Read the NYT article below and post your responses to the
following questions in this discussion thread.
·
what you agree with the author on?
·
what you disagree (if any)?
·
how do you see examples of this in real life?
In July 1838, Charles Darwin, then 29, sat down to make a
decision that would alter the course of his life. The decision he was wrestling
with was not related to scientific questions about the origins of species. It
was a different kind of decision existential as well, but of a more personal
nature: Should he get married?
Darwins method for making this decision would be recognizable
to many of us today: He made a list of pros and cons. Under the heading not
marry he noted the benefits of remaining a bachelor, including conversation
of clever men at clubs; under marry he included children (if it please
God) and charms of music and female chitchat.
Even if some of Darwins values seem dated, the journal
entry is remarkable for how familiar it otherwise feels. Almost two centuries
later, even as everything else in the world has changed, the pros-versus-cons
list remains perhaps the only regularly used technique for adjudicating a
complex decision. Why hasnt the science of making hard choices evolved?
In fact, it has, but its insights have been
underappreciated. Over the past few decades, a growing multidisciplinary field
of research spanning areas as diverse as cognitive science, management theory
and literary studies has given us a set of tools that we can use to make
better choices. When you face a complex decision that requires a long period of
deliberation, a decision whose consequences might
last for years or even decades, you are no longer limited to
Darwins simple list.
None of these new tools, of course, provide solutions to the
decisions you face. They are prompts, hacks, nudges. Theyre intended to help you
see the current situation from new perspectives, to imagine new possibilities,
to weigh your options with more sophistication. There is no foolproof algorithm
for lifes difficult choices. But the research shows that you can get better at
making them.
One important insight that has emerged from this research is
the importance of generating alternatives to any course of action you are
considering. In the early 1980s, a business school professor named Paul Nutt
set out to catalog real-world decisions the way a botanist might catalog the
various types of vegetation growing in a rain forest. In his initial study,
published in 1984, he analyzed 78 decisions made
by senior managers at a range of public and private
organizations in the United States and Canada: insurance companies, government
agencies, hospitals, consulting firms.
The most striking finding in Professor Nutts research was
this: Only 15 percent of the decisions he studied involved a stage where the
decision makers actively sought out a new option beyond the initial choices on
the table. In a later study, he found that only 29 percent of organizational
decision makers considered more than one alternative.
This turns out to be a bad strategy. Over the years,
Professor Nutt and other researchers have demonstrated a strong connection
between the number of alternatives considered and the ultimate success of the
decision itself. In one of his studies, Professor Nutt found that participants
who considered only one alternative ultimately judged their decision a failure
more than 50 percent of the time, while decisions that involved contemplating
at least two alternatives were felt to be successes two-thirds of the time.
The upshot is clear: If you find yourself mapping a whether
or not question, looking at a simple fork in the road, youre almost always
better off turning it into a which one question that gives you more available
paths.
Whats the best way to expand your pool of options?
Researchers suggest that if possible, you diversify the group of people who are
helping make the decision. About a decade ago, the social psychologist Samuel
Sommers conducted a series of mock trials in which a jury debated and evaluated
evidence from a sexual assault case. Some of the juries were entirely white,
while other juries were more diverse in
their racial makeup. By almost every important metric, the
racially mixed juries performed better at their task. They considered more
potential interpretations of the evidence, remembered information about the
case more accurately and engaged in the deliberation process with more rigor
and persistence.
Homogeneous groups whether they are united by ethnic
background, gender or some other commonality like politics tend to come to
decisions too quickly. They settle early on a most-likely scenario and dont
question their assumptions, since everyone at the table seems to agree with the
broad outline of the interpretation.
A 2008 study led by the management professo
r Katherine
Phillips using a similar investigative structure revealed an additional,
seemingly counterintuitive finding: While the more diverse groups were better
at reaching the truth, they were also far less confident in the decisions they
made. They were both more likely to be right and, at the same time, more open
to the idea that they might be wrong.
Once you have your alternatives, how are you supposed to
assess them? One approach, known as scenario planning, developed by a handful
of management consultants in the 1970s, involves imagining three different
future environments for each alternative: Concoct one story where things get
better, one where they get worse, and one where they get weird.
Storytelling is something we instinctively do anytime we are
contemplating a big decision. If youre thinking of leaving the city and moving
to the suburbs, you tell a story of family hikes through the trails behind your
house, and better public schools, and a garden that you can tend in your
backyard. The difference with formal scenario planning is twofold: First, we
rarely take the time to do a deep
analysis of all the forces that shape that story; and
second, we rarely bother to construct multiple stories. How does the story
unfold if your children dont like their new classmates, or if one part of the
family loves the new lifestyle but the other is homesick for the old friends
and vitality of city life?
The psychologist Gary Klein has developed a variation on
this technique. He calls it a premortem. As the name suggests, the approach
is a twist on the medical procedure of post-mortem analysis. In a post-mortem,
the subject is dead, and the coroners job is to figure out the cause of death.
In a premortem, the sequence is reversed: Our exercise, Dr. Klein explains,
is to ask planners to imagine that it is months into the future and that their
plan has been carried out. And it has failed. That is all they know; they have
to explain why they think it failed.
In Dr. Kleins experience, the premortem has proved to be a
much more effective way to tease out the potential flaws in a decision. A whole
range of bad cognitive habits from groupthink to confirmation bias tends to
blind us to the potential pitfalls of a decision once we have committed to it.
It isnt enough to simply ask yourself, Are there any flaws here in this plan
that Im missing? By forcing yourself to imagine scenarios where the decision
turned out to be a disastrous one, you can think your way around those blind
spots and that false sense of confidence.
Once you have done all this, there comes a point where you
actually have to decide. In some cases, working through the initial phases of
making a decision will lead to a clear winner. But if the decision is still a
difficult one, the final phase can be completed with the help of something
called a value model a more nuanced and powerful version of the pro and cons
list.
First, write down a list of the values that are most
important to you. Think back to Darwins choice of whether to marry. His values
included freedom, companionship, the clever conversation of men at clubs and
having children. Next, give each of those values a weight, a numerical
measure of its importance to you. In the most mathematical version of this
approach, you give each value a weight somewhere between 0 and 1. If the clever
conversation is not so important to you, you might give it a .25, while the
prospect of having children, if its something you greatly value, might get a
.90.
With the values weighted, you then turn to the scenarios
youve developed for each of the options on the table. You grade each option in
terms of how it addresses each of your core values, on a scale of 1 to 100.
Remaining a bachelor scores very poorly on the having children value, but to
Darwin, at least, it scores better on the clever conversation front.
Once youve established those grades for each scenario, you
then do some elemental math: Multiply each grade by the weight of each value
and add up the numbers for each scenario. The scenario with the highest score
wins.
The ultimate limitation of the pros and cons list is that we
are merely transcribing our existing understanding of the decision at hand and
not seeing it with fresh eyes. One thing a person cannot do, no matter how
rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, the economist and Nobel
laureate Thomas Schelling once observed, is to draw up a list of things that
would never occur to him.
And yet hard choices require us to make those kinds of
imaginative leaps: to discover new paths and outcomes that had not been visible
to us when we first started wrestling with the decision. It is the nature of
complex decisions that they are all unique constellations of variables. These
new tools simply help us see each constellation more clearly, from fresh angles.