “all” or “nothing,” they chose “a little something.”
this concept—testing a profession before entering it—sounds obvious. Yet every year hordes of students enroll in graduate schools without ever having run an experiment like that:
Jim Collins and Morten Hansen advocate a strategy they call “firing bullets then cannonballs,” that is, running small experiments and then doubling down on the ones that work best.
Tetlock delivers the bad news: “Surveying these scores across regions, time periods, and outcome variables … it is impossible to find any domain in which humans clearly outperformed crude extrapolation algorithms.”
what the data shows is that applied base rates are better than expert predictions, which are better than novice predictions.
Whenever possible, we should get out of the business of prediction altogether.
One survey found that 60% of Inc. 500 CEOs had not even written business plans before launching their companies.
this preference for testing, rather than planning, was one of the most striking differences between entrepreneurs and corporate executives.
most corporate executives favor prediction; their belief seems to be, “To the extent that we can predict the future, we can control it.” In contrast, though, entrepreneurs favor active testing: “To the extent that we can control the future, we do not need to predict it.”
Research has found that interviews are less predictive84 of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance. Even a simple intelligence test is substantially more predictive than an interview.
The interviews seemed to correlate with nothing other than, well, the ability to interview.
With so little proof that interviews work, why do we rely on them so much? Because we all think we’re good at interviewing.
Richard Nisbett calls this the “interview illusion”: our certainty that we’re learning more in an interview than we really are.
TO OOCH IS TO ask, Why predict something we can test? Why guess when we can know?
To use 10/10/10, we think about our decisions on three different time frames: How will we feel about it 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now?
As predicted by the mere-exposure principle, the subjects preferred the mirror-image photo, and their loved ones preferred the real-image photo. We like our mirror face better than our real face, because it’s more familiar!
All of us, in our work, will naturally absorb a lot of institutional “truth,” and chances are that much of it is well proven and trustworthy, but some of it will only feel true because it is familiar.
another bias called loss aversion91, which says that we find losses more painful than gains are pleasant.
researchers have found again and again that people act as though losses are from two to four times more painful than gains are pleasurable.
When you put these two forces together—the mere-exposure principle and loss aversion—what you get is a powerful bias for the way things work today.
The researchers have found, in essence, that our advice to others tends to hinge on the single most important factor, while our own thinking flits among many variables.
When we think of our friends, we see the forest. When we think of ourselves, we get stuck in the trees.
in helping us to break a decision logjam, the single most effective question may be: What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?
she realized why she was stuck: It wasn’t just a job decision; it was a values decision.
The buck stops with emotion.
an agonizing decision is often a sign of a priorities conflict.
Remember that MIT study showing that, over the course of a week, managers spent no time whatsoever on their core priorities?
Bregman’s hourly beep: Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?
“bookending,” which involves estimating two different scenarios: a dire scenario (the lower bookend), where things go badly for a company, and a rosy scenario (the upper bookend), where the company gets a lot of breaks.
A postmortem analysis begins after a death and asks, “What caused it?” A premortem, by contrast, imagines the future “death” of a project and asks, “What killed it?”
Realistic job previews have been proven, by a large research literature, to reduce turnover.
“vaccination” effect. By exposing people to a “small dose of organizational reality” before they start work, you vaccinate them against shock and disappointment.
We should bookend the future, considering a range of outcomes from very bad to very good.
bundle our decisions with “tripwires,” signals that would snap us awake at exactly the right moment, compelling us to reconsider a decision or to make a new one.
That’s why the initial slowness of bargaining may be offset by a critical advantage: It speeds up implementation.
When you can articulate someone’s point of view better than they can, it’s de facto proof that you are really listening.
when researchers ask the elderly130 what they regret about their lives, they don’t often regret something they did; they regret things they didn’t do.
J. Edward Russo and Paul J. H. Schoemaker (2002). Winning Decisions: Getting It Right the First Time.
Aaron T. Beck (1989). Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstandings, Resolve Conflicts, and Solve Relationship Problems Through Cognitive Therapy.
Susan Nolen-Hoeksema (2003), Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life (New York: Holt).
