Mapping the terrain of a hard choice is usually the first step we take in making a decision. We chart the participants who will be involved in the decision and its aftermath—in Washington’s case, the rival military forces of the British and Revolutionary armies. We model the physical or situational forces that shape the interactions between the participants: the topography of Long Island and Manhattan, the weather, the range of the cannons at Fort Clinton. We take stock of the mental or emotional states that will likely shape the behavior of the key players: the fading morale of the underpaid and ill-prepared American troops, the willingness of General Howe to make a surprise attack. With hard choices, these maps almost by definition must be full spectrum in their scope. Washington’s choice required that he consider the individual psychology of Howe, the collective emotional state of his men, the technological prowess of the weapons under his possession, the growing physical threat from the camp fever that had felled Nathanael Greene, the mandate to protect New York delivered to him by the Continental Congress, the financial pressures of a military force with no sovereign power wealthy enough to fund it, and the broader historical currents of the conflict between the former colonies and England itself.
Washington’s choice at the Battle of Brooklyn had a magnitude that most group decisions rarely possess: There were thousands of lives at stake, not to mention the precarious life of a new nation. But the mental map he had to construct was not so different from the kind of map we build in our heads when confronting more mundane decisions. They are both trying to model multivariable systems across the full spectrum of experience, ranging from the inner emotional life of our colleagues to the geography of the community that surrounds us, and from our political worldview or religious beliefs to the mundane realities of financial limitations or opportunities. Like any form of navigation, the best way to start on the journey of a hard choice is to have a good map as your guide. But mapping is not the same as deciding. What the map should ultimately reveal is a set of potential paths, given the variables at play in the overall system. Figuring out which path to take requires other tools.
In this sense, mapping is the point in the decision process where divergence and diversity are key. You are not looking for consensus in this phase; you are looking to expand the range of possible factors (and, ultimately, decision paths). The challenge of mapping is getting outside our intuitive sense of the situation in front of us. Our minds naturally gravitate to narrowband interpretations, compressing the full spectrum down into one dominant slice. Cognitive scientists sometimes call this anchoring. When facing a decision that involves multiple, independent variables, people have a tendency to pick one “anchor” variable and make their decision based on that element. The anchors vary depending on the values you bring to the decision: in the aisles of a grocery store, some shoppers anchor on price, others on known brands, others on nutritional value, others on environmental impact. Compressing the spectrum turns out to be a perfectively adaptive strategy in a world characterized by an abundance of micro-choices. You don’t want to build a complex, full-spectrum map for every item you buy at the supermarket. But for decisions that may reverberate for years, it makes sense to expand our perspective.
Decision theorists have developed a tool for sketching out these kinds of full-spectrum choices: influence diagrams. Diagramming a complex decision using these visual tools can help elucidate the true complexity of the issue. Influence diagrams are widely used in environmental-impact studies, precisely the kind of analysis that was so sorely lacking in the decision to fill Collect Pond. They help us visualize the chain of effects—sometimes called impact pathways—that inevitably follow hard choices.
Imagine a group of time-traveling environmental planners had arrived in Manhattan circa 1800 and sketched out an influence diagram of the dilemma the city faced in its debate over the future of Collect Pond. A simple version would have probably looked something like this:
Note how even a simple diagram like this shows the connections that link a wide range of factors: from biological microorganisms to real estate markets, from disease outbreaks to the structural failure of buildings. Without a clear vision of the future effects that would ripple out from the decision to fill the pond, the decision might seem to be a clear choice between two competing value systems: pro-nature versus pro-economic development. You can have a lovely park with clean water and wildlife enjoying a natural oasis in the middle of the bustling city, or you can fill in the pond and create new housing stock to shelter the city’s growing population, making some money for the real estate developers along the way. But the impact pathways rarely run in straight lines. The destruction of Collect Pond might create a short-term economic boost with the construction of new housing, but long-term, the creation of a park might result in more economic benefit, as the price of an apartment on Central Park West will testify.
No one bothered to sketch out an influence diagram before the city filled in Collect Pond, because we simply didn’t have the conceptual tools to imagine the decision in those terms two centuries ago. But today we do, and those tools are used every day in planning decisions around the world, with material benefits that we rarely pause to appreciate.
Just a few miles northeast of Jamaica Pass, not far from the present-day neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens, the largest lake in all of New York City—known as Meadow Lake—lies between the parallel arteries of the Grand Central Parkway and the Van Wyck Expressway. Originally a salt marsh, the lake took its modern form during the construction of the 1939 World’s Fair, but in recent decades, during warm months of the year, a thick coating of yellow-green algae covered the lake, depleting oxygen levels and posing health risks to both fish and humans interacting with the water. In 2014, inspired by their success at revitalizing the rivers that surround Manhattan island, a group of city and state agencies decided to turn their focus to the city’s lakes. Restoring Meadow Lake to conditions that would be healthy for both wildlife and human recreation forced them to sketch out the impact pathways that had created the algae bloom in the first place and to contemplate the potential effects of making changes to those pathways. They discovered that a 1992 EPA regulation had compelled the city to add phosphate to the drinking water—some of which fed Meadow Lake—in an effort to reduce the lead levels in the city’s water supply. The phosphate functioned as a key nutrient supporting the algae superbloom on the lake’s surface. Storm-water runoff from nearby highways was also bringing nitrogen into the lake, accelerating the bloom. Even coal from nearby barbecues was finding its way into the water.
In the end, the city decided to filter out those algae-supporting nutrients by restoring part of the lake to its original form, with wetlands plants lining the eastern shore and serving as a natural filtration system that removes the phosphates and nitrogen before they can fuel the algae superbloom. (The city also built a landscaped “bioswale” that collects the highway runoff before it reaches the lake.) The result has been a transformed habitat for both human recreation and for the formerly oxygen-starved fish that swim in the lake. Just a few years ago, a new boat-rental concession opened on the northern edge of the lake, and today you can see New Yorkers kayaking and enjoying paddleboat rides on clear water all summer long.
Restoring Meadow Lake required a full-spectrum map to make sense of the problem and to decide on a path for solving it. It forced the planners to think on the scale of individual molecules of nitrogen and phosphate. It forced them to think about the nutrient cycles of blue-green algae, the oxygen needs of fish swimming in the lake, the transportation corridors of urban highways, and the casual pollution caused by human beings grilling burgers on a summer weekend. It was a complicated map to draw, but not an impossible one. And it was the kind of map that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. You can be sure Robert Moses wasn’t thinking about blue-green algae and nitrogen runoff when he was building Grand Central Parkway and the Van Wyck. Today we can make maps with that fu
ll-spectrum sensitivity to the system we are altering. Those kayakers on Meadow Lake are likely unaware of this advance; all they know is that the water looks a lot cleaner than it did a few years ago. But behind that surface transformation lies a much more profound advance in our ability to make farsighted decisions in environmental planning. We make better decisions because we can see across a much wider spectrum.
DIVERSITY
Every farsighted decision has its own unique map, of course, and the art of making those choices with as much wisdom as possible lies not in forcing that map to match some existing template, but instead in developing the kind of keen vision required to see the situation as it truly is. And the best way to develop that vision is to get different pairs of eyes on the problem.
A few years ago, the water authority in the Greater Vancouver region faced a decision not unlike the one that confronted the citizens of New York two hundred years ago as to the fate of Collect Pond. A growing urban population meant that the region’s existing freshwater sources were not going to be able to meet demand in the coming years. New sources would have to be tapped, with inevitable impact on local environment, commerce, and communities. The city’s home in the rainy Pacific Northwest gave it the luxury of many potential options: three reservoirs could be expanded, new pipelines could be built to a number of distant lakes, or wellfields could be drilled along one prominent river. Like filling or preserving Collect Pond, this was a decision whose consequences would likely persist for more than a century. (Water from the Capilano River, for instance, was first delivered to Vancouver residents in the late 1800s, and continues to be a major water source for the city.) But this decision began with an earnest attempt to model all the important variables from a full-spectrum perspective. It built that model by consulting a wide range of stakeholders, each contributing a different perspective on the problem at hand: local residents living near each of the water sources being considered; indigenous people with sacred ties to the land being surveyed; environmental activists and conservationists; health and water-safety regulators; even local citizens who used the various bodies of water for boating, fishing, or other water sports. Stakeholders evaluated each option for its impact on a wide range of variables: “aquatic habitat, terrestrial habitat, air quality, visual quality, employment, recreation, traffic and noise, and property values.”
The approach taken by the Vancouver Water Authority has become commonplace in many important land use and environmental planning deliberations. The techniques used to bring those different voices together vary depending on the methodologies embraced by the planners (or the consultants they have hired to help run the process). But they share a core attribute: a recognition that mapping a decision as complex as establishing new sources of drinking water for a metropolitan center requires a network of diverse perspectives to generate anything resembling an accurate map of the problem. The most common term for this kind of collaborative deliberation is a “charrette.” The word derives from the French word for wagon; apparently architecture students at the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1800s would deposit their scale models and drawings in a small wagon that would be wheeled out to collect student submissions as the deadline for a project approached. Students making last-minute tweaks to their projects were said to be working en charrette—adding the finishes touches as the wagon made its rounds. In its modern usage, though, the design charrette does not refer to a last-minute cram session, but rather to an open, deliberative process where different stakeholders are invited to critique an existing plan, or suggest new potential ideas for the space or resource in question. The charrette makes it harder for a complex decision to be evaluated purely from the narrowband perspective of a single business group or government agency.
One way in which charrettes differ from the more traditional forum of a community board meeting is that they conventionally take the form of a series of small-group meetings, not one large gathering. Keeping the groups separate reduces the potential for open conflict between groups that have competing values, of course, but it also generates a more diverse supply of ideas and assessments in the long run. “To derive the most useful information from multiple sources of evidence,” Daniel Kahneman advises, “you should always try to make these sources independent of each other. This rule is part of good police procedure. When there are multiple witnesses to an event, they are not allowed to discuss it before giving their testimony. The goal is not only to prevent collusion by hostile witnesses, it is also to prevent unbiased witnesses from influencing each other.” In situations where small-group separation is not possible, Kahneman suggests using another technique to preserve the full range of potential ideas: “Before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.”
In fact, the practical applications of “group” decision-making can sometimes be usefully broken down into a series of individual consultations. As legal scholar Cass Sunstein and others have observed, groups often possess a rich mix of information distributed among their members, but when they actually gather together in person, they tend to focus on shared information. As Sunstein writes:
Some group members are cognitively central, in the sense that their personal knowledge is also held by many other group members. What the cognitively central members know, other people know as well. A cognitively central group member is thus defined as one who possesses information in common with all or most group members. By contrast, other group members are cognitively peripheral; their own information is uniquely held. What they know is known by no one else, and what they may know might be really important. For that very reason, well-functioning groups need to take advantage of cognitively peripheral people. These people are especially significant. But in most groups, cognitively central people have a disproportionate influence in discussion and participate more in group deliberations. By contrast, cognitively peripheral people end up having little influence and participate less, often to the group’s detriment.
Something about the bonding environment of a face-to-face meeting seems to elicit a borderline unconscious response in humans to discuss elements that are commonly known to other members of the group, either because individuals like the feeling of consensus, or because they worry about being perceived as some kind of outsider if they reveal information not shared by most of the other members. If you don’t design the decision process to expose this crucial unshared information—the technical term for it, coined by the psychologists Garold Stasser and William Titus, is hidden profiles—the primary benefit of consulting with a wide range of people will be lost. In the divergent stage of a decision, the stage where you’re trying to assemble the most full-spectrum map of the situation at hand, the best approach may well be a series of interviews with individuals, not a team meeting. In those one-on-one conversations, the power of the “cognitively central” in-group disappears; people just know what they know, and thus are more likely to share that valuable piece of information unknown to the rest of the group.
Whether you build your map through a series of small group sessions or individual interviews, the most important element is the diversity of perspectives you assemble. The very act of diversifying the group clearly improves its decision-making abilities. The power of diversity is so strong that it appears to apply even when the diverse perspectives being added to the group have no relevant expertise to the case at hand. When the Vancouver Water Authority assembled its network of stakeholders to help make the decision about new sources of drinking water, it was laudable that they integrated feedback from stakeholders like water sports enthusiasts and indigenous peoples. But they would have also been able to improve their decision-making process simply by inviting feedback from random peopl
e who had no connection to Vancouver—as long as the backgrounds and expertise of those newcomers differed significantly from the original decision-makers at the water authority itself. Just the presence of difference appears to make a difference.
The connection between diversity and improvements in the collective IQ of a group has been demonstrated by hundreds of experiments over the past few decades. The social scientist Scott E. Page refers to this as the “diversity trumps ability” theory of group decision-making. But the way in which the presence of diverse viewpoints improves our judgment turns out to be more complicated than one would initially suspect. The conventional assumption was that newcomers to a previously homogeneous group improved the overall intelligence by bringing new ideas or values to the discussion, and indeed, in some cases, that kind of outside perspective did improve the group’s overall intellect. But a number of studies have shown that the addition of “outsiders” to a homogeneous group also helps the “insiders” come up with more nuanced and original insights on their own.
A number of these studies revolve around simulated versions of one of the most important public decisions any of us will ever make: jury verdicts. 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, they remembered information about the case more accurately, and they engaged in the deliberation process with more rigor and persistence. Homogeneous groups—whether they are united by ethnic background, gender, or some other worldview like politics—tend to come to decisions too quickly. They settle early on a most-likely scenario, and don’t spend the energy to question their assumptions, since everyone at the table seems to agree with the broad outline of the interpretation. But Sommers found that the mere presence of non-whites in the jury room made the white jurors more contemplative and open to other possible interpretations. Just the idea that there were diverse perspectives in the room helped the group build more accurate maps.
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