Creating Great Choices

by Jennifer Riel

  Having empathy isn’t always easy, but we have a bit of a head start, biologically speaking. Elements of empathy appear to be hardwired into our brains through our neurons. A neuron is a nerve cell that processes and transmits information through electrical and chemical signals. We have neurons all over our nervous system, and they come in two types: sensory neurons, which receive stimuli from the world and send signals to different parts of the brain; and motor neurons, which receive signals from different parts of the brain and cause muscles to contract or release so that we can move in certain ways. If we were scanning your brain and you picked up a ball, we’d see neurons fire; certain parts of your brain would activate as the neurons sent and received signals.

  The interesting thing, according to a team led by scientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, is that when I watch you pick up the ball, my brain lights up, too; the same neurons fire in my brain as in yours.4 It is as if I had picked up the ball myself. That is the core idea of empathy: “as if.” I understand your experience as if I were you.

  The existence of these mirror neurons suggests that some basic forms of empathy are automatic. You’ve likely experienced it yourself: your friend tells you a story about making dinner last night. He recounts getting distracted as he was chopping vegetables and feeling the sharp knife slice right into his ring finger. Many of us flinch as we hear that kind of story. We can see the knife or even feel the cut. We have an adrenaline rush as we hear these kinds of stories, especially if they are vivid. Automatic empathy is acting upon us as we listen, binding our experience to that of the storyteller.

  But as we’ve discussed, our higher reasoning processes can interrupt our ability to truly feel empathy for others. Our cognitive biases make it easier to feel empathy for people whom we see as “like us” and harder to feel empathy for members of other groups. It almost goes without saying that this particular bias is the root of a lot of bad behavior in the world. Humans are complex and flawed, so simply relying on automatic empathy impulses isn’t enough to build the kind of sophisticated understanding we need in order to create great choices.

  To create great choices, we need to cultivate controlled empathy—a purposeful and directed attempt to understand others and their experiences. A curiosity about others, and a desire to see the world as they do, is key if we hope to truly collaborate and to leverage a diversity of views. Again, it is not easy, but tools can be extraordinarily helpful. Here, we can learn a lot from the world of design thinking.

  Design thinking begins with seeking to understand. In most cases, for the purpose of designing products or experiences, the unit of study is the end user (typically the potential customer). The design process starts with a deep immersion into this user—his context, behavior, and experiences—in order to understand his needs. The tools designers most often use for generating user understanding and building empathy fall into three broad categories, drawn from the tradition of ethnographic research.

  Observation. This is the process of watching people closely in their natural habitat. In business, observation includes conducting in-home visits with consumers (for instance, to watch how a dad goes about cleaning the house) and observing shopping behaviors (by tagging along or reviewing videos of real shoppers). In no small part, ethnographic observation is about noticing when people do something unexpected, such as hacking the system to make it work better for them.

  Engagement. Here, understanding comes from directly engaging with a person, asking for stories from her life. Stories are important, because they help illustrate real moments and can build a richer picture of an individual than you can gain from simply asking for opinions. For our project on middle-class Americans, for instance, we asked for stories about the impact of the economy and government in people’s lives, about family, education, and the American Dream. These stories—of attending town hall meetings, being laid off, experiencing racism at work—gave us a richer understanding of the lived experiences of the people we met.

  Experience. Sometimes, the best way to build understanding and empathy is to actually experience what another person goes through. If you’re redesigning a process, you might try working the process as a customer would, explicitly focusing on stumbles and moments of truth in your journey. Sometimes, of course, it’s impossible to experience something you know really well with fresh eyes; you know too much about what is supposed to happen to experience it as if you didn’t. In these cases, you can borrow a trick from design and innovation firm IDEO. Staffers at IDEO often create proxy experiences meant to build instant empathy. For example, to help some telecommunications executives understand how confused, overwhelmed, and, well, stupid customers often feel while in one of the telecom company’s stores, IDEO sent the male executives out to buy lipstick for their daughters. Bumbling through the process, feeling unequipped and grateful for any amount of help they could find, the executives finally experienced empathy for their own customers.

  Try This

  Reading fiction can increase your empathy. In a recent study, our friend Maja Djikic and her coauthor Keith Oatley demonstrated that people who read more fiction are better at reading the emotions of others.5 Moreover, exposure to fiction makes us more likely to engage in altruistic acts, such as helping a researcher pick up a set of pens dropped on the floor. Romance novels are the most likely to promote empathy, so get cracking on that copy of Pride and Prejudice.

  Each of the three ethnographic tools can help you build understanding and empathy. Each is worth trying with your customers, your peers, and even, if you are brave, your family. The more you practice with these tools, the more you will build your capacity for empathy. You will find yourself increasingly curious about others, especially when they see the world differently than you do.

  The good news is that empathy is not a one-way street. The more open and curious you demonstrate yourself to be with others, the more likely they are to be curious and open with you. This is a case of making a cognitive bias work for you. According to social psychologists, we have a shared norm around reciprocity. It says that people should repay, in kind, what another person has provided to them. Those who violate the norm not only risk social censure but also tend to feel an uncomfortable, nagging sense of obligation that lingers until they have actually reciprocated in some way. It is why, in repeated interactions, it is hard to be unkind to those who are kind to us. Similarly, if we demonstrate empathy, we make it easier for others to feel empathy for us.

  A lack of empathy tends to lead to narrow, single-minded solutions. Only with empathy do we have a serious shot at understanding how others think and truly learning from their perspectives. Hence, empathy becomes a second key component of our integrative approach to creating choices. The third and final element is collaborative creativity—working with others to find new answers to vexing problems.

  CREATIVITY: SEEKING THE NEW AND EMBRACING THE UNIQUE

  Straight-away the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind’s eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration.

  —JOHANNES BRAHMS

  You can almost see it: the solitary creative genius, gifted with a moment of divine inspiration, expressing a new idea that changes the world. It is Brahms at his piano, Steve Wozniak in a garage in Los Altos, Thomas Edison behind a workbench in Menlo Park. And maybe, for the lucky few, this is how creativity happens.

  What hope do the rest of us have? None—as long as we accept this poetic myth as truth. It’s beautiful, to be sure, but this myth is also what leads many people to cut themselves off from creativity and to define themselves as “not a creative person.” But here’s the thing: creativity isn’t only for the solitary genius. In the words of dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp, “Creativity is not just for artists. It’s for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it’s for engineers trying to solve a problem; it’s for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.”6 Creativity isn’t a
gift, and it isn’t a solitary act. It’s hard work, and it’s a collaborative process. And it is something each one of us can cultivate.

  One of the keys to creativity, as we see it, is doing some counterprogramming. In a 2008 TED talk, IDEO’s Tim Brown gives his audience a task: to take thirty seconds to draw the person sitting next to them in the audience. Almost immediately, the audience erupts into nervous laughter. “Am I hearing a few ‘sorry’s?” Brown asks. “That’s exactly what happens when you do this with adults—lots and lots of ‘sorry’s.’”7 He highlights the point of the task: we’re embarrassed. This embarrassment, which extends to many contexts beyond a simple drawing task, is caused by a fear of being judged.

  This fear stops us from sharing our ideas in meetings, taking on new assignments, and pushing ourselves to learn new things. It’s not that we don’t come up with ideas; it’s that we are so sensitive to the judgment of others that we keep those ideas to ourselves. It’s not that we don’t want to learn; it’s that we’ve become comfortable being good at what we do—and when we try new things, we’re rarely good at them. Our embarrassment is in marked contrast to the reaction of children given the same drawing task; kids dive into it with glee and share their work with pride. We all start out creative. Life drives it out of us.

  So we need tools that help us get back in touch with our inner five-year-old. Some of this is about building creative confidence. Important to that task is an understanding of psychologist Albert Bandura’s notion of self-efficacy, wherein “individuals who come to believe that they can effect change are more likely to accomplish what they set out to do . . . People with self-efficacy set their sights higher, try harder, persevere longer and show more resilience in the face of failure.”8 In part, being creative is about cultivating self-efficacy: believing you can be creative and giving yourself permission to try.

  Few organizational processes set creativity as a specific goal. There may well be talk of thinking outside the box, but given the risk tolerances and success criteria of the modern corporation, leaders would be foolish to do any such thing. Our standard decision-making processes are designed to produce convergence on a doable, realistic answer. So that is what we get.

  To change this outcome, we must redefine creativity as something each of us has the capacity to do. But we also must make a choice to actually do it. For that to happen, we need a process that supports each person to make such a choice. In the current construct, when we’re confronted with a difficult decision, most of us understand that it is our job to pick the right answer from among the options. In contrast, a richer decision-making process reframes our job: it isn’t to choose an option, but to create a better answer that effectively solves the problem.

  With self-efficacy and a reframed task, creativity becomes about practice. It becomes a matter of finding practical ways to work regularly at generating new ideas—on your own and with others. As you practice generating (and sharing) new ideas, here are five principles we encourage you to keep in mind.

  Start with a problem to be solved. Creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Clearly defining the problem to be solved can act as a spur to creativity and a helpful reference point for potential solutions. This is the power of design thinking’s central question: “How might we . . . ?” How might we increase sales in this part of the store? How might we retain our highest-potential employees? How might we meet this customer need in a compelling new way? Defining a clear question is an important step in creating the conditions for generating a great answer.

  Escape the tyranny of the blank piece of paper. As we’ve noted, one of the most popular, and useless, pieces of advice when you’re trying to solve a problem is to “think outside the box.” Typically, this means you should imagine from first principles and start from a blank piece of paper. Unfortunately, trying to create without inputs places you at a significant disadvantage. Why not use all the resources at your disposal, including the existing models of the world, as raw materials to spur new ideas? As Maria Popova puts it, “In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.”9 This understanding of creativity as connection and recombination makes the blank piece of paper not only unhelpful but actually counterproductive. So, ditch it.

  Learn the value of bad ideas. The single most important rule of idea generation is to defer judgment. Otherwise, if one idea is deemed to be a bad one, many more ideas will go unsaid. The cool thing about wild, silly, and even bad ideas is that they can contain within them the seed of something great. To illustrate this point in our classes, we often show an image of square watermelons. This is, of course, a ridiculous idea. Watermelons are watermelon-shaped. It is part of what makes them watermelons. But oval watermelons are hard to ship, hard to store, and definitely hard to cut. A square watermelon is actually a pretty great idea—and can be produced by growing the melon in a box. Seriously. What at first seems like a bad idea has within it the promise of something good.

  Build to think. Abstraction isn’t terribly helpful for the generation of new ideas. Again, we can learn from the world of design, where, instead of talking about ideas, designers build quick prototypes. These are sketches or models of an idea that make it concrete and testable. Although physical prototypes may not be possible for some strategic problems, you can use storyboards, role-playing, and even narrative storytelling to articulate what you mean when you describe a new idea. More on this in chapter 8.

  Give yourself time. The world is geared to action. We see the consequence of this mindset in our work with corporations—a desire to drive quickly and decisively to a conclusion so that the real work can begin. In this world, thinking is often treated as secondary to action. “Don’t overthink: stick to the critical path.” Repeatedly we’ve heard executives complain that they have no time to think. Rarely do they recognize that taking time to think, or not, is a choice. Believing there is no time is self-sealing and self-limiting. If we act as if there is no time to think, then there won’t be time to think. Time is a critical feature when it comes to creativity. It isn’t about taking forever to make a choice. Rather, it’s about giving yourself room to play, the space to think about something else for a while, and the permission to let insights emerge as you do.

  Try This

  To reinforce the value of bad ideas, take your team through this exercise. First, brainstorm as many bad new business ventures as you possibly can (think perfume that smells like garbage). Then, in pairs, pick one truly bad idea. Each pair has five minutes to generate a pitch for their new business based on that bad idea, explaining why their bad idea is actually a brilliantly good, moneymaking, awesome idea! (That perfume would be ideal for ending a bad date, or getting a little elbow room on the subway, right?).

  A NEW WAY TO THINK

  As we’ve said, we believe a productive approach to decision making builds from metacognition, empathy, and creativity. In theory, there are many approaches you could take that would leverage these three foundational ideas. In practice, we’ve found that integrative thinking contains within it steps that both benefit from these skills and help build them. You will be a better integrative thinker through metacognition, empathy, and creativity. And you will be better at metacognition, empathy, and creativity through integrative thinking.

  Integrative thinking is a process for creating new answers and designing great choices. We’ve developed it as an alternative to existing processes that can short-circuit our thinking, amplify our biases, drive divisions between individuals, and minimize creativity. Over the past decade, we’ve honed a methodology to apply integrative thinking in a deliberate, conscious, and directed way. It isn’t a recipe, exactly. It’s a heuristic: a rule of thumb to help you work through difficult problems you face in your work. Following this process won’t necessarily produce winning integrative solutions every time, but the process gives you a
clear path to follow and a higher probability of coming to a creative answer. In part II we dive into each stage of the process in detail.

  TEMPLATES

  Figure 3-2 is a blank template of the ladder of inference, and figure 3-3 shows a sample ladder filled in, as an example to guide your thinking.

  Figure 3-2. Template: The Ladder of Inference

  Figure 3-3. Sample: The Ladder of Inference

  Part Two

  In Practice

  Chapter 4

  A Methodology

  No lie, just know I chose my own fate I drove past the fork in the road and went straight.

  —JAY Z

  Is Jay Z an integrative thinker? The rapper, producer, and entrepreneur certainly falls into the highly successful leader category, having sold 100 million records, earned more than twenty Grammy awards, and amassed a personal net worth in excess of $600 million. But we have to admit, neither of us had much considered his approach to decision making—not, that is, until one of our MBA students sent us an excerpt from Jay Z’s memoir, Decoded. Our student, Adam, was convinced the rapper was just like the integrative thinkers we’d talked about in class.