Making good decisions has never been easy. Company-, team- or even individual’s results are depending on it. Making good decisions is also an opportunity to improve relationships between people and move processes forward.
In recent decades, we have been accustomed to a constant acceleration of many elements:
- The power of processors has evolved exponentially, resulting in a substantial increase in computing and telecommunication capacities.
- The constant fluctuation of stock prices on the stock markets has increased the complexity of many professions.
- The tendency of our young people (generations Y and Z) to favour instantaneity (Texto, instant messaging, Facebook, Twitter…) has opened new horizons.
- The ever-growing flow of information unloaded by our media’s and social media’s and the always easier and cheaper access to the Internet has multiplied by 10, 100, 1000 the number of sources of informations… and errors!
As a consequence, we have been confronted with a fast-growing number of situations to assess, analyse, understand, solve…
Conclusion, we have indeed entered an era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, the VUCA world.
Developed by the US military in the mid-1990s, this concept was designed to ensure territorial security while avoiding exposing military personnel, nationals and civilians to conflict on the ground. Interventions had to be quick and well targeted in order to limit collateral damage and troop stagnation. It was all about fast decisions in an uncertain and ever-changing world.
In our societies, leaders are beginning to understand that they must and will have to make more and more decisions in ever shorter periods of time, under conditions of increasing uncertainty and volatility. The need to modify strategies along the way, making planning complicated and analyzing many variables, will become essential to discover new paths.
If today’s leaders and those of tomorrow do not question themselves, there will come a time when, pushed to make a quick decision in an emergency situation, they will make errors of judgment and generate imperfect, even bad decisions with consequences for all segments of society.
In addition to that, we, human beings, are constantly subjected to a multitude of cognitive biases, even if we avoid emergency situations. These shortcuts of the mind make us see the world in a way that is not necessarily realistic, make us make wrong decisions and generate inappropriate actions.
In short, they make us even less rational. Even less because we are emotional « entities » sometimes becoming rational and not the contrary.
Let’s take the example of the illusion of transparency which leads a person in a negotiation to believe that his interlocutors read in him as in a book, which provokes in him a desire to close himself during the discussions. In doing so, it projects a sense of closure on others and encourages them to redouble their efforts to obtain information or even to use aggression. The self-fulfilling prophecy, another trap, can then take over and send a message of confirmation of the need for closure (« I was right to keep the information to myself, they do everything to try to tear it away from me ».)
The anchoring bias widely run into in negotiation, anchors the psychology of other negotiators in our data system; the framing bias, essential to understand how to present our projects and offers; the confirmation bias pushing us to find what demonstrates our theses and projects, the illusion of control causing irrational decisions, forgetting the base frequency, making us forget statistics… are some important examples, not to mention « overconfidence » and the « halo effect ». Risk and loss aversion are common mind traps too. Recency and primacy also play important roles in daily situations…
And this is true in many areas: finance, business, sport, music, news, training, coaching….
Unfortunately, knowing them all (hundreds of them), understanding how they all work, being aware of their (sometimes) heavy consequences, won’t guarantee we won’t fall into these traps. They act below the surface of consciousness. Therefore, the key to avoid or to bypass them, lies much more in others than in us.
Here are a few idea’s we can use in order to decrease their impact on decisions:
- Ask people around you to challenge your plans, theses, hypotheses…
- Actively gather information from sources contesting yours
- Don’t decide in a hurry, if possible
- Don’t consider 100 people thinking the same way are necessarily right
- Verify expert’s « assertions » and check in particular if they are related to their zone of expertise
- Allow yourself the right to withdraw a proposal, reconsider a decision, cancel an action
In the same way, we are subject to multiple influences on a daily basis. More than ever, we live in a world where others continuously want us to do things that we would not have done spontaneously. If hierarchical power, held by only a handful of people, enables them to pressure others, everyone else has to use tools, techniques and methods in order to make their cases.
It is therefore not surprising that human beings have invented so many strategies, often used without agreement and without others being aware of them. In this range of influences to which we are subjected on a daily basis, how can we distinguish between what is benevolent and what is not, what is beneficial to us and what harms us (or does not benefit us), what improves situations and what makes them worse off? And when we diagnose such cases, how should we react?
What if we had a better understanding of how marketers, advertisers, canvassers, our bosses, colleagues, neighbours and even family members are trying to make us act, push us to choose, to decide? Being well informed, using critical thinking and using assertiveness are real answers to manipulation: benevolent (the intention is to improve the target’s situation), selfish (the intention is to improve own’s situation whatever happens to the target) and malicious (the intention is to make the target’s situation worse off, to destroy him/her).
The purpose will be to diagnose, recognise, understand and react to as many manipulations as possible. Hereunder a few examples of selfish ones:
- Bait & switch
- Fear & relief
- The door-in-the-face
- The foot-in-the-door
- Making feel guilty
- Victimisation
- The illusion of freedom
- Labelling others
- Flattery
- Contrast
- Lies & deception
- …
Here are a few idea’s we can use in order to decrease their impact even if we will need more than 1 other article to cover this topic:
- Increase your knowledge: learn what they are and how they work
- Ask one out of the following questions :what does the interlocutor want from me specifically? What does the interlocutor want me to accomplish?
- Answer one out of the following questions: do I need/want it? Now? Who wins what and when? Would I do it without interaction with others? What if I said « no »?
- Refuse to be or become his/her accomplice (your own persecutor).
Living in a world where numerous decisions need to be made in less and less time, combined with the effect of our cognitive biases and the manipulation we are the target of, will increase the number of errors.
It would be unthinkable to leave it at that! We must find « reliable partners », people involved in the decisions to be made and to whom we will entrust specific missions aimed at opening debates and challenging our information and ideas. In summary, a « new operating procedure », a decision-making strategy.
This strategy should include the systematic « devil’s advocate » approach (in the sense of De Bono’s 6 hats). The Black Hat, which will consist in explicitly giving this role to people with the sole aim of « challenging » any project, plan or decision. The purpose is manyfold: escape the confirmation bias, escape groupthink and the availability bias among others.
The Pre-Mortem approach, as explained by Gary Klein in his book « The Power of Intuition », which allows new ideas to be generated before decisions are made, will be another approach. The main benefit lies in the discovery of additional causes of failure and thenceforth, allows to strengthen plans, projects and decisions.
Establishing check lists is another important idea. Surgeons, pilots, operators in a power plant are just a few examples of people using them daily, fortunately for patients, passengers and users.
Let us not kid ourselves: we will have to go through it. So why not now?
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