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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chip Heath
Read between
July 2 - July 8, 2023
Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them. Think about the visual analogy—when we focus we sacrifice peripheral vision. And there’s no natural corrective for this; life won’t interrupt our focus to draw our attention to all of our options.
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?
Another technique you can use to break out of a narrow frame is to run the Vanishing Options Test. The conceit here is that Aladdin’s genie has an eccentric older brother who, instead of granting three wishes to a person, arbitrarily takes options away.
One rule of thumb is to keep searching for options until you fall in love at least twice.
The surprise came at the cash register: Customers who’d chosen among 6 jams were 10 times more likely to actually buy a jar of jam than customers who’d chosen among 24! It was fun to sample 24 flavors, it seems, but painful to pick among them. The choice was paralyzing.
That’s why we believe decision paralysis is not a big factor in most circumstances—you don’t need a plethora of choices to improve your decisions. You just need one extra choice, or two. Forget 24 different kinds of jam; we’ll happily settle for two or three.
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 fundamental problem, she realized, was not with her kids or her husband but with her overheated response to life’s normal irritations. That led her to focus on option 5, finding a less stressful job. Finding a job that was less emotionally taxing would provide instant stress relief. However, it also felt like a betrayal of one of her core religious beliefs, the imperative to serve the less fortunate.
Encouraging our loved ones and colleagues to blend the two mindsets can help them escape from an emotional cul-de-sac.
WHEN LIFE OFFERS US a “this or that” choice, we should have the gall to ask whether the right answer might be “both.”
In our experience, some managers will try to excuse single-tracking by arguing, “Even though we’re only considering one option right now, it’s not really a ‘whether or not’ decision, because we’ve considered many other options over the last few years.”
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.
Developing multiple alternatives will sometimes be difficult because our minds don’t always think, “This and that.” Often, for example, we’ll get stuck in a mindset of prevention OR promotion. If we can do both, seeking out options that minimize harm AND maximize opportunity, we are more likely to uncover our full spectrum of choices.
Multitrack 1. Multitracking = considering more than one option simultaneously. • The naming firm Lexicon widens its options by assigning a task to multiple small teams, including an “excursion team” that considers a related task from a very different domain. 2. When you consider multiple options simultaneously, you learn the “shape” of the problem. • When designers created ads simultaneously, they scored higher on creativity and effectiveness. 3. Multitracking also keeps egos in check—and can actually be faster! • When you develop only one option, your ego is tied up
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Throughout Walton’s career, he kept his eyes out for good ideas. He once said that “most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from someone else.” In the early days of discount store chains, he crisscrossed the country in search of insights, visiting discounters ranging from Spartan and Mammoth Mart in the Northeast to FedMart in California. Through conversations with one of FedMart’s leaders, Walton clarified his thinking on distribution, which would eventually become a defining strength of Walmart. And he admired the merchandise mix and displays in Kmart, founded in Garden City, Michigan, by S.
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one of the most basic ways to generate new options is to find someone else who’s solved your problem.
While these habits are useful, they are rarely transformative. Good ideas are often adopted quickly. When all retailers adopt centralized checkout as a “best practice,” it’s no longer a competitive advantage for anyone.
The research supports this early intervention. The risks are worth it. But it was difficult for doctors, with their “Do no harm” ethos, to move as quickly and forcefully as the research said they should.
The search for options might lead the manager to search first for best practices. In a world with thousands of other organizations, someone has surely faced this problem before. Next, she might look for bright spots within her own organization, interviewing a couple of longtime managers to fish for their insights.
Dion Hughes said, “We knew that creative people tend to be precious about their ideas and find the ones that they’re passionate about and then invest a lot of emotion into them. And they spend most of their time diving deep into one or two ideas and not a lot of time spreading their wings. So we thought, well, why don’t we do the opposite?” So when Hughes and Johnson are called in by creative directors, they try to send them a dozen possible directions within a week. (Notice the multitracking.)
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. (Don’t forget to shine your spotlight over here …) Playlists also spur us to multitrack. In the last chapter, we discussed the value of shifting between the prevention and promotion mindsets. A playlist can force us to make that shift.
“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.)
the more you are able to extract the “crucial features” of a problem, the further afield you can go.
You can see how, as you grow more and more abstract, you eventually ascend past the zone of creativity and into the realm of absurdity. (If you ever find yourself seeking inspiration from other galaxies, ladder back down and have a cup of coffee.)
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. • Sam Walton discovered an ingenious checkout solution by scoping out another store. 3. Look inside. Find your bright spots. • Kaiser’s leaders found and scaled a solution for sepsis pioneered by one of Kaiser’s own hospitals. • What can you learn from your own bright spots (e.g., the four days you went to the gym last month)? 4. Note: To be proactive, encode your greatest hits in a decision “playlist.”
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*“Bright spots” is a term that we defined in Switch, which discusses how to spark change.
In Greek mythology, a hubristic protagonist often suffers humiliation. When Icarus ignored advice not to fly too close to the sun, his wax wings melted and he fell to his death. (By contrast, in American business, hubris is less damning. If Icarus had been a bank CEO, he’d have escaped with a $10 million golden parachute.)
Hayward and Hambrick speculated that executives’ hubris—their confidence that they could work magic with their acquisitions—would lead them to overpay for their targets.
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: 1. Praise by the media 2. Strong recent corporate performance (which the CEO could interpret as evidence of his/her genius) 3. A sense of self-importance (which was measured, cleverly, by looking at the gap between the CEO’s compensation package and the next-highest-paid officer—a CEO must think a lot of himself if he’s paid quadruple the salary of anyone else)
Our “bubble” is not the boardroom; it’s the brain. The confirmation bias leads us to hunt for information that flatters our existing beliefs.
The meta-study found that the confirmation bias was stronger in emotion-laden domains such as religion or politics and also when people had a strong underlying motive to believe one way or the other
The confirmation bias also increased when people had previously invested a lot of time or effort in a given issue.
We know that the confirmation bias will skew our assessment. If we feel a whisker’s worth of preference for one option over another, we can be trusted to train our spotlight on favorable data.
The devil’s advocate 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.
Certainly not every decision needs a devil’s advocate—“I strenuously object to your purchasing those slacks!”—but for high-stakes decisions, we owe ourselves a dose of skepticism.
Our typical tendency is to flee these skeptical conversations rather than embrace them, but that reflects short-term thinking. We want to avoid the momentary discomfort of being challenged, which is understandable, but surely it’s preferable to the pain of walking blindly into a bad decision.
In the era when Disney was churning out hits such as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, its senior leadership team used a Gong Show format that allowed many people to pitch ideas for movies or theme-park rides—but the leaders brought the curtain down quickly on bad ideas.
It might be tempting to think about hiring a formal devil’s advocate, someone who could inject criticism into a complacent organization. However, it’s too easy to imagine the position being marginalized and, beyond that, offering an excuse for others to pull back their own criticism. (“I know the devil’s advocate will give this deal a thorough going-over, so I don’t need to worry about it.”)
The most important lesson to learn about devil’s advocacy isn’t the need for a formal contrarian position; it’s the need to interpret criticism as a noble function. An effective promotor fidei is not a token argumentative smarty-pants; it’s someone who deeply respects the Catholic Church and is trying to defend the faith by surfac...
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There are many ways to honor that spirit of values-based opposition. In some organizations, the executive in charge might assign a few people on the executive team to prepare a case against a high-stakes proposal. (What if the Quaker CEO had assigned a team to make a case against the Snapple purchase?) That’s a wise idea. It puts the team members in the role of “protecting the organization,” and it licenses their skepticism.
“I remember we’d been there probably a couple of hours,” said the treasurer, Ross. “And there was this sense of frustration. There’s a lot here to talk about. How do we work through it?” “I could tell it was going nowhere,” said Martin. At the point of impasse, he said, “an idea popped into my head.” He issued the group a challenge: Let’s stop arguing about who is right, he said. Instead, let’s take each option, one at a time, and ask ourselves: What would have to be true for this option to be the right answer?
ROGER MARTIN SAYS THE “What would have to be true?” question has become the most important ingredient of his strategy work, and it’s not hard to see why. The search for disconfirming information might seem, on the surface, like a thoroughly negative process: We try to poke holes in our own arguments or the arguments of others. But Martin’s question adds something constructive: What if our least favorite option were actually the best one? What data might convince us of that?
“If you think an idea is the wrong way to approach a problem and someone asks you if you think it’s the right way, you’ll reply ‘no’ and defend that answer against all comers. But if someone asks you to figure out what would have to be true for that approach to work, your frame of thinking changes.… This subtle shift gives people a way to back away from their beliefs and allow exploration by which they give themselves the opportunity to learn something new.”
Barbour’s assessment of this interview was damning: “Though [the resident] regards himself as objective and scientific, he manipulates the data to fit his concept of disease, but is not aware that he does so. He does not discover a pattern; he generates one.” Unfortunately, the speed with which the doctor took over the interview in the case above may not be unusual. One study of patient interviews revealed that it took only 18 seconds, on average, for a doctor to interrupt a patient.
To interrupt this cycle, some organizational leaders urge their employees to “assume positive intent,” 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.
Most of your “deliberate mistakes” will fail, and in fact that failure should be encouraging, because it means you’ve been making the right assumptions all along. Beyond the mistake itself, the willingness to test your assumptions has its own value. It signals to your colleagues that your work will be conducted based on evidence, not folklore or politics.
From the perspective of our brains, we are unique. Our challenges and opportunities feel particular to us. From the perspective of the universe, though, we are utterly typical. And as we’ll see in the next chapter, when our predictions and opinions clash with the universe’s averages, the universe usually wins.
1. Confirmation bias = hunting for information that confirms our initial assumptions (which are often self-serving). • The hubris of CEOs can be counteracted by disagreement. We need the same disagreement to counteract our confirmation bias.
2. We need to spark constructive disagreement within our organizations. • The devil’s advocate, murder boards, and The Gong Show all license skepticism. How can we? • Roger Martin’s brilliant question: “What would have to be true for this option to be the very best choice?”
3. To gather more trustworthy information, we can ask disconfirming questions. • Law students: “Who were the last three associates to leave the firm? What are they doing now? How can I contact them?” • iPod buyers: “What problems does the iPod have?”
