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“Part of the culture here is to ask ourselves, ‘How do we ooch into this?’ … We always ooch before we leap.
Experts with impeccable credentials underperform a dumb algorithm that merely assumes that what happened last year will happen again this year.
Previous research has shown that psychologists, doctors, engineers, lawyers, and car mechanics are also poor at making predictions.
this preference for testing, rather than planning, was one of the most striking differences between entrepreneurs and corporate executives.
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.
“When the bosses make the decisions, decisions are made by politics, persuasion, and PowerPoint.
ooching has one big flaw: It’s lousy for situations that require commitment.
It’s not intended to enable emotional tiptoeing, in which we ease timidly into decisions that we know are right but might cause us a little pain.
Ooching, in short, should be used as a way to speed up the collection of trustworthy information, not as a way to slow down a decision that deserves our full commitment.
Research has found that interviews are less predictive 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.
we’ve got to Reality-Test Our Assumptions. We’ve seen three strategies for doing that. First, we’ve got to be diligent about the way we collect information, asking disconfirming questions and considering the opposite. Second, we’ve got to go looking for the right kinds of information: zooming out to find base rates, which summarize the experiences of others, and zooming in to get a more nuanced impression of reality. And finally, the ultimate reality-testing is to ooch: to take our options for a spin before we commit.
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?
10/10/10 helps to level the emotional playing field. What we’re feeling now is intense and sharp, while the future feels fuzzier. That discrepancy gives the present too much power, because our present emotions are always in the spotlight. 10/10/10 forces us to shift our spotlights, asking us to imagine a moment 10 months into the future with the same “freshness” that we feel in the present.
you’ve been avoiding a difficult conversation with a coworker, then you’re letting short-term emotion rule you.
To be clear, short-term emotion isn’t always the enemy. (In the face of an injustice, it may be appropriate to act on outrage.) Conducting a 10/10/10 analysis doesn’t presuppose that the long-term perspective is the right one. It simply ensures that short-term emotion isn’t the only voice at the table
mere exposure” principle, which says that people develop a preference for things that are more familiar (i.e., merely being exposed to something makes us view it more positively).
In one experiment, participants were presented with unfamiliar statements, such as “The zipper was invented in Norway,” and told explicitly that the statements might or might not be true. When the participants were exposed to a particular statement three times during the experiment, rather than once, they rated it as more truthful. Repetition sparked trust.
Compounding this preference for the status quo is another bias called loss aversion, which says that we find losses more painful than gains are pleasant.
When an organization’s leader proposes a change in direction, people will be feeling two things: Ack, that feels unfamiliar. (And thus more uncomfortable.) Also: Ack, we’re going to lose what we have today. 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
THIS STATUS-QUO BIAS MIGHT be most evident in big, bureaucratic institutions.
A relatively new area of research in psychology, called construal-level theory, shows that with more distance we can see more clearly the most important dimensions of the issue we’re facing.
The advice we give others, then, has two big advantages: It naturally prioritizes the most important factors in the decision, and it downplays short-term emotions. That’s why, 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?
You know how after you ride a roller coaster, they try to sell you a photo of you shrieking during the ride? You might impulsively buy the photo because you’re flush with adrenaline. “But the next day,” she said, “do you really want that picture? Not really. No one looks good on a roller coaster.
We’re using the word “core” to capture the sense of long-term emotion we’ve been discussing; these are priorities that transcend the week or the quarter. For individuals that means long-term goals and aspirations, and for organizations it means the values and capabilities that ensure the long-term health of the enterprise.
“guardrails that are wide enough to empower but narrow enough to guide.
When we identify and enshrine our priorities, our decisions are more consistent and less agonizing.
Peter Bregman, a productivity guru and blogger for the Harvard Business Review, recommends a simple trick for dodging this fate. He
advises us to set a timer that goes off once every hour, and when it beeps, we should ask ourselves, “Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?
