Making Decisions that Keep Work and Life in Balance: Preparing to Be Wrong

We had talked about it for months – a new electronic publication for employees. Only two companies in North America had one at the time, one in the U.S. and one in Canada. We had talked with both, and the one in Canada was our best analogy – no standardized platform for employees to read it, people scattered across several countries, and uncooperative technical staff. 

We planned it, designed it, found stories for it (we still called them stories back then, not content), and staffed it.  

We did three things right.  

We set everyone’s mind at ease by starting small – a test group of 100. That’s what Chip Heath and Dan Heath, in Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, call “ooching,” or trying things on a small scale before you go all out.  

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling. 

 

 

Related: 

Ooching Toward Success.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Familiarity Breeds…Contentment?

It’s an old saw – familiarity breeds contempt. But in organizational settings, it’s also dead wrong.

Familiarity actually breeds contentment – and that can be dangerous.

We call it “corporate culture” or “organizational culture.” Put another way: “It’s how we do things here.” It’s what we believe in, and the values we hold.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, in Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, suggest that contentment often comes from repeated exposure to an idea, a program, a process. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, “but what’s more troubling is that mere exposure also extends to our perception of truth.”

In other words, the more we hear or read or see something, the more we believe it’s true. Even if it’s a flat-out lie.

How many times have you received a group email claiming something (usually outrageous or bizarre) is true and you’re urged to pass it on? The internet lends itself to this type of communication. If something seems unbelievably outrageous, it’s probably untrue.

I received one that claimed a certain consumer product (I won’t mention names here to protect the innocent product) was the cause of all cancers, autism, Parkinson’s Disease, epilepsy and virtually every other illness and disease known to humanity, supposedly on the basis of “new scientific studies.”(I am not making this up.) Looking at the email chain, it has already been passed on numerous times.

If you receive something like this, check Snopes. The odds are good that Snopes will have an answer as to the validity of an internet claim.

Why are we so prone to believe this stuff?

We trust the people sending the email or making the claim.

We see a lot of people making the claim on twitter and Facebook.

There’s an article about it on Wikipedia.

An online publication that you read regularly has an article about it.

We have a lot of reasons for doing this. The key point related to all of these is that we tend to believe something is true if it fits our pre-existing worldview.

If we mistrust big corporations, or big government, or big religion (or any religion), we are more prone to believe crazy things about them. We don’t stop and ask if something might be wrong with our worldview. We’re a consumer culture and we consume news and information just like any other consumer commodity.

For organizations, the Heaths say, this status quo or “it’s the culture here” mentality can be devastating. It’s often most easily seen when an outside executive is brought in to change things in a staff or business unit with a strong culture. Watch how fast the white blood cells go to work to “kill the infection.”

We all can do better than that. Not every status quo is bad or wrong. Not every change or innovation is good. But we need to develop a highly tuned sense of discernment to know the difference.

And stop forwarding those crazy email chain letters.

Over at The HighCalling, we’ve been discussing Decisive. To see more posts on this section about short-term emotion, please visit TheHigh Calling.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Ooching” Toward Success

Last year, a friend of mine asked for advice. His organization was being relentlessly criticized on social media, and most of the criticism was unfounded. He said the criticism could be easily answered—except for one problem.

His organization wouldn’t let him mount a defense. The strategy was to emphasize only positive things and look to others to defend the organization. But no one was doing that—they were waiting for the organization itself to act first.

What could he do?

We talked. I suggested some small action so as to be almost unnoticeable—select one of the criticisms, answer it, and see what happened. He eventually tried it.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling, where I'm discussing part 2 of Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

Worldviews, Villains, and Decisions

I’ve been spending a lot of time reading about and considering the subject of worldviews – what they are, where they come from, and how they affect our day-to-day lives. As Chip Heath and Dan Heath point out in Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, a worldview is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it, and how we make decisions to live and work in it.

One problem with a worldview is that we tend to seek out information that agrees with our worldview, and filter out the information that doesn’t. Consider how seriously informed you would be if you got all of your information on the Obama Administration from either Rush Limbaugh or Chris Matthews – a steady diet of ridicule or chills running up your leg.

If we all did that, we would end up with a national government that was so polarized that nothing would get done.

OK, I’m trying to make a point here, because that’s exactly what we do have.

But it’s not just government. Think about how a worldview can affect a workplace, a church, or a relationship, simply by filtering our information that doesn’t conform to what we already believe.

The Heaths would say, and I would agree, that desperately holding on to a worldview at the expense of reality will, at a minimum, lead to bad decisions.

In the book, the call this “conformation bias,” and individuals and organizations do it all the time. It’s one of the “four villains of decision making” they describe in Decisive. The other three are narrow framing, or unduly limiting your options; relying on short-term emotions (if you’re upset, always chill before making a decision); and overconfidence, or having too much faith in our own predictions (and we all do this).

They’re not saying you have to jettison your basic beliefs if you want to make good decisions. But they do say that you should question why you react or respond in certain ways, and examine exactly why you believe one decision or course of action is better than another.

It could be that you confirmation bias – your worldview – is showing.

Can you think of an example of when the worldview an individual, a company, an organization, or a nation led to disaster? (There are some obvious ones – Nazi Germany – and some not-so-obvious ones – like Enron.)

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading the book discussion this month on Decisive. A post will be published each Monday in June (and I’m guest-posting on the book next week). To view the discussion and the comments, please visit The High Calling.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.