Creating Great Choices

by Jennifer Riel

  This crush-or-cave-in approach has the potential to produce hard feelings that linger long after the discussion. Once we have publicly expressed a preference for a particular option, it is hard socially and cognitively to reverse course. It means losing face in front of colleagues, and it produces cognitive dissonance: an uncomfortable feeling of our own inconsistency.

  So organizations have found a way to produce consensus with a seemingly more productive methodology. In this case, the different answers are called options. As a team, we lay all the options on the table. And we analyze them. And analyze them. And we figure out all the pros and cons of all the options until we are tired of talking about it and feel ever less enthusiastic about every one of the options.

  The Least-Worst Option

  Sometimes, at this point, we choose the single option that is least destroyed by the process of analysis (what Roger calls the “least-worst” option). We choose one option and move on. Often, though, we start to recognize that none of the options is quite good enough, that no single option really solves the problem, and that there are now significant political factions aligned with the respective options. If we choose one, we won’t really solve the problem, and we’ll have a revolt on our hands from the losing factions. So we smoosh a few options together, taking the good and bad and producing a relatively miserable compromise with which no one is really satisfied—but at least no one will kill anyone else at the end of the meeting.

  No wonder the results of our typical choice-making processes tend to be mediocre. When there is a great choice there for the taking, we take it. But often, we struggle in the face of opposing models, trade-offs, and interpersonal conflict. We seek consensus but wind up with suboptimal compromises and low-grade dissatisfaction. This is one reason many people loathe the idea of reaching consensus. It typically is painful and moreover rarely results in a great choice.

  A Better Process

  To produce better decisions, we need a better process. We need a way of thinking through and creating choices that mitigates, rather than amplifies, the effects of our deeply held mental models and biases. One key step in doing that is to explicitly consider opposing solutions, exploring deeply divergent possibilities for solving the problem. In part, this approach is about challenging the notion that there is a single right answer. It is also about using conflict purposefully, thereby enriching our understanding of the problem and expanding the possibilities for its resolution.

  This is an approach that Peter Drucker wrote about fifty years ago. In his book The Effective Executive, Drucker writes at length about decision making, arguing that it is a central executive task. An effective decision maker, he says, focuses on the most important decisions, works to achieve deep conceptual understanding, and isn’t overly impressed by speed. Drucker also points to a particular idiosyncrasy of effective decision makers, writing that “the understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash of divergent opinions and out of serious consideration of the competing alternatives.”20 Effective decision makers, he says, disregard conventional wisdom about consensus and instead work to create disagreement and dissention. As an example, Drucker points to Alfred P. Sloan, former CEO of General Motors.

  Sloan is reported to have said at a meeting of one of his top committees: “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.” Everyone around the table nodded assent. “Then,” continued Mr. Sloan, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”21

  Sloan, Drucker says, “knew that the right decision demands adequate disagreement.” In other words, he knew that it is in the tension between competing ideas that we come to understand the true nature of a problem and start to see possibilities for a creative answer.

  Clearly, no one process can totally overcome our cognitive biases and unproductive heuristics. Being aware of biases may help, to some degree. But the greatest impact on our decision-making outcomes will come from adopting a process that recognizes these unhelpful glitches and designs around them purposefully.

  In other words, as long as we accept the world as it is given to us, see our job as finding the right answer, and set about the task of getting others to buy in, we will tend to have increasing numbers of bad decisions. We will tend to make compromises, taking a bit of the good and a bit of the bad in existing choices. We will tend to accept suboptimal trade-offs.

  To change this outcome, we need a different path to creating the world around us, to generating new, superior answers, and to building genuine alignment. We need a process that does more than recognize the dangers of our implicit mental models, deep-seated cognitive biases, and unfortunate decision-making patterns. We need a process that provides new tools to make thinking explicit, helps us understand how others see the world differently, and gives us room to create great choices. These three principles of a better decision-making process—metacognition, empathy, and creativity—are the subject of chapter 3.

  Chapter 3

  A New Way to Think

  If you could read my mind love what a tale my thoughts could tell.

  —GORDON LIGHTFOOT

  In 2015, as part of our work at the Martin Prosperity Institute, we conducted a series of interviews with middle-class Americans. Our desire was to gain insights into what it is like to live in America today by talking to individuals from many walks of life—a firefighter in Florida, a teacher in North Carolina, a truck driver in Illinois, a corporate trainer in Utah, and so on. For several hours, via Skype, we sat with each person and listened to stories about their lives.

  As part of interview preparation, we asked participants to select an artifact—an object that represented, for them, what it means to be an American. Many of the artifacts were what you might expect: there were quite a few footballs and flags, family mementos, a graduation photo, and a business card. And then, from a city in the Midwest, we interviewed a young hairdresser with a warm smile and great highlights.

  Kelli, as we’ll call her, started the interview by saying that she would only participate if we could promise her that nothing she said would be twisted to reflect poorly on America. She was proud to be an American, she explained, and she worried that her words might be used to make her country look bad. We reassured her, she visibly relaxed, and we continued with the interview. After a short introduction, our colleague Quinn Davidson asked Kelli to share her artifact.

  “I’m going to warn you that it’s a little cliché,” Kelli said. “But there’s a deeper-rooted meaning behind it. So, before you make any judgments . . .” A pause, as she reached behind the camera. “Here, I have my hunting rifle. I know, cliché, cliché.” She brandished a shiny .30-06 gun.

  Suppressing an urge to duck and run, we pressed on. “Say more,” Jennifer prompted, honestly expecting to hear a spirited defense of the right to bear arms.

  Kelli continued, “I thought about it, and it took me half a second to decide what artifact really made me feel like an American. Yes, I’m a gun-toting American, but there’s so much more to it than that.” She smiled. “There’s so much conflict going on right now in America about gun rights and gun laws. I think it’s amazing to live in a country that lets you say how you feel about it. In America, we have freedom of speech, the freedom to say how we feel about things. Some countries don’t have that.”

  She went on to explain that she was well aware that her right to speak her mind came to be only because so many women before her had spoken theirs. “I just think that that’s so amazing. And I think it’s what it means to be American: having a conflict and having a lot of people speak their mind about it.”

  In short, what we had expected to be a partisan defense of the Second Amendment was actually a thoughtful and reasoned reflection on the First.

  People can surprise you in wonderful ways, but only if you give them the room to do so. Creating ro
om for that understanding, and the empathy that grows from it, is one of three core principles at the heart of a better decision-making process—three elements missing from most decision-making processes based on standard operating procedures. The first principle is that we need better access to our own thinking, as a way to understand our existing mental models and their limitations. This is metacognition. Second, we need a deeper understanding of the thinking of others, an understanding that helps illuminate the gaps in our thinking and provides opportunities for collaboration. This is empathy. And third, we need an imaginative spark, an ability to create new and better answers rather than simply choose between existing options. This is creativity. Taken together, metacognition, empathy, and creativity have the potential to provide the foundation for richer decision making.

  METACOGNITION: THINKING ABOUT OUR OWN THINKING

  The notion of metacognition—the process of thinking about thinking—is very old. Philosophers like Aristotle, Spinoza, and Locke helped lay the groundwork for metacognition as they attempted to explain the nature of the mind. Saint Augustine, more than fifteen hundred years ago, wrote of the mind’s search for its own nature, arguing that the mind that seeks to know itself must already know itself in some sense. At the very least, it knows itself as seeking.1

  So humans have long wanted to understand our own minds. But it wasn’t until the late 1970s that developmental psychologist John Flavell assigned a name to the concept. He defined metacognition as capturing our knowledge about cognition and our regulation of the cognitive process. So metacognition is about understanding our own thinking and controlling that thinking. The concept contains within it both self-awareness and self-control.

  As with virtually any skill, some of us are better than others at metacognition. Whether through explicit training or natural disposition, some people are more able and more inclined to think about their own thinking. But, as with other skills, metacognitive abilities can build over time via repeated practice and actionable feedback. The problem is that few of us have formal practice in metacognition, and we rarely get any kind of feedback on it, even in school. Educators increasingly are understanding the essential role of metacognition in learning and development, but teachers have little room and little incentive to bring it into the classroom. Most countries still have curricula based on the “what” of learning rather than the “how.” Teachers are asked to teach to the curriculum and are incentivized to help students pass standardized tests rather than encouraged to help students learn to learn. So most of us graduate without being taught to reflect on our own thinking in a meaningful way, let alone to use metacognition to improve our thinking and solve problems more effectively over time.

  We’re interested in creating choices. For us, metacognition is essential because it is the way we can understand the nature and limits of our own thinking. This means understanding why and how we believe what we believe. It means being clear not only about our conclusions and our actions but also about the data and reasoning that support them. Thinking about our thinking is challenging, as we’ve noted, because much of our thinking process is automatic, implicit, and abstract. So we need tools and frameworks to help us dive deeply into our own thinking and better access the thinking of others.

  Harvard management theorist Chris Argyris designed one such tool, a concept he called “the ladder of inference” (see figure 3-1).2 In it, he uses a clever metaphor to break down the modeling process into a series of steps on a ladder.

  Figure 3-1. The Ladder of Influence

  Argyris explains that the world is full of data—testable facts that can be directly observed and experienced. But because the pool of data is vast, we have no choice except to select and pay attention to only a portion of it. Each of us selects our data based on our own experiences, needs, and biases—and we do so unconsciously, without being aware of the choices we’re making.

  From that data, we create meaning. We interpret the information, make sense of it, and use logical inferences to come to conclusions and build our models of the world. These conclusions can span a wide range of beliefs: I should quit my job. The Rolling Stones were better than the Beatles. Microsoft is an evil empire. Eating animals is wrong. Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made. The Toronto Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup this year. (OK, maybe not that last one.)

  One critical failing of our existing decision-making processes is that they tend to be conclusion oriented. We argue for the right answer, but we have little incentive to question why or how we believe in it, nor to question our inferences and note gaps in our logic. A superior decision-making process would require that we make our data and reasoning more explicit, to us and to others. It would challenge us to understand the following: How did we reach this conclusion? What data did we select? How did we make sense of it? And where did we make a big leap from concrete data to abstract inference? And how might we make our logic clearer and our conclusions richer?

  In part II of this book, we explore a number of tools for making thinking explicit, but for now we share one quick example from an elementary schoolteacher. Beth Grosso teaches grades 4 and 5 at Central Public School in Hamilton, a traditionally working-class city just southwest of Toronto, Canada. To help her students develop their metacognitive skills, she embraced and extended the ladder of inference and, in particular, the data pool metaphor.

  In her classroom, Grosso turned the pool of data into an ocean that was inhabited by many, many fish. She wrote facts about the world on the fish and placed them around the room. Some were out in plain view, while others were hidden behind plants and under desks. She had the students collect the fish and identify the different conclusions they might reach based on which fish they found. She ensured that some of the most important fish, the ones that helped round out the whole story or that might lead to a radically different conclusion, were the hardest fish to find. For example, the fish might contain facts about a particular student. Some easy-to-find fish facts might be that the student slammed a door, stomped his feet, and put his head down on the desk. From these facts, we might infer that the student is an angry person or has a bad temper; we might conclude that the student should be given a time-out. But if we found a hidden fish that indicated that the “angry” student had been teased at recess, we might instead infer that the student was frustrated and stressed, and conclude that he needs help and advice rather than punishment.

  Grosso’s exercise led to a series of discussions about students’ own “fish”—the data that inform their mental models—which in turn led to a shared recognition of the value of understanding someone else’s thinking as well as your own. Grosso returned to the ocean of data and ladder of inference metaphors over the course of the year until it became second nature to her students to think about the world, and their own thinking, in those terms. As one of Grosso’s students put it, “It’s like a really hard thing, but once you get used to it, it can become easy.”3

  The ladder of inference is a useful conceptual tool for thinking about thinking regardless of context. Working with it can help you gain clearer access to the way you think, setting yourself up for the kind of metacognitive tasks embedded in the integrative thinking process.

  Try This

  Here’s an assignment we often give our university students. Identify one of your strong beliefs (a belief you hold with some conviction, but not one that is so essential to your life that questioning it could produce an existential crisis). Quickly map out a ladder for that belief: your conclusion, your supporting reasoning, and your data. Then go online and research the arguments that support the other side. Build out a ladder for that conclusion. Compare and contrast the two ladders in clarity, logic, and the way they make you feel. Reflect on your own thinking and feelings as you work your way through the process. What do you notice? You’ll find blank templates at the end of the chapter that are helpful for this exercise.

  Metacognition is a critical foundation of successful decision making. To create
great choices, we need a process that enables us—or even forces us—to get clear and explicit about our own reasoning. One of the most important lessons that emerged for Grosso’s students was that making one’s own thinking explicit helps us understand the value of another person’s thinking as well. As we start to understand the gaps and biases inherent in our models of the world, it becomes clear that other people may see something valuable that we do not. The key to finding those fish, and the ladders that we build from them, is to foster meaningful curiosity about, and empathy for, other people.

  EMPATHY: APPRECIATING THE THOUGHTS AND IDEAS OF OTHERS

  Empathy is a powerful thing. It is the act of experiencing things as if we were in another person’s shoes. Empathy isn’t the same thing as liking other people, or being nice to them, or even agreeing with their models of the world. Rather, it’s about genuinely seeking to understand who another person is, what she thinks, and how she feels.

  To understand a bit more about what empathy is (and isn’t), it’s helpful to spend time on the difference between empathy and sympathy. Imagine that a friend tells you her mother has passed away. You might respond with sympathy or with empathy. Sympathy is feeling bad for your friend, feeling sad for her because you would feel sad if your mother passed away. In contrast, empathy requires acknowledging that sadness is only one possible reaction to such a death. Your friend might be angry. Or relieved that her mother’s suffering is over. Or numb. Empathy is asking not how you would feel in the situation, but how your friend actually feels right now, in this moment.