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Or as one of the authors, Scott Klemmer, said, “If I have only one design, then my ego is perfectly conflated with my design. But if I have multiple designs, I can separate the two.
So, given the clear benefits of multitracking, what explains the failure of most organizations to embrace it? Many executives are worried that exploring multiple options will take too long. It’s a reasonable fear, but the researcher Kathleen Eisenhardt has found that the opposite is true. In a study of top leadership teams in Silicon Valley34, an environment that tends to place a premium on speed, she found that executives who weigh more options actually make faster decisions.
There’s no “right number” of houses to see or job candidates to interview. One rule of thumb is to keep searching for options until you fall in love at least twice. If you’ve only identified one good candidate for a job, for instance, you’ll have the strong urge to talk yourself into hiring her, which is a recipe for the confirmation bias. You’ll start to make excuses for the flaws you see: She asked us not to call her old boss for a reference, but that’s probably okay, because the boss sounded like a real jerk …
So far in this chapter, we’ve emphasized the benefits of multitracking your options. We’ve implied that more is better. However, if you’ve ever walked into an ice cream store and found yourself stymied by the array of choices, you know there may be a limit to the amount of “more” we can take. This leads us to an important concern about multitracking. Psychologists such as Barry Schwartz have written about the dangers of “choice overload,” our tendency to freeze in the face of too many options. Is multitracking likely to plunge people into choice overload?
When the researchers analyzed the data, the evidence was striking: When the executive board considered more than one alternative, they made six times as many “very good” decisions. (Specifically, 40% of the multi-option decisions were rated “very good,” compared with only 6% of the “whether or not” decisions.) That is not a small effect.
We must be careful, too, to avoid sham options, which exist only to make the “real” option look better. More than a few real estate agents, for instance, have admitted to taking their clients to lousy properties first to make the subsequent visits more appealing.
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.
The most successful companies acted more like multitrackers, combining the best elements of promotion and prevention.
What Dunbar discovered, after countless hours of eavesdropping and interviewing and synthesizing, was that one of the reliable but unrecognized pillars of scientific thinking is the analogy.
Dunbar said, “The use of analogies is one of the main mechanisms for driving research forward.” And the key to using analogies successfully, he said, was the ability to extract the “crucial features of the current problem.” This required the scientist to think of the problem from a more abstract, general perspective, and then “search for other problems that have been solved.” (Find someone who has solved your problem.)
DUNBAR FOUND THAT GRANULAR problems benefit from local analogies, and conceptual problems lend themselves to regional analogies. In fact, the more you are able to extract the “crucial features” of a problem, the further afield you can go. A separate study of a medical-plastics47 design group, conducted by Bo T. Christensen and Christian D. Schunn, found that the designers tapped a veritable circus of analogies, including zippers, credit cards, toilet paper, shoes, milk containers, Christmas decorations, waterwheels, picture puzzles, venetian blinds, and lingerie.
Lexicon, the naming firm discussed in the previous chapter, excels at this process. In naming the processor that became the Pentium, the creative team wanted names that suggested “speed,” so they laddered up past the domain of computer technology to consider any fast, high-performance product.
One team, in fact, spent time studying the names of slalom race skis. (In the end, another analogy would prevail: the notion that the processor was a powerful “ingredient,” an essential element of the computer. Note the “-ium” ending, which is familiar from the inhabitants of the Periodic Table of Elements.)
The images sparked an insight for Fairhurst: “For years many people thought smooth fabric was the key [to speed], but if you look at sharkskin and how rough it is, roughness is the actual key to making a fast fabric.” (Indeed, one Harvard scientist has conducted experiments showing that the shark’s rough denticles reduce drag and increase thrust
IN THIS SECTION, WE’VE been looking for ways to evade a narrow frame, the tendency to unduly restrict our own options. It’s not just teenagers and business executives who fall into this trap; it’s all of us.
When we Widen Our Options, we give ourselves the luxury of a real choice among distinct alternatives. Often the right choice won’t be obvious at first glance, though we may have a hint of a preference. So, to inform our decision, we’ll need to gather more information. But we’ve already encountered the villain that tends to thwart these efforts: the confirmation bias, which tempts us to collect only the information that supports our gut-level preference.
As you might imagine, this self-confidence often proves unwarranted. Warren Buffett said, “In the past, I’ve observed that many acquisition-hungry managers were apparently mesmerized by their childhood reading of the story about the frog-kissing princess. Remembering her success, they pay dearly for the right to kiss corporate toads, expecting wondrous transfigurations.” Unfortunately, said Buffett, “We’ve observed many kisses but very few miracles.
The researchers tested this theory by analyzing every large acquisition ($100 million or more) conducted in the public markets during a two-year period, a sample that contained 106 transactions. What they wanted to see was whether the price paid in the acquisition was influenced by three particular factors, all of which would tend to inflate the ego of the acquiring CEO: Praise by the media Strong recent corporate performance (which the CEO could interpret as evidence of his/her genius) A sense of self-importance (which was measured, cleverly, by looking at the gap between the CEO’s
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The justice system isn’t alone in using a balanced process. For centuries, the Catholic Church made use of a “devil’s advocate” in canonization decisions (i.e., in deciding who would be named a saint). The devil’s advocate54 was known inside the church as the promotor fidei—the “promoter of the faith”—and his role was to build a case against sainthood. John Paul II eliminated the office in 1983, ending 400 years of tradition. Since then, tellingly, saints have been canonized at a rate about 20 times faster than in the early part of the twentieth century.
The Pentagon used a “murder board55,” staffed with experienced officers, to try to kill ill-conceived missions.
THE DOWNSIDE OF PROVOKING disagreement is that it can curdle into bitter politics. Roger Martin56, the dean of the Rotman School of Business and the author of The Opposable Mind and other well-regarded business books, said that people often complain to him that their strategy meetings “descend into adversarial position-taking.” In his judgment, that’s the single biggest barrier to creating effective strategies.
Surely it’s possible, he said, to imagine a set of evidence that would persuade us to change our minds. Let’s talk about what that evidence would look like.
The tenor of the discussion changed. There was still tension in the room, but it was productive tension. Martin’s reframing of the meeting had changed adversaries into collaborators.
Sometimes we think we’re gathering information when we’re actually fishing for support. Take the tradition of calling people’s references when you want to hire them. It’s an exercise in self-justification: We believe someone is worth hiring, and as a final “check” on ourselves, we decide to gather more information about them from past colleagues. So far, so good. Then we allow the candidate to tell us whom we should call, and we dutifully interview those people, who say glowing things about the candidate, and then, absurdly, we feel more confident in our decision to hire the person. (Imagine
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Asking tough, disconfirming questions like these can dramatically improve the quality of information we collect, as illustrated in a study titled “There Is Such a Thing as a Stupid Question,” authored by three Wharton researchers, Julie A. Minson, Nicole E. Ruedy, and Maurice E. Schweitzer.
In situations like this, the therapist Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, advises that couples consciously fight the tendency to notice only what’s wrong. To avoid that trap, he advises couples to keep “marriage diaries61,” chronicling the things their mates do that please them.
Beck cites a research study by Mark Kane Goldstein, who found that 70% of couples who kept this kind of marriage diary reported an improvement in their relationship. “All that had changed was their awareness of what was going on,” Beck wrote. “Before keeping track, they had underestimated the pleasures of their marriage.
To interrupt this cycle, some organizational leaders urge their employees to “assume positive intent62,” that is, to imagine that the behavior or words of your colleagues are motivated by good intentions, even when their actions seem objectionable at first glance. This “filter” can be extremely powerful. Indra Nooyi, the chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, cited it to Fortune as the best advice she ever received. (She learned it from her father.)
The ultimate form of “considering the opposite” might be what Paul Schoemaker did when he convened his colleagues at DSI—Decision Strategies International, the management consulting firm he’d founded—to discuss an important matter of business. He wanted them to make a mistake. Schoemaker, a decision researcher and consultant, was dead serious. He wanted his colleagues to help him plan and execute a deliberate mistake64, as a way of testing their assumptions about DSI’s business.
That cultural reinforcement is precious, because it helps to correct for our natural inclination to avoid this work. Reality-Testing Our Assumptions is difficult. We’ll rarely do it instinctively. That’s the whole point of the confirmation bias—deep down, we never really want to hear the negative information. (When’s the last time you earnestly “considered the opposite” of one of your political views?) That’s why we are advocating so strongly in this book for the use of a process, something that becomes habitual. Otherwise it will be too easy to discard this advice in the heat of the moment.
SO FAR, WE’VE REVIEWED three approaches for fighting the confirmation bias: One, we can make it easier for people to disagree with us. Two, we can ask questions that are more likely to surface contrary information. Three, we can check ourselves by considering the opposite.
Because when we make decisions based on reviews, we are acknowledging two things: (1) Our ability to glean the truth about a product is limited and subject to distortion by the company that makes it; and (2) For that reason, we are smarter to trust the averages over our own impressions.
Thirteen years after his transplant, Brian is thriving. He is now a professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan and has become known among his colleagues for his research on medical decision making and among his students for his patient-centered lectures.
Concerned about side effects, he pumped doctors for base-rate information: Are we talking about a 50% chance? Or a 5% chance? Or a five-in-a-million chance?
This is why we need to add the “close-up” to our tool kit. Base rates are good at establishing norms: Here are the outcomes we can expect if we make this decision. Close-ups, though, create intuition, which can be just as important.
To ooch is to construct small experiments to test one’s hypothesis. (We learned the word “ooch” from NI, but apparently it’s common in parts of the South. Maybe it’s a blend of “inch” and “scoot”?) Hanks said, “Part of the culture here is to ask ourselves, ‘How do we ooch into this?’ … We always ooch before we leap.
OVER THE PAST SEVERAL years, the notion of exploring options with small experiments79 has popped up in many different places.
Early in his career, Phil Tetlock, a professor of psychology and management at the University of Pennsylvania, served on a National Research Council committee with a sobering mission: to assess what the social sciences might contribute to rescuing civilization from the threat of nuclear war. It was 1984, during the first term of Ronald Reagan, who in a speech the previous year had referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Political experts felt that the relations between the two nations were “precariously close to the precipice,” said Tetlock.
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.” In other words, if you gave a teenager some base-rate information and a calculator, she could handily outpredict the experts.
Note that in most of Corporate America, our hiring process looks more like test 2 than test 1. Let’s all slap our foreheads in unison.
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.
TO OOCH IS TO ask, Why predict something we can test? Why guess when we can know? Those questions bring us to the end of this section, in which we’ve been studying strategies for fighting the confirmation bias. The basic problem we face, in analyzing our options, is this: We will usually have an inkling of the one that we want to be the winner, and even the faintest inkling will propel us to gather supportive information—and sometimes nothing but supportive information. We cook the books to support our gut instincts.
HALLAM’S STRATEGY IS A good inspiration for what we’re seeking in this section: ways to Attain Distance Before Deciding. So far, we’ve spent some time thinking about how to generate more options for ourselves by Widening Our Options and how to assess those options by Reality-Testing Our Assumptions. And now it’s time to choose.
Repetition sparked trust.
Research suggests that we set ourselves up for loss aversion almost instantly. In a brilliant series of studies, researchers walked into university classrooms and gave a gift at random to roughly half of the students: a coffee mug with the university’s logo. The students who weren’t given a mug were asked, “How much would you pay for one of those?” On average, they said $2.87. But the surprise came from the students who’d received the mugs. Asked at what price they’d sell the mugs, they reported that they couldn’t part with them for less than
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.
First, people rarely establish their priorities until they’re forced to.
Second, establishing priorities is not the same thing as binding yourself to them.
What sparked the idea was a challenge from one of his advisers to consider what he would do if he received two life-changing phone calls. In the first call, he’d learn that he’d inherited $20 million, no strings attached. The second call would inform him that, due to a rare and incurable disease, he had only 10 years left to live. The adviser asked Collins, “What would you do differently, and, in particular, what would you stop doing?” Since that time, Collins said, he has prepared a “stop-doing” list every year.
“Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?
