WorkingTypes.com: The PersonaWork Blog: Making Wiser Decisions: Evidence-based Tips

Facing some kind of big decision? College? Career? Marriage? Buying a home? Proud that you’re faithfully following the decision-making advice you learned from your elders — parents, teachers, whatever?

Well, too bad for you!

If those people gave you any advice at all — many times they don’t—it’s likely to be the same simplistic advice that they got from their elders: some folk wisdom whose limitations have been exposed by decades of research on decision-making.

Author Steven Johnson is out to change that. He’s on a crusade to remind parents and teachers and other leaders it’s time for them to upgrade the quality of their advice concerning wise decisions.

In an entertaining, fast-paced interview on NPR’s 1A, Johnson discussed his new book, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most.

The interview and the book provide a basic introduction to modern research on decision-making.

More importantly for the average reader, Johnson shows the practical implications of this research: you’ll see examples ranging from the Navy Seal raid on Osama bin Laden to making decisions about climate change to coming to grips with whether or not to move across the country.

You’ll see why leaders make a mistake when they pay attention to the content of the issues and and fail to bring the decision making process itself to the attention of their teams. When a team jumps right into listing options, the chances of making a wise decision drops dramatically compared to situations wherein a team has high awareness of passing through stages that demand different types of mental activity.

With content like that, the book will give you a chance to develop a decision-making strategy you can apply to a wide range of life issues.

Your Takeaways

The big idea here is that making wiser decisions demands that you pay active attention to the decision-making process itself. Most people jump right into the content of the issues and ignore the procedures they are following when they engage with that content. Research shows this to be a big mistake.

Once you learn to pay attention to the process of making good decisions, you’ll see that there are three important stages in a good decision-making protocol:

Stage 1: Brainstorm the situation and try to view the issue through many different lenses.

Stage 2. Conduct a systematic Premortem. If you are like most people, you never even heard of this.

Stage 3. Evaluate scenarios and let the wisest choice to emerge. Huh? What’s a scenario?

Those are the takeaways. Now let’s look at the details.

What’s Wrong with the Old Advice?

In a nutshell, the customary advice is rooted in a false model of the mind that became popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. It disregards how real people make real decisions. It’s simplistic. A mentor who gives such advice encourages you to follow a procedure that ignores taking time to do big-picture thinking and actually increases your stress rather than reducing it.

Here’s a highly condensed outline of this complex issue:

Tips and common sense advice you learned are probably based on folk wisdom that evolved from the writings of Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin urged his friends to make better decisions by using Pros and Cons lists: take a sheet of paper, divide it into two columns and, for each Pro in the first column, write a Con in the other column. Then weight the merits of each Pro/Con pair. See his letter to Joseph Priestley. The letter endorses a strategy that became known as the “Moral Algebra” strategy.

Moral Algebra became a craze. It was even embraced by the great Charles Darwin, who was paralyzed by ambivalence about whether to settle down and get married or continue to hang out with his buddies at the pub.

So what’s the problem with continuing to hand down Ben’s advice to our children or students or fellow employees?

This model of decision-making overweighted human rationality. Ben’s attempts to quantify aspects of choices made the process look much more objective and precise and rational than it really is.This was a century when capitalism was gaining steam, the scientific method was producing enormous gains in technology and majority of thought-leaders were committed to a vision of man as a rational actor in economies that were believed to be well understood.

Today it is widely recognized that the rational actor model of human nature is false. (See, for example, this short Harvard Business Review article.)

When mentors teach the Pros and Cons list as a good way to make decisions and then leave it at that, learners tend to take for granted that they understand the true nature of their problem. If learners are not warned about the dangers of immediately jumping into binary thinking to resolve their situation, they are likely to make impulsive mistakes just to allay their tensions.

What’s a better way to start the process? Use your imagination!

Johnson isn’t impressed by the Priestley letter nor does he think that teachers and parents should portray the “Moral Algebra” as a good way to arrive at wise decisions.

Instead, Johnson recommends that your first step in confronting a big life problem should be to step back, take a deep breath and start using your imagination rather than work your way through a list of pros and cons. Here’s an outline of things to listen for as you hear the interview:

When facing a big decision in life, it’s wise to assume you don’t really understand the full dimensions of the problem. If your understanding was perfect, you wouldn’t be tied up in knots about what to do!

To make a wiser decision at the end of your efforts, begin by concentrating on reframing the problem facing you! Discuss the problem with a diverse group of people and listen for different takes on the problem.

When people step back and work to define and redefine a problem, their horizons expand and they start to realize they have more possible ways to deal with the problem than they first thought. This is very common.

I’ve seen hundreds of people get their creative juices going by mind mapping the situation they were facing. Have you given some thought to using a happiness map to keep yourself focused on what’s important?

With an expanded list of choices that satisfy your important needs, you’ve given yourself a much better chance of making a wise decision.

What’s a Premortem? Advice for the average reader

Once you’ve finished brainstorming and have a set of alternatives that meet important needs, it’s time to narrow down the range of possibilities.

Johnson once again suggests that you should deploy your imagination to finish the process of making a wise decision. Here he takes the average reader into unknown territory.

For each of your potential alternatives, construct a vision of what your world would look like if you chose that alternative and put that choice into action. Express that vision in the form of a story or scenario.

This will leave you with three kinds of scenarios that illustrate what your world would look like if:

Things got a lot better after that alternative was put into action.
Things didn’t change after that alternative was put into action.
Things got a lot worse afterwards.

This step in the process is often referred to as a premortem exercise. Few people explicitly recognize this as an important phase of a good decision-making procedure. Ironically, teams frequently stumble accidentally towards this kind of activity, especially if there are one or more “difficult people” in the group: as a group moved toward a decision, most people do remember that there was always the guy who constantly brought up all the reasons why a given plan will not work. Since the value of imagining worst-case scenarios as a vital component of good problem solving is not appreciated, teams rarely take creative advantage of it when it happens by accident.

When people are forced to do premortems, they get more creative and develop more choices for themselves. This is especially true when they imagine the ways in which a possible choice could turn into a complete disaster!

Zero in on the Best Alternative

Good alternatives will rise to the top of your list as a natural outcome of scenario development and the emotions and intuitions and value conflicts that those scenarios stimulate.

As you weigh the alternatives, make sure you capitalize on diversity as you consult other people.

Johnson emphasizes the importance of getting input from a diversity of people and groups when you are planning to meet a serious challenge in life.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking “diversity” is simply a matter of sex or race or whatever – these kinds of characteristics are too shallow. You should plan to get input from people with different life experiences and different personalities and different values and, most importantly, different ways of defining the problem.