Nobody's Got Time for That: The Case for Making Time for Creative Cul…

Every day we are expected to make decisions. Some are minor and have no lasting impact, but sometimes the decisions we make can have a lasting impact on our careers and on our personal lives. When the decision matters, how do you know you’re making the right one?

Photo by jnap - http://www.flickr.com/photos/25843092@N04/4386154663/

Whether you realize it or not, your decisions are being influenced by invisible factors. The sad truth is that many of these factors are rooted in psychological mechanisms that can sometimes cause you to make the wrong decision.

To be able to combat these psychological quirks, we must first attempt to identify them.

Every day we are expected to make decisions. Some are minor and have no lasting impact, but sometimes the decisions we make can have a lasting impact on our careers and on our personal lives. When the decision matters, how do you know you’re making the right one?

Photo by jnap - http://www.flickr.com/photos/25843092@N04/4386154663/

Whether you realize it or not, your decisions are being influenced by invisible factors. The sad truth is that many of these factors are rooted in psychological mechanisms that can sometimes cause you to make the wrong decision.

To be able to combat these psychological quirks, we must first attempt to identify them.

Now, I’m sure many of you are familiar with some pretty common/wide-spread ones we see everyday. This includes things like conformational bias and group-think.

In this brief presentation, however, we are going to take a tour of some my more favorite “invisible” factors that we may hear less of. Most of the items on this list are courtesy of Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet’s lesser known, but equally talented partner at Berkshire Hathaway) at a speech he gave to Harvard in 1995.

In it, Charlie outlines about 24 major psychological influences (We’re just going to touch on a few)...

Let’s start:

Bias from consistency and commitment tendency – it has always been this way, so we should keep doing it that way. The human mind has a tendency to shut off once an idea or decision has been established. This one doesn’t need much explanation. We are creatures of habit. Some habits are good… but habitually coming to the same decisions may blind you to other choices.

Incentive-cause (or based) Bias – if you benefit from the bad decision, it becomes difficult to stop making it. Example: The great moral instrument: the cash register. John Henry Patterson ran a small miner’s supply store where he was constantly being robbed blind by his employees. Some folks some his some cash registers, and he instantly became profitable. The structure of the register, its tracking of receipts, etc. made it far more difficult to do this and automated the process. The store was immediately profitable, and Patterson went on to form the NCR – National Cash Register company.

Bias from Pavlovian association – a fairly large majority of advertising works this way: associate your product with something positive, and it becomes a better product. Are your decisions associated with good outcomes, or bad?

Reciprocation tendency (including the tendency of one in a roll to act as other persons expect.) –

ONE EXAMPLE: Charlie gives the example of Wal-Mart’s Sam Walton. Sam Walton would not let a purchasing agent take a handkerchief from a salesman, because he knew how powerful the subconscious reciprocation tendency can be. Taking anything from a salesman, could influence the buyer to direct a deal to the salesman as a kind of payback. And it’s possible the buyer would not even know that he/she is favoring the agent.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE (multiple influences in this examples…)
Asks people on a campus if they would like to sponsor an underprivileged, but behaviorally difficult child, for a day at the zoo (take some juvenile delinquents to the zoo). Initially. The results depended greatly on the manner of the request. If he said something like, “would you like to devote two afternoons a week to taking juvenile delinquents somewhere and suffering greatly to help them”, he got 2/3 saying no. But then, he’d ask them a second time: “Could you take these underprivileged children to the zoo for just one afternoon?”, his compliance rate increased to 50%. Ask for a lot and back off, but people are expected to help out

contrast-caused distortions of sensation, perception and cognition : Practical example: Real estate agent takes you to two crummy houses before taking you to a third average house, which now looks amazing. You fall in love with the average house.

Another example: experiment includes three buckets of water (one hot, one cold, one room temperature). Stick your hand into the hot, it feels hot. Now stick the other hand in the cold, feels cold. Now take both and stick it in the lukewarm water. Each hand reverses its feeling, even though the water is neutral.

Bias from deprival, super-reaction syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity (Moving People’s Cheese) - This one is well known.. It just has an awesomely complicated name. Or, said in another way: moving people’s cheese. Good example: New Coke.

You can also positively motivate people by making them believe they are missing out on something (artificial scarcity); it’s the same effect.

[Dis]like Distortion – Liking a decision because you made it, or someone you like made it, or the reverse: disliking a decision because you dislike the person who made it. One example of decisions influenced by this: consultants recommendation is to hire more consultants!

Stress-induced mental changes – Remember Pavlov’s dogs? Well, a flood hit the lab while they were still cages. So the water rises, and these dogs nearly drown. With their little snouts just barely getting air someone walks into the lab and raises a bunch of them, saving them. He found that for many of the dogs, the learned behavior had been erased.

...these are just a small sampling, and in real-world applications, these factors combine with many others. Rarely in any given situation do just one of these factors play a role; rather, it is many at once.

Consider a story told by Procter & Gamble Chairman A.G. Lafley about his own learning while working on the Tide brand in the 1980s:

“Every year consumers would rate the Tide powder cardboard package as excellent; excellent to shop; excellent for opening; excellent in use — on, on, on. So, I’m in basements in Tennessee, in Kentucky, doing loads of laundry with women, and after three or four or five of these one-on-one sessions, I’ve realized that not a single woman has opened a box of Tide with her hands.

Why not? How do you open a box of detergent? Why don’t you open the box of detergent with your hands? You’ll break your fingernails! You’re not going to subject those nails to a box of laundry detergent. So, how did they open the box? They had nail files; they had screw drivers; they had all kinds of things sitting down on the shelf over their washing machine, and they thought our package was excellent! And you know what? We thought our package was excellent because they were telling us our package was excellent.”

Being familiar with some of these psychological influences is half the battle. Once you know you’re there, what can you do to help overcome them?

You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options. So … Widen Your Options. How can you expand your sent of choices? …

How do you widen your options?
More options increase odds of making successful decision. “Thumbs up or down” decisions (yes or no) decrease odds of success.
Research suggest adding 1 additional option results in a decision being 6X more likely to be successful according to Heath

2. You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information. So … Reality-Test Your Assumptions. How can you get outside your head and collect information you can trust? …

3. You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one. So … Attain Distance Before Deciding. How can you overcome short-term emotion and conflicted feelings to make better choices? …
Sleep on it
Consider 10/10/10 (Think of implications 10 minutes, 10 months, 10 years from now)
- For business decisions ask yourself, “What would your successor do?”

4. Then you live with it. But you’ll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold. So … Prepare to Be Wrong. How can we plan for an uncertain future so that we give our decisions the best chance to succeed? …

...leading into this idea of being wrong, we have a great quote from Tim Cook on Steve Jobs [insert groan here...]

“More so than any person I ever met in my life, he had the ability to change his mind…. He could be so sold on a certain direction and in a nanosecond (Cook snaps his fingers) have a completely different view. (Laughs.) I thought in the early days, “Wow, this is strange.” Then I realized how much of a gift it was. So many people, particularly, I think, CEOs and top executives, they get so planted in their old ideas, and they refuse or don’t have the courage to admit that they’re now wrong. Maybe the most underappreciated thing about Steve was that he had the courage to change his mind.”

3. You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one. So … Attain Distance Before Deciding. How can you overcome short-term emotion and conflicted feelings to make better choices? …
Sleep on it
Consider 10/10/10 (Think of implications 10 minutes, 10 months, 10 years from now)
- For business decisions ask yourself, “What would your successor do?”

Nobody's Got Time for That: The Case for Making Time for Creative Culture

Nobody's Got Time for That: The Case for Making Time for Creative Culture