KF #12. Decision Quality Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis

Janice, welcome.

Janice Fraser

Thank you so much for having me. I’m so glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, me too. I’m excited to be chatting about Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama. And I’d love it if you could kick us off with a tale of a time you were enmeshed in a whole lot of drama.

Janice Fraser

Oh, boy. Well, you know, honestly, life will throw drama at you no matter what. I mean, we’ve all just lived through a whole bunch of drama, whether it was the pandemic or, you know, what have you.

So, you know, I’ve been through, let’s say, 3 economic meltdowns in my professional life. So we had going way back, we had 2000 when the dot com bust. I live in San Francisco, so the dot com bust ruined everything. And then, you know, 2008 was another time of total, like, right? Everyone thought the sky was falling, and it was.

I was raising money for a startup company that year. And I’ll tell you, I had no idea how I was ever going to hold my head up again because let’s see.  Get heavy for a minute, in February, my father died.

And then in May, my brother died, same year. And then 3 months later, the economic meltdown happened. And here I have this team of people who have come to help me build this company, and there was not gonna be any money. And I had to lay them all off and close the company.

I handed back a check to one of my investors. It was a really hard time.  And, you know, I was just crushed, and I thought I would never recover. I thought that this is it. Like, my career’s over.

You know, I was, what, 30 something, 35, and my career felt like it was over. And you know what? You put one foot in front of the other. And, you know, you cry in your beer to your friends and you keep going. And I, as an independently employed person, right, as a startup founder, I got a couple consulting gigs, and I connected with some friends, and I made some phone calls, and I reached out.

And it took a lot of courage to stand up. And then I started another company. It was the best one I ever did. And I sold it to a bigger company. And, you know, careers were made and life was happy again.

But, you know, when I say, like, less drama, the world has so much complexity to it. I want us all to be able to be as effective as we possibly can be, not in a, like, hustle culture kind of, you gotta work yourself to the bone kind of way. But, like, I just think it should be easier to get more done because you never know what’s going to happen, and there’s enough drama coming from the outside we don’t have to make our own. So, the idea of Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama is about just letting the easy things be easy, helping us to move with flow so that we have more resilience when the unexpected comes down the pipeline.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, that sounds like some great outcomes we would all love to have. Can you tell us any particularly surprising means by which this is done?

Janice Fraser

So, I think that the surprise for a lot of people is how simple it all seems. I’m often taken, my attention is grabbed by methods that feel easy to use, easy to repeat, easy to adapt and pick up, but then they’re kind of under the surface, they’re hard to practice. It’s kind of like if you think about meditation. Well, what is meditation? So, we all do yoga or whatever, and you think, “I’m just going to sit and be quiet for a minute,” and that’s easy but meditation is actually hard because you’re doing it mindfully.

So, here’s an example, point A, point B. From the first job we have, we’re taught about goal-setting, “You have to set a goal. If you don’t set a goal, you’re not going to get where you want to go.”

I absolutely believe that, and we have lots of ways to do goal-setting but no one has ever mentioned or taught, at least not for me, that you have to start with understanding where you are right now, and no one has given me a framework or a tool for understanding, “Here’s where we are right now,” so that we can all reach that goal together. So, in business, you hear a lot of words like alignment, or buy-in, and “How do we get buy-in for something?” and all of that is about we want to get someplace together, so we want to reach that goal together.

But let’s say my team, half of my team is Denver, half of them is in Miami, and I need to get everybody to Albuquerque. Well, I live in San Francisco. If I give them driving directions from San Francisco to Albuquerque, my Denver and my Miami people aren’t going to get there. We’re not in the same place, so even though we know our goal, Albuquerque, we have to start by knowing where are we together, what is our starting place.

And so, I’ve developed and adapted some techniques for defining point A and getting alignment around point A, “Where are we starting from?” It goes like this. Situation, complication, then question, and answer. So, the situation, “We all need to get to Albuquerque.” Complication, “We’re in different cities starting out.” Question, “How do we get there?” Okay, now we can tell the answer.

So, situation, complication, question, answer, I did not develop that. That was developed by this wonderful woman in the ‘60s, her name is Barbara Minto. I think she’s an unsung hero. She was in the first graduating class of women coming out of the Harvard Business School, so she was in the first graduating class of women, and she went on to work at McKinsey Consulting, and really defined how they do strategy communications. And it’s called the Minto Pyramid Method.

So, situation, complication, “What is true right now? And what makes this moment complicated such that it’s a work to achieve our goal, our point B?” So, point-A-point-B thinking can help you have better meetings, it can help you with your project planning, it can help you manage your career, it has helped me be a better whatever, parent, partner, human.

So, point-A-point-B thinking, super, super simple and straightforward but you avoid so much drama if you just take a moment and say, “Are we all driving from Denver to Albuquerque?” “No, some of us are in Miami.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, we talked about driving from different locations to Albuquerque. Could you share with us how this situation, complication, key question, answer stuff can unfold in a real-life situation and be useful for folks?

Janice Fraser

Sure. Well, there’s an example that I like to use because it’s so relatable. I started a company with seven founders. This is going back 20 years. And we started that company at a time when our service offering was in great demand, it was a services company. We have more inbound interests than we could possibly handle. And I was the CEO and lead salesperson of this company, and I was just drowning.

Our close rates were really high, and others were involved in sales meetings here or there, but for the most part, I was kind of running the process. And I went to the partners and I was like, “I need to buy a printer,” $300, we were an all-virtual company, so they didn’t really see that I was drowning, but we’re all a virtual company. And I said, “I just need $300 to buy a printer. Are we all cool with that?”

And I’ll tell you, we argued for 10 minutes for six months why I want to buy a stupid $300-printer. It was excruciatingly painful.

Pete Mockaitis

Ten minutes for six months, like 10 minutes a meeting?

Janice Fraser

Ten minutes at our partner meeting every Tuesday because it was on the agenda. So, here I am like clawing my eyes out, like, “Ah, just let me buy a printer.” And, honestly, if I had to do it over, I would’ve just bought the printer.

Pete Mockaitis

And you’re the CEO with seven partners.

Janice Fraser

Yeah, but we were equal partners, and it was a CEO role and I didn’t get to wave my magic wand. Anyway, the problem there was that I had framed it up so the situation was I did not define the situation for my partners very well. I asked the wrong question, and I asked the wrong question because I hadn’t teed up, “What is the situation? What is the complication?”

The situation is lots of inbound interests. The complication is I was having trouble keeping it all straight, and juggling all of the big piece parts. The question that I should’ve asked is, that I should’ve brought to my partners is, “How can we support this level of sales without burnout forever? I have a suggestion. The suggestion is blah, blah, blah.” Suggestion is, “Other people should be participating.” Suggestion is, “I want a printer,” suggestion is whatever.

And so, the framing of the question led to the wrong debate. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis

So, framing the question, just like, “Just let me buy a printer.”

Janice Fraser

“Can I buy a printer?” Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Just like you want one.

Janice Fraser

“Janice wants a printer because she’s a prima donna.” Right. Like, whatever the story was that they were telling themselves in their head, rather than, “How can we make our sales operation more sustainable?” And probably there were two or three other things that could’ve been done to make it a more sustainable operation.

Pete Mockaitis

So, this is so fascinating to me. What sorts of objections does one hear to, “I want $300 to buy a printer”?

Janice Fraser

So we were a consultant company, so it was a low-margin business, and this is me, I’m with my business person’s hat analyzing why people were doing what they were doing, which is always easier in hindsight than in the moment. And, literally, like one person was highly motivated by wanting to be a paperless company, absolutely from a kind of philosophical standpoint, they were just simply opposed to printers, whatever.

Another person literally said the words, “One-seventh of that money is mine.” Yeah, right?

Pete Mockaitis

“You can have one-seventh of the printer when we’re done with it.”

Janice Fraser

“One-seventh of $300 is not going to make or break you.” But people are motivated by different things. Some people thought that we just shouldn’t need it, “We didn’t have an office because we were an all-virtual company, and we’re going to put a printer in one person’s office? That doesn’t make any sense.” Again, these were dumb things. Like, I said, none of these makes any sense in retrospect.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it is dumb, and yet I think it is richly instructive for us to dig into this in incredible detail, which might sound odd. But it’s like, in all of our organizations, there’s dumb stuff that’s going on.

Janice Fraser

Yes, and it’s so human. It’s just so human. Everyone’s point of view here was legitimate to them.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, thusly, if you’ll indulge me to go in tremendous detail about this printer discussion, I think it can be illustrative for us all. So, your opening was just, “Hey, I want a printer,” as opposed to sharing how that could be an enabler. If you could give us an example of that, “Hey, this will enable the sales and such”? Can you spell that pathway for how having that printer will enable the sales team to be more effective?

Janice Fraser

Sure. So, the sales team, remember, so this is, at this point, was an eight-person company. We had employee number one. So, it’s seven co-founders, so equal partners in a partnership, and one employee, and no professional salespeople, like I was the sales lead, and we had a couple of other partners of those seven were participating in sales operations based on me setting up meetings, inviting them to the meetings.

And so, we had all these inbound interests, and I was spending as much time on our losses as our wins. And you can imagine, I’ve got, let’s say, four to six customers at any one time running through the sales process, with four to six participants on the customer side. So, now you’re at 24 to 40 people, humans, that I’m keeping track of in my mind, that I’m interacting with.

Now, I’ve got 40 people living in my head, as many as, living in my head all the time on a rotating revolving door basis. How do we keep that straight? And so, for me, what I wanted was to have kind of a stack of folders, physical folders, where my most important, most recent notes were on top. And so, for me, I would, like, be on a sales call, and I would type, type, type, type, type. At the time, I was doing this myself.

And I would summarize that stuff, and I would want to print that out so that the most relevant information was always at the ready so that if I needed it, I could context-switch simply through physical manipulation of stacks of paper.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood.

Janice Fraser

So, that’s what I wanted.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you just got to print notes, “So, I could stick them in folders and move them around. That’s what I want.”

Janice Fraser

Like, I just needed a way to keep my brain straight. I was, like, my brain was coming out of my ears.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right. Okay. But you didn’t offer that kind of context or path. It was just sort of like, “Hey, I want a printer. Can I just get a printer?”

Janice Fraser

Yeah, I didn’t.

Pete Mockaitis

And you probably didn’t think it was going to be that hard, “I need a printer. Can we just do that? Okay. Oh, we can’t. Oh, really? Oh.”

Janice Fraser

Exactly. I thought it was a trivial ask.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you had to bring the big guns in terms of laying out the pathway. So, then did you ever get that printer, Janice?

Janice Fraser

I did. I did eventually get the printer. And like I said, if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have asked permission. I’d just go buy the printer.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, totally, “The receipt is in the reimbursements. Are we going to fight about it now? Well, I got the printer.”

Janice Fraser

Yup, live and learn. Live and learn. Live and learn.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Lovely. Well, I think that is instructive in terms of if we frame up the situation, complication, key question, and answer in a way that is resonant for the different stakeholders and the different things that they value and care about, that’s really cool, and then that’s a compelling story, like, “If I have this printer, we are going to significantly increase the revenue that can come through this because I am, in some ways, a bottleneck as the single sales professional in the midst of overwhelming demand.”

So, there we have it. All right. Well, that is just one of many tools that you share in your book. Can you lay out a couple more with us? You say you’ve got one tool to rule them all. It’s a two-by-two. What’s this one?

Janice Fraser

This is another one that if you’ve done any work time in consulting companies, you’ll recognize it. We call it the two-by-two. It goes by many names, and it is, I think of it as a virtual or physical sorting grid. And the way that I prefer to use it is, at a blank wall, I literally stand at a wall, and I take blue painter’s tape, and I make a big plus sign. So, there are four quadrants, and the way that I organize it is a little different than kind of you may have heard of before.

I choose two different criteria, one for each axis. And on the vertical axis, it’s whatever the criteria it’s an obvious yes-no, “Is it important? Is it not important?” Like, if it’s not important, I don’t want to think about it. So, find whatever my criteria that’s a yes-no, I put that top to bottom, yes on top. And then, on the horizontal axis, I think of, “What is the criteria that is a yes-maybe?” And I put the yes on the side, on the right side, and the maybe on the left.

And if you construct your two-by-two sorting grid this way, you can take whatever your ideas, your options, you can plot them into these four quadrants based on, “From one perspective, this is an absolute yes. But from another perspective, that, I’m not sure.” So, I think an easy-hard. So, let’s say you’re building software. You have 20 product features that you know would be great additions, or you think would be great additions, that everyone has requested.

So, a product manager has the job of prioritizing, “Which ones are we going to build and not build?” Well, from one perspective, it’s easy to do but from another perspective, it’s not that important. It doesn’t help the user or the business at all. So, you’ve got easy but unimportant. Well, that’s going to fall down to this one quadrant, this bottom right quadrant. And even if it falls in the bottom right quadrant, this is the stuff I call seductive distractions.

From one perspective, it is, “Yes, it’s easy to do.” From another perspective, it’s a, “No, it’s not important. Why would you bother?” You’d be shocked to know how many unimportant things end up in a product backlog and waste your time, waste your developer’s. And so, these are the things that cause people to argue.

Imagine that you’re in a product prioritization meeting, and you don’t have a tool like the two-by-two that makes this very obvious that there’s a no. You could easily get into a 30-, 50-minute discussion, argument, debate about whether or not to include this feature, “Well, it’d be easier to do, we should just throw it in there.” But you shouldn’t do it because it’s not important.

And so, what a tool like this does is it puts the real depth of conversation on, “What are the decision criteria that we agree to?” So, rather than having the real conversation be, “Should we build this feature?” That’s the wrong question. The right question is, “How should we choose which features to build?” Well, it’s only, “Build the ones that are important.” Okay, that sounds like a no-brainer, “Okay, let’s build the ones that are important.”

So, now if you’re using this two-by-two diagram, this sorting grid, is what I call it, then you’re only going to have a debate about the ones that are an obvious yes from one perspective, but a maybe from another perspective so you eliminate 75% of the discussion required because it’s just so obvious the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. So, what’s distinctive about this is one of the axes is pretty much binary, and so it in terms of like, “That’s it. Almost no user cares about this feature. Ergo, it’s not important so we just don’t even need to, or put our little heads about it for a minute, or not even a minute.” So, you can get right into it. Now, can you share with us some other contexts where this can be illuminating?

Janice Fraser

So, we use this in pretty much every aspect of life, and I’m not kidding.

Pete Mockaitis

“What should I eat for lunch? Is it delicious and nutritious?”

Janice Fraser

“Is it delicious? Do I have the materials? Can I make it?” We’ve done two-by-twos for everything. Everything from kind of disruptive strategy at very, very large companies. Or, actually, I did this with the Navy Seals training command. 

So, I taught this, I led a workshop where I could not actually physically see any of the two-by-twos that they were creating. I simply coached them through the steps and answered their questions as they went because it was a highly secure environment. So, it can apply to any situation where there are many choices, and you have to be able to reveal which choices makes sense, and which ones do not.

And so, in the preparation for one of these kinds of high-stakes facilitations, I worked with my clients to figure out, “What is the body of ideation that we want to do? What is the range of ideas that we want to generate, or thoughts that we want to elicit from our participants?” And then, “What are the choice criteria that will help us to know which ones are the correct ideas to move forward with and which ones we ought to let go of?”

And, usually, I can find a way to layer in three or four different criteria. So, it could be importance, easy-hard, urgency, what have you. And so, if we want to go from a wide range of ideas represented down to, let’s say, four or five things that we intend to do that we’re actually going to do, in one hour I can get 20 people to generate 200 ideas and come down to six using this two-by-two method.

And the way that you do it is you say, “All right, I’d like everyone to come up with 10 ideas, one idea per Post-It note. And in 10 minutes, you’ve got 200 ideas, and then you spend the next 50 minutes reducing that from 200, to 100, to 50, and we do that using the two-by-two.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, that’s cool. And I think it’s nice because you really put a spotlight on, “What are the criteria that we’re using here?” And if that is left beneath the surface, poor criteria can rule the day, “It’s easy. It’s fun. I’m really just interested in this kind of project. This seems cool.” And so, it’s like, “All right. Well, that’s notable but what’s the goal here? Is the goal just for you to enjoy yourself? Or is the goal more of an economic profits-minded kind of a thing?”

And so then, you can recognize whether it seems cool and fun and easy and interesting is a valid criterion that we should utilize here, or if we should say, “Oh, I guess we actually have to be disciplined grownups and put our personal preferences to the side on this particular context.”

Janice Fraser

Well, so much friction and wastes results from people arguing over something that they’re not actually explicitly saying.

So, we end up with this proxy that the friction and the waste and slowness often is the result of a proxy argument. You’re arguing over something on the surface but, really, there’s something underneath that that’s more of the issue. And if you could just have that conversation, you could resolve it. So, for instance, you could say, one of the yes-no axis is, “Does it cost more than $100 or not? Like, if it costs more than $100 that’s an obvious no because we’re broke.” You see.

So, instead of arguing over the thing that’s the proxy, you can have a meaningful conversation to align on the things that really matter.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s super. And I’m curious, do you have any favorite words, or phrases, or means of going deeper there? Because if folks aren’t surfacing their real concern, they may very feel kind of sensitive about it. How do you recommend we go there?

Janice Fraser

So, I think a lot about, “What are the prompts?” When we ask a question that inspires people to come up with new thinking, that’s what I call a prompt. I actually think a lot about prompts. I craft them very deliberately because I want to elicit information from the people that I’m collaborating with. So, putting this back in a work context, what we’re talking about here is collaboration to make progress.

And when I write the prompt, I’m thinking about, “What is the underlying question?” again, we’re back at point A, “What’s the underlying question that will help us orient honestly in the present moment?” And that’s why I ask questions like, “How will we know, how might we recognize the right thing to do? Like, what are the things that matter most in making this selection?”

And I value those conversations, and sometimes it can feel, to people who aren’t familiar in working with me, it can feel a little bit slow at first, but then the wrap-up happens so easily that we make up for all that time. So, if we spend 10 minutes having a conversation about, “What are the decision criteria? How will we recognize something that is the right answer?” we’re going to get our heads on straight together and that’s going to make it easier for us to recognize the right path forward, the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Okay. Well, so you mentioned this waste. In your book, you highlight two pernicious kinds of wastes. It sounds like we hit one. What’s the other?

Janice Fraser

Yeah, okay. So, when it comes to decision-making, there are really two big ways that we waste. There’s the kind that happens before the decision is made, and the kind of happens after the decision is made. So, there’s before a decision is made, we end up with these slow decisions, and it sounds like, “Oh, they’re never going to make a decision. We’ve been talking about this forever. Six months, we’re talking about a freaking printer. Are you kidding me?”

So, when a decision is taking a really long time, it’s often because we’ve set the wrong kind of standard, and it’s like, “Is this the right thing to do? Is this the best decision? Do we all agree?” Those three sentiments all set this very, very high standard for the quality of decision and the amount of support that the decision has. And what that leads to is deliberation. So, that’s how you get extensive talking.

So, with the printer example that we talked about earlier, it was, “Do we all agree this is the right thing to do? Is it really necessary for seven people to have complete agreement, and that is unequivocably the right thing to do?” “No, no, this does not rise to that level of importance.” Compared to like, “Do we all agree it’s the right thing to do to pull the plug on grandma?” Like, “Okay, now, we should probably all have consensus, and we should all know that it’s right, unequivocably.” So, that’s the first kind of way, is setting the wrong standards for the quality and alignment of our decision.

After a decision is made, the other kind of waste is the waste that happens if a decision is like a snap decision that’s made by fiat or that’s made by gut instinct. Have you ever been on a call and on a Zoom meeting, and you’re watching all 25 talking, all 25 heads, and a decision is made, and you could just see the looks on their face. They’re going to go back to their desks and do whatever they want because they don’t agree with whatever, but nobody is going to say anything.

So, if a decision is made in too-cavalier a fashion without sufficient attention being paid to building support and depth of understanding, then what you end up with is decisions that are reversed, or they’re reversed and nobody talks about it so now there’s chaos. And what happens there is that you erode trust and belief in the quality and nature of the decisions that get made in your organization.

And so, that breeds resentment, and lack of trust, and a lot of churns, and people doing things in conflict with one another because person A doesn’t believe in it, so they’re going to go off and do their own thing, person B is going to do the same thing but without talking to person A about it, so you end up with this entropy chaos-type of situation.

So, what we want instead is to think about decisions, like as, “What could a middle ground be?” And I ask two questions. One, “Can we all live with it?” because if no, if you can’t live with it, that’s important to know. If your lawyer is like, “I cannot live with that. That exposes us to too much risks.” That’s super important information. So, “Can we all live with it?” is a really helpful thing to ask.

And, “Does it move us toward our point B? Does it obviously help us make progress?” because if a decision is something that everyone can live with, that obviously makes progress, it’s probably a good-enough decision.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s nice in terms of good enough as opposed to…

Janice Fraser

Right or best.

Pete Mockaitis

…striving internally for optimal, universal acclaim by consensus may be a fool’s errand in certain contexts.

Janice Fraser

Right. I just can’t, I can’t even. It really drives me nuts when people are, like, debating, as if continuing to talk will actually give us new insight. Sometimes we need to just stop talking and move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like that. There’s a time and a place where we want to raise the bar. I think about my conversation with Greg McKeown here in terms of essentialism, in terms of if you’re clearing out your closet, “Might this ever be useful someday?” is a very low bar, and you’ll not get rid of very much stuff. Just everything might be useful someday. Versus a Marie Kondo question, “Does this spark joy?” Okay, now there’s a very high bar. Not a lot of things are going to go there.

And so, here, we’re sort of playing it in reverse. It’s like there’s a time when we want to have a very high bar for this decision, and the consensus, and everyone jazzed about it, and then there’s a time where we should have a lower bar, and there’s a little bit of an art of leadership there in terms of making that determination for where this falls along the continuum.

Janice Fraser

And you mentioned the spark of excitement, and one of the things that keeps us in a really boring middle ground is not being willing to take risks. And sometimes, I think, when we start to see organizations shifting how they frame up decisions, and, “Do we all agree this is the right decision to make?” like, if we all agree it’s the right decision, we’re never going to take any risks.

I made a highly controversial decision at one point in my career. Again, I was a leader of a company, just a small company, but it was tiny but mighty. And we made a product, and we ended up selling it to Google within a year of developing the product. It was such a cool outcome. And shortly after the transaction was closed, and we returned a nice big check to all of the shareholders in the company, everyone was excited, one of the shareholders was very upset, and said that it was the worst decision the company had ever made. The worst decision the company had ever made because it put us at such risk.

And it really landed with me because I was feeling so proud of what we had accomplished, and I was so pleased with the decision-making acumen of the board of directors that allowed us to take that decision, even though one of the shareholders was so risk-averse. Because if we all have to agree that something is unequivocably the right thing to do, we’ll never do anything bold.

So, I’m still really proud of that product, and that set of decisions, and that way of bringing something new to market, and helping everyone make good-enough decisions that kept the company safe enough that we could take a calculated risk.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Janice, that’s really a beautiful perspective that you have as you reflect on this because I think myself, and others with some people-pleasing tendencies, might look back on that, and sort of wonder, “Oh, I don’t know, is that person right? And did we make the wrong call after all?” Whereas, you said, “I love the fact that we went after this, and one person was really upset. That’s really cool of us.” So, I love that perspective.

Janice Fraser

And, honestly, like he took home a cheque for like $400,000.

Pete Mockaitis

There you go.

Janice Fraser

Like, “Dude, it’s fine.” I’m not happy that he was upset. I’m happy that we were able to have a vision and move forward even without consensus. So, there was some research done about the best venture capital investment decision-making. And what turned out to be true was high conviction, low consensus led to the best outcomes in venture funds.

So, that means that, at the partner table, all the people that are sitting around, debating whether or not we should invest in XYZ company, what you needed to really have good outcomes was somebody had to see outrageous potential, outrageously positive potential. And even though everyone couldn’t see it, if somebody saw that there was outrageously possible potential, then there was a capacity, like that potential could be realized.

So, high conviction but low consensus means that it took a leap of faith to believe in it. And I look at the challenges that we have as a planet right now, whether it is war in multiple places, or economic uncertainty, high inflation, climate change, political divisiveness, these are really big challenges. This generation, I think a lot about, my son is 22, my daughter is 35. So, she’s peak Millennial, he’s peak Gen Z, and I think about these young professionals that are coming into the workplace, and we need them to be bold. We need them to help us through some really difficult challenges.

And so, I want us to embrace high conviction, low consensus opportunities to explore big leaps forward in our culture, in our world.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s intriguing that low consensus is advantageous, like, that is better than high conviction, high consensus. Can you unpack this pathway for me a little bit more? Is it that it’s because of VC funds, and VC funds tend to prosper when they have a few bets that pay off massively as opposed to the majority of their bets do pretty well?

Janice Fraser

They don’t tend to. They only prosper.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like that’s the way of the VC fund, as opposed to a mortgage lender. It’s a different risk gain.

Janice Fraser

So, I’m going to say it’s not just the way of VC funds. It is the way of anything innovative, actual innovation, all innovation across. And this is something that I spend a lot of time looking at. The numbers are in, the math works. If you’re trying to disrupt the status quo, then you will be taking risks, and a small number of those risks will pay very high returns. And I don’t just mean financially. I mean, in whatever.

A lot of the organizations that I work with are, like I worked with the Air Force, like they’re not necessarily profit-making contexts. It’s about creating disruptive results. And the thing about disruption, and I mean this in a sort of business school sense of disruption, like there’s a guy, Clayton Christensen, who developed disruption theory.

The thing about it is that is a fundamentally optimistic act. Our innovators, whether they’re economic innovators, political innovators, they are imagining a world that is different and somehow better. And that imagination, we need to have ways and methods for harvesting the insight and imagination of people who imagine better, and who are willing to wrestle with the status quo in order to make improvements in the world.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, I guess, in a way, low consensus is, in a way, an indication of the innovativeness of the thing. Because if everyone says, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. Everybody, all loves it.” Well, odds are, if everyone feels that way, it’s probably already done, or it is so obvious that it is not disruptive.

Janice Fraser

Well, if it’s so obvious and it is disruptive, there’s some reason that it’s not been done, and so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I guess I’m just thinking for listeners, like a takeaway is, “Hey, everyone thinks this is a terrible idea but I’m really gung-ho about it, and Janice said that’s exactly what I want.” Is that the takeaway? Or how should we view high conviction, low consensus?

Janice Fraser

No. So, it’s not “I want.” It’s “What if this were true, how good would it be?” So, the framing, again, it’s, “What is the framing? If this were true, how good would it be? And then, what would we need to learn in order to find out whether it’s true, whether it’s possible?” And that’s where you get things like, there are terms like MVP, where it’s the smallest thing you can do to test out the critical path idea, that kind of thing.

So, it’s not “I believe in this, therefore, I’m going to shove it down everybody’s throat.” It’s, “I believe in this. What’s the smallest thing we can do to figure out whether it’s right?” So, it comes with a degree of humility, that high conviction, conviction doesn’t mean blind faith. Conviction means, “I’ve seen some indicators that there’s real potential here. Not everybody sees it yet, but I do.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Janice Fraser

So, there’s actually a quote from my book that I sit with a lot and I pay a lot of attention to, and it goes something like this, “We no longer believe in work-life balance. It’s all just life. And what we want is to make it a life filled with confidence, security, love, and meaning.”

And it’s not because I believe in hustle culture, and I think that you should have no boundaries between work and the rest of your life. It’s actually kind of the opposite. It’s more that I want life to infect your work. Who we are at work, what happens to us at work, the pains and joys that we experience at work, the kinds of decisions we make at work, they alter who we are as people.

And if we can be really attentive and mindful to being ourselves wherever we go, we will end up building a life that is so much more fulfilling and satisfying. And if we have a planet filled with people who have fulfilling satisfying lives, I believe we’re going to make better decisions on that global geopolitical kind of scale.

So, I think that that is the thought that I would want to leave people with, is that you’re allowed to have a life filled with confidence, patience, security, love, meaning. These things really do matter, and they matter at work as much as at home.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Janice Fraser

Well, my favorite tool that helps me be awesome at my job is Google, Google Docs, the Google Suite. I have a long, long, long list of tools, and the one that I could not live without is G Suite. And I’m surprised by how few people notice how powerful it is. You could do everything on G Suite.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Janice Fraser

When I get up in the morning, I sit for one hour and do something I love.

Pete Mockaitis

For example?

Janice Fraser

Usually, it’s I drink coffee and I read a book, and I pet my cat in a favorite chair with the curtains open and the sun shining in, but I spend one hour every morning doing something I love, sometimes it’s social media, let’s be honest.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Janice Fraser

Yup, figure out the truth. Figure out what’s true and make it a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Janice Fraser

JaniceFraser.com. J-A-N-I-C-E-F-R-A-S-E-R.com.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Janice Fraser

Well, the call to action is I would love it if you would take a look at the book. If it looks interesting to you, give it a try. I read the audiobook, so if you want to hear me talking in your ear, that’s the best way to do it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Janice, this has been fun. Thank you. I wish you much speed and little drama.

Janice Fraser

Thank you so much, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Cheryl, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Cheryl Einhorn
Thank you. So good to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to talk about your book, Problem Solver, and get some more insights into problem-solving goodies. But one problem I understand you’ve been working to solve for years is the perfect spice cookie. What’s the story here?

Cheryl Einhorn
Oh, I’m always experimenting. They say that cooking is an art and baking is a science, so that means that you can keep experimenting until you find what you think is just right.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you say spice cookie, what spices are we talking about here?

Cheryl Einhorn
Oh, I really throw in the kitchen sink. I like a lot of ginger. I think ginger is, like, this secret ingredient. And then a little bit of cayenne and all sorts of nuts thrown in so you get really good texture.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you go with the spice ginger or the powder ginger? Sorry, not spice, the fresh ginger or the…yeah.

Cheryl Einhorn
No, no, I like the fresh ginger. I like the fresh ginger, and I think something that people don’t appreciate enough is that you actually don’t have to peel it. The peel is actually good for you.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Cheryl Einhorn
So, I do recommend cleaning that first, but make sure that you leave that on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’ve already blown my mind about one minute into the interview, so this bodes well for the future. You don’t have to peel your ginger. Who knew? Okay. Well, talking about your book, Problem Solver, any particularly extra-surprising or fascinating or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about problem-solving while putting this together?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, absolutely, because what the research talks about is that there are five dominant ways that people approach their decisions, and that each of these different decision-making archetypes, I call them problem-solver profiles, and that’s why my book is called Problem Solver, each of them has some beautiful strengths but each of them also is correlated to a couple specific cognitive biases.

Those mental mistakes that can impede clear thinking and, therefore, each of them is actually optimizing for different things in their decisions. And if we can learn about which problem-solver is ours, we can better understand why we engage with our decisions in the way that we do, what kind of information do we think is important for making a decision, and we can also learn how to make better decisions with others based on understanding the other problem-solver profiles that are not our own.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Cheryl, this is exciting stuff and I’m eager to almost just dive in, table format, what’s the archetype, what are they optimizing for, what’s their strengths, what’s their bias. But maybe before we get to that level of meat, could you first share what’s at stake in terms of if we are great at problem-solving versus just okay at problem-solving, if we really know our archetype and we’re dialed into it versus we are just blissfully unaware of that knowledge?

Cheryl Einhorn
I think it’s a great question. The only thing that we truly have agency over in our lives are our decisions. And so, our decisions are the data of our lives. If we feel confident as decision-makers, if we have conviction that our decisions can move us forward into our good future, we can have a greater sense of wellness and of resilience. We can take on bigger challenges, and we feel like we can move through our day more easily.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Do you have any cool stories of someone who learned some of your stuff and was able to upgrade their decision-making, problem-solving to see some cool results?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, absolutely. My company, Decisive, we work with decision-makers around the world. And what we’ve found is that, as we begin to work with almost anybody, whether it is somebody who would like to help their aging parents find the right house or housing accommodation as they age, or whether it is somebody who’s thinking about starting their own business, as people learn their problem-solving skills and feel better about what actually is a quality decision-making process, they feel better about themselves, and they feel like they can reach their goals and their dreams.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Any particular goals and dreams reached that was super inspirational?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, we recently worked with a team that had been together, a senior leadership team, at an organization, a big international company, and what they had found is they had been working together for so long that they had sort of fallen into certain habits and patterns where they had some preconceived notions about who they can work well with, and who they kind of wanted to go around.

And by working together to uncover these problem-solver profiles, they now really felt like they could reduce their friction and work better together because they understood why each person was approaching a decision a certain way, why they were asking the questions they were. They weren’t being sluggish, or slow, or confrontational, but they needed to understand certain parts of the process in order for them to feel confident in the decision that they were making, and it really amplified and reignited what this team could do together and for the company.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Cheryl, I’m curious, in terms of our direction here, do you think it would be worthwhile to provide a refresher on the AREA Method for those who missed our first interview or do you think we can jump right into the archetypes?

Cheryl Einhorn
I’d be happy to give a refresher. So, AREA is an acronym for my system of complex decision-making that uniquely controls or counters cognitive bias so that we can expand our knowledge while improving our judgment. And, basically, it’s an order of operations where the A, absolute, gets up close on the target of your decision, the R, relative, then puts that decision into the broader context and collects information from related sources.

E, exploration upgrades your research beyond documents to identify good people and ask them great questions, it’s interviewing. Then AREA exploitation is a series of creative exercises to test your evidence against your assumptions. This is a new piece of decision-making which really helps you to strength-test your decisions.

And then the final A, analysis, helps you think about failure, which is so important because if you can identify how and where your decision could fail, you can shore up and prevent that weakness and also have a signpost to tell you when something is going awry in the execution phase, and when you might need to make a new decision.

So, that is just a brief summary of the AREA Method as an end-to-end system for complex problem-solving that includes all of the different perspectives, and really helps you to end up with a decision that has a good chance of succeeding.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cheryl, that’s lovely. Thank you. So, we’re all situated there. And now, okay, so we talked about cognitive biases a couple times. Now, I am familiar with this term and I find them so fascinating. I, one time, in my prior home in Chicago, had this beautiful poster, the Cognitive Bias Codex. Maybe you’ve seen it. It’s got a brain in the middle, and then it’s just nicely sorted, like all these cognitive biases.

I think they’re, like, over 150 into segments. It was lovely but it didn’t successfully make it through the move but we’ll link to that in the show notes for anybody who wants to buy this beautiful piece of art. But what is a cognitive bias?

Cheryl Einhorn
So, basically, it’s a heuristic. It is a mental pathway, a way of thinking that actually can help us to make the many small decisions that we have during the day but that don’t go away when we’re solving for complex problems. Let me give you a couple examples of things I think we all do. One is the liking bias. We tend to overweight information that comes from somebody that we like. Or the planning fallacy, which is even if we’ve done a task before, we may believe that it can be done faster than actually the number of steps and the time that it takes.

Or, another one is the confirmation bias where we look to confirm a favored hypothesis instead of thinking about disconfirming data which has far more diagnosticity. So, those are just a couple of examples of how we sort of move through the world to help us go a little faster but they don’t necessarily help us to really be present in the moment to think about the decision that we’re actually facing on its own.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. That’s good. And I pulled up the image of the Cognitive Bias Codex in terms of it has categories, like, “Why do we have these shortcuts? Well, it’s sort of unclear. What should we remember? We’ve got too much information. We can’t make enough meaning out of something and we crave meaning. Or, we got to act fast and we can’t analyze every tidbit.”

Cheryl Einhorn
Our brain likes to conserve energy and it likes to take these shortcuts, and it definitely allows us to multitask. If you’re in the supermarket and you know exactly where the box is in the cereal aisle that you want to get, you can also be on the phone and maybe thinking about something from earlier in the day. So, you can be doing many things, but by reducing that cognitive load, it’s also not actively thinking through whatever it is you’re facing.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. All right. So, lay it on us, these archetypes. We’ve got the adventurer, the detective, the listener, the thinker, the visionary. I guess that’s alphabetical. Is that how you like to, the sequence you like to move in or should we go at it? What’s your order of preference?

Cheryl Einhorn
That’s perfectly fine. One is not better than the other. As I said, they each have beautiful strengths but each of the problem-solver profiles are optimizing for different things in their decisions. So, the adventurer is a confident decision-maker, and he or she really favors making a lot of decisions. And there’s an underlying optimism bias to this because if they make a decision and it doesn’t work out the way they want, guess what? They always can make a new decision. And so, this is really a great person to have in your friend circle, in your colleague circle. They really help to make sure that you continually have momentum.

The detective, that’s what I am, this is a slower and more evidence-based decision-maker. For me to make a decision, if you don’t come to me with data, I really have trouble hearing you. I want you to substantiate it. And that has an underlying confirmation bias to it, which is that I can find the facts that I need to be able to share with you why my hypothesis is the correct one. And so, this is somebody, when you really want to be able to prove it, the adventurer can help you find the data that you need.

The listener is a relational, collaborative, inclusive decision-maker. And for this kind of a problem-solver profile, they have an underlying liking bias. They tend to have a trusted group of advisors, and they tend to overweight information that comes from those people, and they are people-centered. The thinker is your slowest decision-maker. This is somebody who really likes to explore their options. This can have a kind of frame blindness to it because they tend to look at the options against each other, which can circumscribe how they see and understand the problem.

And then the visionary is a creative open-ended decision-maker. This is somebody who has an underlying scarcity bias. They overvalue things that are original and things that maybe have not actually been on the table in the discussion, and that can also make them seem off-topic. And so, what I think you can see is that each of these different problem-solver profiles value different parts of decision-making.

And in order to make better decisions, alone and with others, you can really rapidly build trust and increase the speed of your decision-making by knowing the problem-solver profiles of the people who you’re making decisions with so you can come to them with what it is that they need to be able to discuss their decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so let’s do a rapid recap there. So, the adventurer is optimizing for what?

Cheryl Einhorn
Forward momentum.

Pete Mockaitis
Forward momentum. And their cognitive bias is?

Cheryl Einhorn
Optimism bias.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then the detective, they’re optimizing for?

Cheryl Einhorn
Data.

Pete Mockaitis
And their bias is the confirmation bias.

Cheryl Einhorn
That’s correct.

Pete Mockaitis
And the listener is optimizing for what?

Cheryl Einhorn
Collaboration, cooperation.

Pete Mockaitis
And their bias is what?

Cheryl Einhorn
Liking bias.

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-huh. And the thinker, likewise?

Cheryl Einhorn
The thinker is somebody who wants to understand their options, and a bias that would be associated might be the relativity bias.

Pete Mockaitis
And how do we define the relativity bias?

Cheryl Einhorn
Relativity bias is like the frame blindness. They see the world in a relative, “This versus that,” over a…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, right. Option A versus option B.

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And, finally, the visionary?

Cheryl Einhorn
The visionary is creative and really optimizing for originality. And one of the biases associated for them would be the scarcity bias. And in my book, I go through this in much more detail and I give you lots of what I call cheetah sheets. Can I describe why I call them cheetah sheets?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Cheryl Einhorn
So, the cheetah, while she’s the most fearsome hunter and can accelerate up to 60 miles per hour, her hunting prowess is actually from her deceleration, and she decelerates up to 9 miles an hour in a single stride. That gives her agility, flexibility, and maneuverability. And that’s what you need in quality decision-making.

And so, throughout all of my books, Problem Solved, on personal and professional decision-making, which introduces the AREA Method, Investing in Financial Research, about business, financial, and investment decisions, and this newest book, Problem Solver, I have cheetah sheets throughout which are worksheets that help you be a more agile and flexible decision-maker.

And each of these worksheets allows you to take the skill that you’re building and, basically, plug it right into your day. It gives you a series of questions that I ask that, as you answer them, help you to really be able to use the tools and the skills of each of these problem-solver profiles.

Pete Mockaitis
Nifty. All right. And I’m curious, do you have a sense of what proportion of people are adventurers versus detectives versus listeners?

Cheryl Einhorn
So, so far, I’ve collected information from well over 5,000 people. And for the people that take the problem-solver profile, we do have the largest group as thinkers. And I have been thinking about why that might be, and one of the things that occurs to me is the thinker is going to be very open to taking a quiz to help them to self-identify how they make decisions. They want to understand. The option for them is between the ears. They want to know the why.

An adventurer might hear about the problem-solver profiles on a podcast like this, and say, “I don’t need to take the quiz. I know I’m an adventurer.” Again, that forward momentum and the different ways that people are thinking about how they make their decisions, and the time to the decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And perhaps, to make it all the more real and concrete, could you walk us through a problem to be solved, or a decision to be made, and how each of the five archetypes would approach it?

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah, one thing that I think is, in all of our common experience, might be going out to dinner with the five problem-solver profiles. When you get the menu and the adventurer looks at the menu, sees something on the menu that speaks to her, and she can put the menu down. She doesn’t have to read the whole menu because it’s not about all options. It’s about picking the first one that seems good to her.

The detective looks at the menu, notices that one of them has olives, loves olives, and thinks about, “Okay, based on that specific ingredient, that’s a dish that I’m probably going to like.” The thinker looks at the menu, and thinks about, “Well, what else have I had today? How do I want to balance out my diet for the day?” and maybe thinking about all of the eating that he or she has done as she looks at the menu to pick the dish.

The listener may be waiting to hear what all her friends order because she wants to hear what they think sounds good as well. And the visionary looks at the menu, likes the dish that has the olives, but looks at another dish and sees that the sauce might be better on that particular dish, and create something of her own. So, just from that example, I think you can see, again, that these different problem solvers are either skipping to decision-making or staying in problem-solving from very different vantage points.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, I have my own guess, but I’d love for you to diagnose me. When I’m looking at a menu, I find what I most often after is I want to be full and satisfied in a very efficient way per calorie while also experiencing deliciousness and novelty. So, I am looking at every option, and I’m sort of crossing them. I look at every option, and I eliminate every one until I’m left with perhaps two or three finalists.

And sometimes one just pops off because, hey, someone else is eating the other one so we’ve got the variety. And other times, I will, I’ve asked this question many times to wait staffs, like, “Which one is heartier? Or, which one is the most delicious and unique in your opinion?” And so, yeah, I guess I really am kind with everything. I’m all about optimizing experience relative to the criteria and values that matter most to me.

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, first, just the sheer amounts of things that you’re thinking about, and that you’re weighing against each other – hearty, savory, new, what does the waiter think – oh, my goodness, this sounds like a thinker to me. You’ve really got a lot going on. And while you can certainly have elements of listening, and elements of novelty, you’re not optimizing for forward momentum.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Cheryl Einhorn
The pace of the decision doesn’t matter to you as much as making the right decision according to the criteria that you’ve identified.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. And when I do want it to go fast, I use the Chipotle app because I’ve already done all the thinking, and this is the exact bull that I want.

Cheryl Einhorn
And that’s very exciting to the thinker. The thinker, having it be like the three bears just so, that’s important. And that is in part why the thinker is such a slow decision-maker because the thinker has huge loss aversion. They are not optimizing for the best possible outcome. They are optimizing to mitigate the downside risks.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s true. I have had moments in a restaurant where I have intense regret, like, “I absolutely should’ve ordered what you had ordered.” And I regret having made the choice that I did.

Cheryl Einhorn
And that is something that really plagues the thinker. And regret is an emotion uniquely about our decisions, and it’s a very difficult decision. It’s a very difficult emotion.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s say we are resonating with a particular archetype, or we take the assessment. Well, first of all, let us know, what is the quick and easiest way we can learn what our archetype is?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, you can go to App.AreaMethod.com and you sign up for it, and you can take the problem-solver profile. And then you can learn more about it and how to use it by reading Problem Solver, my new book which goes through how to really put it into practice, or, obviously, by getting in touch with me, and working with me to help you and your team, or your family, or your friends, in making decisions using this new knowledge.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s say we’ve got a sense for, “Okay, I’m a thinker and I’m working with an adventurer,” just for example, what do you think are the key implications in terms of, “So, now how do I live my work life differently with this knowledge?”

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, you have a really asymmetric risk-reward between these two because the adventurer wants the forward momentum, and the thinker wants to understand the why and to explore the options. And so, in a way, this can be just a wonderful group together because they’re really thinking about the problem differently.

And if you understand that, the adventurer then doesn’t have to feel frustrated that the thinker really needs to know that he or she has understood the why and the options, and the thinker doesn’t have to look at the adventurer, and say, “Why is this person in such a rush?” And together, you can really use each other’s strengths to make a decision that you both can feel good about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, tell us, any other top tips or implications that we should bear in mind as we explore this stuff?

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah, I think this is transformative. First, I don’t think that we really think that much about intellectual diversity, and the fact that the different problem-solver profiles are optimizing for different things means if you can bring in questions from all five of the vantage points, you can have a much more fulsome understanding of the problem that you’re solving.

And you also no longer, as I was mentioning, need to denigrate how other people approach their decisions. Somebody is no longer hasty. They are optimizing for forward momentum. And somebody is no longer sluggish or too slow, for instance, like the thinker. This is somebody who really wants to make sure that they’re mitigating the downside risks.

And so, I think it can give you a really beautiful appreciation for these different ways that people problem-solve and reminds you that your way is not better. It’s just different.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’d like to delve into that a little bit in terms of I can understand the style and process can be neither better nor worse, just different. I suppose I’m wondering about if someone has a capacity as an officer, executive, director, agent of an organization, whether it’s government, or nonprofit, or corporation, like, “To maximize shareholder wealth” is the sacred, I guess, oath of executives of publicly-traded corporations, according to my finance curriculum from the University of Illinois.

So, in that world, in some ways it seems like what is to be optimized for is kind of the part of the job description, if you will. And so, from like a results perspective, I guess not so much from a process perspective, so just wrestling with that, how do you think about these matters?

Cheryl Einhorn
All of these problem-solver profiles are excellent leaders and bring very different kinds of energy to their leadership. So, all of them can be very successful no matter where they are in the for-profit or the nonprofit world.

But just like when we all were going to school and we needed to figure out how to succeed for a particular teacher, when you’re working with different problem-solver profiles, you will have an easier time building trust, strengthening the relationship, and making more successful decisions together if you have a window into which of the problem-solver profiles they are.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. Cheryl, any final thoughts before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Cheryl Einhorn
No, I just think that this is absolutely transformative. In my own life, as I have applied this, I never would’ve imagined how this was able to help me with relationships, both new and ones that I’ve had for my entire life. So, I think it’s an incredible piece of research, and I really hope that it can help other people in feeling better about their own decisions, but also very much in making decisions and having good relationships with others.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah. So, one of my favorite quotes is, “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re absolutely right,” which I think was said by Henry Ford. And this is really about you putting in some of your own motivation and your own effort, and it’s this idea that the agency that you bring to something is what really can help you to succeed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Cheryl Einhorn
I’ve got a favorite study or piece of research, which is this research study about teachers, that the most success that the students have is, in part, by having a teacher who really believes in them. And I would think that this would be true outside of the world of education, that having somebody who really believes in you helps to give you incredible motivation and resiliency.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Cheryl Einhorn
One of my favorites is The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. He is a former chess champion and also a champion in the world of martial arts in what’s called push hands.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Cheryl Einhorn
I would say that one of the things that I use is this idea of not leaving before you leave. When I finish something, or get up from the day, or finish a meeting, I stay with whatever that topic is for a few minutes after to sum up my thoughts and make sure that I can re-enter well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, I think it’s the same idea of not leaving before you leave.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Cheryl Einhorn
I think it’s this idea that there’s two kinds of learning – there’s knowledge and skill. And, for me, decision-making is a skill, which means I can teach you those skills and they can be yours.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Cheryl Einhorn
I would point them to my website, which is AreaMethod.com. And there, you can learn about my books, and my research, and my articles, and get in touch to work together.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah, if you can invest in your decision-making, it can unlock everything that you’re doing, personally and professionally.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cheryl, thanks for chatting, and good luck with all your decisions.

Cheryl Einhorn
Thank you so much for having me today and for this conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Hal, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Hal Hershfield
Hey, thanks so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into some of the wisdom in your book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. But, first, I wanted to hear from you, could you share one of the best and one of the worst decisions that you’ve personally made on behalf of your future self?

Hal Hershfield
That’s a good one, ooh. Okay, the easy answer there is marrying my wife. That’s got to be the obvious one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, she’s listening. It’s the obvious one, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, so I don’t know. Should I come up with another answer?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll count it.

Hal Hershfield
Worst decision, oh, man, it’s like there’s so many to choose from there. Okay, worst decision is more of a sort of perpetual thing and not one specific decision. But I tend to be really bad at taking care of small tasks. I procrastinate on them and it is regularly bad for my various future selves.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a category of task that gets procrastinated all the time?

Hal Hershfield
Oh, yeah, anything with regards to administrative, filling out receipts, or like submitting a claim for insurance, or putting in my car registration. There are sorts of things that requires some amount of work, I don’t know why. I know why. I know why. I don’t like doing them. I always find them, sort of I’m worried that I’m not going to fill it in right, and then I just keep pushing it off.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And then sometimes, I don’t know what this says about me, I’m frustrated that the system isn’t easy. In a world of apps, and iteration, and cost and improvement, and our technology and processes, and web forms, and apps and stuff, it’s like, “Wait, seriously, I got to mail you a check? I’m going to print something out or…really?”

Hal Hershfield
Game over. As soon as it says, “Print this out,” it’s like game over because the chances that the printer at my office or the printer at home will work is considerably low.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, do you have the paper? Do you have the ink? And what I love is that Amazon is super customer focused. I now notice when I try to print a return label, it said one of the options was, “We’ll print it for you and mail it to you in four business days for 50 cents.” I don’t remember, the price was pretty good. It’s like they know. They know that printing a label is too much for me.

Hal Hershfield
It’s such a sad comment but it’s so true. And I love it, remove the friction. Make it easier.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so I’d love to hear, while putting together and researching the book Your Future Self, any really surprising or extra-fascinating and counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made in the research?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, I actually think one of the more counterintuitive parts that I came across in researching the book was the idea that we can experience what’s known as hyperopia. And what that means is, well, in my research, I focus on what’s called myopia, when we’re too sort of tunnel-focused, we have tunnel vision on the present. Hyperopia is when we reverse that. We focus so much on the future that we miss the present. And the irony there is that, in doing that, we end up making things worse for ourselves in the future as well. And that was a bit of work that really surprised me. I hadn’t really thought about that possibility before.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us an example?

Hal Hershfield
Have you ever had a gift certificate for a restaurant and you’re just waiting for the perfect opportunity to use it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
And you’re doing it because you’re thinking, “I really want to maximize this, and I want this to be good for…so that future version of me that gets to go there,” and you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and it closes. That is hyperopic. But there’s obviously more serious versions of that. There are versions of that, in fact, with our professional lives where we tell ourselves that we’re taking care of tasks, we’re doing things because that’s good for the future. And we somehow end up prioritizing the urgent over the important.

It’s like a version of this because we’re telling ourselves that we’re doing something, we’re doing something good for the long run, but, in reality, we maybe sort of shortchanging ourselves and actually making things less good for ourselves in the long term because we’re not focused on the big, important things that will actually move the ball down the field for ourselves. And that’s true both professionally and personally.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, it sounds like maybe we’ve already touched on it, but, zooming out a bit, how would you put forward the main big idea or core thesis of the book Your Future Self?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, sure. So, I think the core thesis of the book is that there are different versions of ourselves that exist over time, and, in some ways, we think about our future selves as if they are other people. And that’s okay so long as we focus on the relationship that we have with that other person. And so, the book is really aimed at understanding the relationships that we have with our future selves, and then figuring out how to improve them so that we can do things that benefit us both in the future and now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we talk about relationships. Are there some categories or archetypes? Does anybody hate their future self, like, “My relationship with my future self is my future self is my nemesis”? Or, what’s the palette or menu of choices for how that relationship can be?

Hal Hershfield
Right. That’s a fantastic question. Empirically, I’ve never asked people, “Do you hate them?” That said…

Pete Mockaitis
That’d be sad.

Hal Hershfield
It would be really sad if somebody said that. In my research and the research that others have done, we sort of treat the relationship with a future self the same way that you would treat our relationships with spouses, partners, close friends, which is to say that there’s varying degrees of distance. I can have a friend who I know, maybe they’re in my group of friends that I see but I’m not really that close to them. They exist but I don’t really connect to them.

All the way down to I can have that best friend, the person who I spend…want to spend all my time with, or my spouse, or my kids, or my aging parents. I would say that the spectrum of relationships goes from a stranger who’s sort of you see them, you know they exist but you don’t really connect to them, and don’t really know them, all the way to a person with whom you feel a great degree of emotional connection.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, this is all intriguing from a thought experiment kind of a world. But could you lay it on us in terms of what’s at stake, what are the implications of getting this relationship right versus not so right?

Hal Hershfield
Sure. We’ve looked at a variety of different things, so one thing we know the people who are more connected to their future selves, they’ve accumulated more assets over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Financially.

Hal Hershfield
Financially-speaking, exactly. We know that people feel more connected, they report greater subjective health. We found that they’re less likely to endorse unethical business practices. In other words, this is another sort of tradeoff. If I feel a lack of connection to my future selves, doing something that might financially benefit me right now but I could suffer some consequences later, well, maybe that’s okay. I’m not really thinking about later.

Other researchers have found that people that are connected to their future selves, they do better in school, higher grades, and even experience greater amounts of life satisfaction and meaning in life. I should say there’s always other factors and variables that play across these different studies. We’ve tried hard, and others have tried hard, too, to sort of isolate, and say, “Well, even in the face of things like age or education, do these relationships bear out?” And, sure enough, they seem to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so when you talk about this connection, what does that maybe look, sound, feel like in terms of our internal dialogues when we have a good rich connection to our future selves versus the non-desired alternative?

Hal Hershfield
It’s a really fascinating question that you raised because it’s not, I should say, we don’t ask people, “What does that conversation look like?” Most likely, they’re so much more idiosyncratic behavior and answers that could be given. I don’t really know what the answer would be but here’s my suspicion. I suspect that a conversation with a future self who I care deeply about is going to look more like the way that I think about and treat the people in my life who I really want to care for and take responsibility for.

The same way that you might feel about your spouse if you’re really connected to them, or the same way that you might feel about your kid, or, even I could think about the workplace, a co-worker that you really appreciate, or even an employee that they’re sort of under you but you still take an interest in their wellbeing. That’s the type of connection or relationship that we might see when we see a high degree of overlap between current and future selves.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And now I’m thinking about how, recently, this isn’t an earth shattering story, but I felt the implications. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, my desk is not the tidiest, and so I’ve accumulated LaCroix cans and more, and papers and all over the place. And so, it was a Friday, I took some time, like, “I’m really going to clean this up really well,” and so I did.

And then, Monday, I came in and I was surprised. I had forgotten my office desk had been cleaned by me in the past, and I said, “Oh, how delightful.” It’s like I was surprised. And the word relationship really does ring true here, I was like, “Well, thank you, past me. I really appreciate you cleaning up that desk because it’s just actually a joy to come into the office and behold this clean desk. I’m in a good mood and I appreciate me for having made that happen.”

Hal Hershfield
It’s a little gift from past you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah. I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it was cool.

Hal Hershfield
I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
And yet, most of the time, though, I don’t have that relationship in terms of, like good or bad, I don’t know. Like, you step on the scale, you look at the mirror, and go, “Ugh, past self, you really should’ve been watching the calories a little more, or hitting the gym a little more, or watch the diet when you get a check-in with the doctor.” It doesn’t even occur to me to think about past self in that relationship kind of a way.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I can relate to that. There are so many of those times where we’re sort of not thinking about all the different actions that we have and how they add up. The annual physical is a great example of that, when you say, “Oh, your cholesterol is a little high.” It’s like, I cannot recall the number of times that I ate in a way that probably wasn’t good for my cholesterol, but, in those moments, I’m not thinking about how each one of those kinds of sums up to the sort of worst whole.

But then, on the flipside, the gift from past self, it’s like I had this experience pang. I think I must’ve paid for a rental car going to a friend’s wedding, completely had forgotten, I go up to pay for it, and they’re like, “You already paid for it.” I’m like, “Well, who paid for it? Like, that guy, the past me? Like, what a sucker, but I’m glad he did it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Or, just sort of like accounts that accrue. I’m thinking about back when I was consulting, there was a benefit where you could use pre-tax dollars to fund your mass transit cards. Invariably, these things just accrued to large sums because I completely forgot, like they’re sort of taken out of a paycheck.

And when people go off to business school, they’d say, “Hey, well, I’m going to Harvard. I’m not going to be in Chicago anymore. I’ve got a card with $300 of mass transit value, and I’m going to sell it at a discount.” So many of those emails, actually, in my time there. And so, yeah, you just autopilot, forget, and sometimes that works in your favor.

Hal Hershfield
Yup, 100%. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to hear do you have any cool success stories or inspiring case studies associated with folks who were able to upgrade their relationship to their future self and then see cool things emerge as a result?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, actually, one of my favorite success stories, it was really funny. This was, oh, gosh, pretty deep in COVID, and I got this random email, and it’s from a high school kid, Enmal was his name. And he basically reaches out and says, “I’ve got to tell you, I went pretty dark during COVID.” I think he was like a high school junior, and when it started, he was having all of his classes at home and he’s not seeing his friends. And he says, “My diet basically consisted of ice cream and Chick-fil-A and Fruit Loops.” I forget which cereal it was but nothing super healthy. No offense to any of those companies, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
The Fruit Loops marketing brand manager is listening and enraged at you, Hal.

Hal Hershfield
Let me walk that back. Generic fast-food restaurants. And he ends up gaining 30 pounds, and he said, “I came across some of your research, and I decided to try to put it into practice.” And he said, “I went online and I printed out like an ideal-looking picture of myself, skinnier.” He used some sort of, I don’t know which technology he used to make himself look a little skinnier and healthier. He said, “I printed that, I put it in the bathroom, and I put it on the fridge.”

And he said, “Looking at that, basically, like wherever I was in the house, kept reminding me of the version of me I wanted to get back to and the version of me I wanted to become.” And it wasn’t that he just cut back on those foods. He also started exercising, etc. And he said in the span of several months, he ended up losing that weight. I forget the exact amount of time. He’s a high school kid so I think he’s probably able to gain and lose weight a little bit easier than the rest of us.

But I was really inspired by him because he was trying to consider a version of his future self who he wanted to become, and I think that sort of forced him, or prompted him, or kept him, held his hand along the way to do the things that he needed to do to get there.

Pete Mockaitis
That is excellent. Well, my key takeaway from that is to find a website that lets me visualize buffed Pete and take a look at that image, see what that does for me. And so, that’s cool in that it made it very real, concrete, visualizable, like, “Oh, okay,” as opposed to amorphous, like, “Oh, the future me is something off in space or in my imagination as opposed to something I could potentially behold with eyes visually.” That’s cool.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, and I think that’s right because, to some degree, if I say, “Think of a future Pete,” there’s probably a lot of different images that could arise there. And you might be able to create sort of an average of them, sort of an amalgamation of them, but this specific image is vivid, and that can be a pretty strong motivator for behavior, “Now, I’ve got like an actual version of me, I’m thinking about looking at.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so could you lay it on us, are there some other actionable approaches we can take to do a better job at making prudent decisions and actions in the present that benefit our future selves?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, absolutely. So, I’ll mention a couple. The marketing professor in me, of course, is saying, “You have to buy the book to find out all of them,” but I’ll mention a couple. So, there’s a category of strategies that involve trying to bring the future self closer to the present. One of those things, of course, is vividly visualizing the future self.

That doesn’t have to be just through apps. There are these apps that do age progression pretty well. But we can also try to get people to write a letter to their future self, and then write one back from that future self. It’s a really cool activity because it forces you to not only think about the future, but then to sort of go into the future and look back to now, which is, ultimately, putting yourself in the shoes of your future self, seeing the world through their eyes. That’s a vividness-enhancing exercise.

There are other strategies, though, that don’t involve necessarily trying to bring the future self closer but rather involve making the present, or rather making present-day sacrifices easier. So, what I mean by that is that every time I talk about these sorts of optimal behaviors, sometimes it’s hard to do them because it feels like all that you’re doing is sacrificing. It’s like, you right now that’s got to experience the pain for future use gain, which is it’s not a great situation to be.

And if you think about the relationship analogy that we talked about before, it’s like now you’re always the one sacrificing, future you is always the one benefitting. That’s not great. So, we’ve explored different ways that we can make present day sacrifices feel easier. One of my favorites is something that we call temporal reframing. I think there’s probably other terms for this, but the general idea is that I chunk something down into smaller and smaller parts.

I’ll give you an example of this. My collaborators and I, we worked with a fintech bank, a fintech company, this is an app designed to get people to save, and we asked people if they wanted to sign up for an automatic savings account, and some people got the message that they could sign up for $150 a month account, and other people got a message saying they could sign up for a $5 a day account. Now, it’s the same amount of money, of course, five bucks a day is 150 bucks a month. Four times as many people signed up when it was framed as $5 a day. I think it’s just an easier sacrifice to make.

Other researchers have found that that same sort of temporal reframing can get people to volunteer more, to do more volunteer hours. Rather than 200 hours total, how about four hours a week or whatever it is? We can sort of break it down in different parts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Now, one of the other strategies that falls under this sort of bucket of making the present easier is, I don’t know what the right term is, I like to call it sort of like attack the side, not the core. Janet Schwartz, she’s a friend of mine, she’s a behavioral scientist, and she had this, I think, such a clever idea. She was going to Coney Island one summer with her friends, and it was right after New York started doing the calorie labeling on menus.

She goes there and she goes to get the hotdog and a side of fries. Like, what else are you going to do when you go to Coney Island, of course? And she sees that the fries are about 1100 calories, which is I think quite high.

Pete Mockaitis
And doesn’t even fill you up.

Hal Hershfield
That’s right. And no one goes there for the…I mean, you don’t go there for the fries. You go there for the hotdog. So, she and her friends said, “Wow, that’s a lot. How about we split the fries and we each got a hotdog?” And she starts thinking, “Wait, there’s something to this.” If you have a goal of, I don’t know, in this case, cutting down on your calories, you could do it in a painful way of cutting back on the thing that you love, or you could achieve the exact same thing by cutting back on something that’s much more peripheral.

It would be ridiculous if she got the fries and a third of a hotdog. And so, she actually worked with a restaurant where they put something like this in their plates, where the cashiers offered the restaurant patrons the option to get a half of the scoop of fried rice. They can get their full order of orange chicken or whatever it is that they’re getting but you want to take a half of the side. You pay the same amount, which is crazy.

And about a third of people say, “Yeah, I’ll do that,” which is so interesting because it suggests that that’s a strategy that people, I think, might warm to. So, again, that’s all about making the present day sacrifices easier. And then there’s a third sort of category of practical strategies, Pete, that I call staying on course.

This is where you, essentially, say, “Okay, you know what, there’s this version of me right now, there’s a version in the future who’s going to want to look back, and say, ‘Hey, I did the thing, I ate healthy, I was productive at work, I saved money,’” and then there’s the guy in the middle who is going to screw it up, the guy who, “I say I’m going to get up tomorrow and go for a run,” and that guy tomorrow morning who’s going to say, “I can’t do it. I got to sleep in.”

And so, this third category of strategies basically says recognizing that there’s all those tensions there, let’s figure out what we call commitment devices, strategies where we can put sort of guardrails on our behavior so that we don’t screw things up. So, one website called stickK.com, that’s with two Ks. Do you know this one?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve been there but I don’t think listeners do, so lay it on us.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, and it’s basically this website where I can put in my goal. Let’s say I want to work out three days a week, 30 minutes at a time, and then I’ll say, “Who’s going to follow up with me? It’s going to be you, Pete. And, oh, I’ll give you my credit card, and I’ll give it the name of an anti-charity.” Well, we don’t have to get political but an organization I don’t want to donate to. How does that sound?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just for example, we might say guns. Some people might be pro-gun, some people might be anti-gun. And so, you can imagine your dollars flowing in the direction you don’t want it to go, just to make it clear for folks, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
There you go. That’s really good. Or, you could say Trump versus Biden, right? Some are on either side. Now, you’re going to call me at the end of the week, and you’re going to say, “Hal, did you do it? Did you work out three times?” And I’ll say, “Pete, this week was tough. I only worked out twice.” And you’ll say, “Okay, good to know.” You’re going to click no on my account, and instantly 200 bucks is going to go toward that charity, that organization, that I don’t want to donate to. That’s a pretty strong motivator.

Now, I’m not saying I won’t mess up but it might make it a lot harder for me to stay in bed a little bit longer if I know doing so was going to cost me possibly hundreds of dollars and not towards some charity that I wanted to donate to but toward one I don’t want to donate to. And there’s other versions of this. There are all sorts of levels of commitment devices which I get into the book. But the key here is picking something that is a strong enough punishment to deter the behavior that we don’t want to do but not so strong that I don’t sign up for this to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And to that point about it not being too strong, it’s funny, I’ve chatted with folks about stickK.com, and they said, “You know, I think that’s a really effective motivator but the anti-charity is so evil to me. Like, I don’t even feel morally okay with setting that structure up in my life.” And so, my wife and I, we were joking, and we were saying, “Well, huh, as a thought experiment, what is something that would hurt to give money to and yet doesn’t feel morally problematic?”

And I think we found some, like, super ritzy country club. So, it’s like, “They don’t need our money. They don’t need it. Like, who knows what it’s going to go to, like polishing golf balls? I don’t even know what they would do with extra money. They don’t need it. But it wouldn’t be evil for them to get it.”

Hal Hershfield
It’s so good because it’s not morally reprehensible. That’s so good.

Pete Mockaitis
It just feels really bad for them to get it.

Hal Hershfield
There’s another version of this that doesn’t involve a financial punishment. It’s a product called the Pavlok.

Pete Mockaitis
We interviewed that guy, yeah.

Hal Hershfield
Oh, did you? That’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Maneesh Sethi, back in the day.

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, that’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
I tried one. It’s not comfortable.

Hal Hershfield
Oh, did you? Yeah, I had a student who told me he just has the hardest time getting out of bed. And putting this on, basically, the more you snooze, I forget what his setting was, but it’s like if he snoozed more than a couple times, he’d start getting shocked by this thing to get him out of bed.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like a rubber band around your wrist but more unpleasant. But, again, that same principle holds, it’s like, “If the shock is so unpleasant, and you have to push a button to administer it to yourself, then you may not do it.” So, I like the automaticity and I like the third-party bits, but, in a way, that’s part of the fun. It sounds like you have a lot of examples in the book.

It’s to think about, “Well, what works for you based on is it so repugnant you can’t even countenance doing it? Okay, well. then maybe something else. But is it so minor, you don’t even care? Like, okay, well, you got to crank it up.”

Hal Hershfield
Right, exactly. It’s funny, I have this thing now, in writing the book, I ended up talking with this guy, Dave Krippendorf, who founded this company. It was originally called Kitchen Safe, and basically a little box you put in the kitchen. There’s a little electronically timed lock on top of the box. He designed it for people to put away their snack food. You can time it anywhere from a minute to 10 days.

So, my kids’ Halloween candy, whatever it is, I pop it in there, I’ll set it for 12 hours so I don’t touch it tonight. Well, he found that so many people were using it for so many things other than snacks, that he renamed it the kSafe, from Kitchen Safe to kSafe. He sent me one, and Pete, I use it for my phone, I have to admit, it’s not like we have dinner with our kids every night.

But a couple nights a week or whenever the schedules work out, it’s such a bad distraction when I have it at the table, “Oh, I just need it to change the music,” or, “I just need it to…” whatever. It’s just there. And then before I know it, I am checking Twitter, or my email, or something that is like totally meaningless. I think this is probably relatable, I assume. Tell me this isn’t just me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Hal Hershfield
So, I throw my phone in there, I’ll set the timer for two hours. Let’s say we have dinner at 5:30, it’s put in there for 7:30 or whatever. I know that sounds like a very early dinner but our kids are little. And it’s amazing because it completely removes the temptation, like it’s not even when I get up, I’m like, “Oh, I see my phone. I should check it.” It’s like it’s just not there so I don’t even worry about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it’s cool. That’s really cool. And maybe it’s a video game controller or any number of things: snacks, phones.

Hal Hershfield
Video game controllers is a great example. I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. So, the commitment device, so it takes a bit of you out of it, and that’s really handy. I wanted to get your take. I love it when you drop these numbers in terms of with the temporal reframing, with the five bucks a day versus 150 a month. We have a 4X lift in intake. And then a third of the people opted to go for half of the fried rice.

To the fried rice point, I’ve just got to mention, once when I was looking at my calories pretty closely, I was at a Cheddar’s and so I made my order, and then just randomly they brought out this honey biscuit thing, and I said, “Oh, what’s this?” And they said, “Oh, yeah, it’s a honey biscuit. It has this and this and this, and it’s on the house. It’s just a thank you for being here.” I said, “Oh, wow.”

Hal Hershfield
On the house. On the house means the calories don’t count, right?

Pete Mockaitis
So, I said, “Oh, wow, that’s great. Thank you. Could you take it away?” He was like puzzled, I was like, “Yeah, I’m just concerned I might eat it.” And so, he did, and that was cool. And then BJ Fogg, he talks about tiny habits. He was on the show. And he, was it chips or Noah’s bread, he would just fill up on bread if he was at the table, and so he just rehearsed his line with a smile, “Oh, no bread for me. Thanks.” It’s like, “Don’t put this on the table. I will eat it.”

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, it’s so good. The bread one is so good. One of the things I talk about in the book is, about five years ago, I got diagnosed with celiac, and it’s been so interesting because I was also one of those people, especially in social situations where my social anxiety was dialed up just a little bit, I would find myself just eating all of the things that were out that I wasn’t even hungry for, but just eating. And it’s often the sliders, the bread, the whatever.

So, all of that stuff is now off the table for me. And it’s really interesting because it’s almost like there’s this giant kSafe walking around with me when it comes to carbs like that. And so, when I’m at a restaurant, I’m not even tempted by the basket of bread because it’s like I know I just can’t eat it. But it’s like psychologically, “What are the shifts that we can make to make that happen?”

And I love the BJ Fogg example of, like, “None for me, please.” It just makes it automatic. It’s a habit. That’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, so we talked about a number of commitment devices. And, ah, yes, I wanted to ask, when you dropped these numbers, 4X on the temporal reframing, a third people opting for half of the fried rice amount, any other sort of eye popping numbers in terms of, “Huh, this little intervention makes a world of difference”?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah. Well, it’s funny, I get cautious with eye popping numbers in social science because they always say, “Was that real?” So, I’ll say, “Look, the temporal reframing, the 4x difference, I thought that was 30% versus 7%. That’s pretty big.” We have another study that’s coming out, or should be out any day now, where we worked with the Bank of Mexico, 50,000 customers, half of them get access to these aged images of themselves, and half don’t, and they’re all getting these messages that they should save.

And the folks who do, they’re 16% more likely to make a contribution to their account. So, when you say, “Was that eye popping?” I don’t know if that’s eye popping per se, but what I find exciting about this is that if I can get 16% more people to do anything when it comes to behavior, then that can really add up and compound over time.

You think about that for voting, or taking care of your teeth or your health, or, in this case, making a contribution to your retirement account. That really can add up and compound in ways that are really beneficial over time.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m also thinking about sort of general decision-making. When it’s not a matter of discipline, but rather just considering options, is there a way you recommend taking into account our future selves in the decision-making process?

Hal Hershfield
I think that is such a good question. It’s funny, because so much of my research has been focused on “How do we relate to our future selves? How do we connect to them?” and so on. But I don’t think the answer here is you should talk to them and think about them all the time. I think that, well, first off, we’re going to start ignoring them. Secondly, I just don’t think it’s sustainable.

So, I think that there’s probably some sort of balancing act here, and I wish I could say to you, “The research says this is the amount of time you should talk to your future self, and this is the amount of time that you shouldn’t.” We don’t know that. And, in all honesty, if I were to do that study, I’m sure there would be so many sorts of individual differences there. For some people, it makes sense to talk more, and some people less.

Here’s what I will say, though, my suspicion is that when it comes to big decisions and things that, once you decide, there’s some sort of automaticity that will carry out over time. So, like signing up for a savings account, signing up to work with a nutritionist or a career coach or whatnot. For those sorts of decisions, I think it may make a lot of sense to really try to step into the shoes of your future self, and think about how this action will impact that person.

For the everyday ones, things like my credit card, my eating habits, whether I get up and exercise or not, for those types of decisions, that’s where I think the world of habit formation becomes much more relevant, but I want to say that we should start, before we can even start going down the path of habit formation, it makes sense to have that conversation with our future selves and strengthen that bond with them so that, “Now, I can, essentially, get the ball rolling, and get the process started to do those things that will, ultimately, benefit me later, but also now.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And I’m curious, is there an overwhelming category of activities, or domains, or responsibility where people undercount their future self?

Hal Hershfield
Wow, that’s great. So, not that I know of, I can’t say, “Oh, there’s this one thing.” It’s easy to point to the different domains that sort of we know pop up all the time. So, under-saving and overspending, overeating, not exercising enough, those are the ones that sort of come up. And, in fact, if you look at the goals that people put forth on stickK.com, a lot of them have to do with exercising and eating behaviors.

I think there’s another one that maybe doesn’t come up as explicitly but it’s still relevant is time expenditures, “So, how I divvy up my time for the things that feel good right now in the moment versus the things that will last and give me benefits and wellbeing and positivity and joy over time?” And, as an example, to get concrete, I don’t know if you have this, but I have the thing that come up a lot for me is know I should call one my buddies, a friend I haven’t seen in a while just to catch up for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or even set aside a night to go out and get drinks or dinner or whatever.

But in the moment, it almost feels better to just not do it. I can go do the thing I was doing, or be on Instagram, watch an episode of Succession, or whatever it is that I’m watching. And there’s like a little present moment bump from just kind of being lazy and ignoring that phone call or the plan-making. But the reality is, over and over and over again, those decisions will be bad for my relationships. Those expenditures of time will take away from the time that I get to spend with people that I might genuinely care about.

And here’s the real irony, if I sort of get over that initial little discomfort, and reach out and call my buddy, or set up a plan to have dinner with them, and that’s true, by the way, for our spouses and our other family members, too, those things are good for the long run but they’re also good for now, too. Like, I haven’t once felt one of those phone calls with an old friend, and said, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t done that.” Normally, a good use of time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. All right. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Hal Hershfield
Oh, no, I think you asked so many good questions. This is great.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Hal Hershfield
I’m not sure if it’s actually like a famous quote or not, but it’s something that one of my mentors told me, “You can’t get what you don’t ask for.” And I love that in the sort of negotiation context.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Hal Hershfield
Favorite experiment or bit of research is probably work on what’s known as the End-of-History Illusion. I talked about it in the book but it’s the basic idea that I can recognize that I’ve changed from the past to the present, but I somehow think that my rate of change, or my rate of progress, will slow from now unto the future, that I’ve somehow arrived at who I am. This is work by Jordi Quoidbach, and Dan Gilbert, and Tim Wilson. And I think it sheds some really interesting light on how we sometimes do a disservice to our future selves by not recognizing the ways in which we will change moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Hal Hershfield
I love the book A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. And it is all about different sort of friends but some of whom are connected, and some of whom aren’t, and the sort of these various little interconnections that exist both within a certain group in New York City, but then also over time. This is from, like, 10, 12 years ago. And it’s just sort of a fascinating examination of the web of connections that exist between the people we know now as well as from the past and to the future.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Hal Hershfield
Evernote. I don’t know if that’s the type of tool that you’re looking for.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Hal Hershfield
But being able to have sort of my notes everywhere, wherever I am, is super useful for me because there’s always things that are popping up, and then anytime I’ve told myself, “I’ll remember that thing later,” I pretty much never do. And so, being able to jot it down quickly and have it, assume everything else is super important for me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Hal Hershfield
My wife and I started to plan out the meals that we’re going to have, whatever it is, on Friday or Saturday, more or less for the rest of the week. And it has drastically decreased the tension involved around what should we have for dinner every night, and drastically increased my efficiency and productivity the rest of the week because I don’t have to spend that time thinking about, “What are we doing for dinner?” I just look at the little sheets, say, “Oh, that’s what we planned out.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah. So, one of the key nuggets that I think people sort of quote back to me often is it’s really more just the big idea that there can be this future self, this salient future self that can exist in the future. I’ve heard a lot of people say to me, “I haven’t thought about things that way, and it gives me sort of a person to consider, and then also an optimistic take on where I’m going through time.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, you can go to my website HalHershfield.com. Everything about my research and my book and whatnot is there. You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter as well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Hal Hershfield
Yeah, I would say one final challenge for folks who are looking to be awesome at their jobs is to consider not the tradeoff between now and later, but to think about the harmony between now and later. So, think about the things that you are doing at work and at your jobs that will benefit you now, and may not benefit you in the future, but then also switch the focus. Think about the things that you can do right now that will provide benefits both now and later. And then consider how you’re spending your time in those different pursuits.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Hal, this has been a treat. I wish you and your future self much luck.

Hal Hershfield
Hey, thanks, Pete. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Paul, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Paul Magnone
Thank you for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom but, first, I think we need to hear about your time working as a DJ when you were in college.

Paul Magnone
Oh, geez. Well, this was back before CDs were popular. We actually had a record library. So, this was carrier current radio, I didn’t do parties. It was college radio. And it was just being at an engineering school, it was a very liberating evening, whether it was Mondays or Tuesdays, depending on the semester, very liberating evening to go in there and just go into the record library, and do your thing. And it was me and a friend, Jim, who maybe he’ll be listening to this. I’ll tell him to listen in. And he would go and get every Led Zeppelin album, and then he would say, “The rest is up to you.”

So, depending on what was happening on a given week, I would manage the programming, and it was a little David Letterman-ish on the commentary side, but certainly heavy rock and roll, and it certainly scratched an itch in the midst of all the engineering school.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s funny. Well, when you talked about Led Zeppelin, that reminds me, isn’t that like the quintessential DJ thing to say, “Get the Led out”?

Paul Magnone
There you go. Well, you would go and get all the Led Zeppelin and not care about anything else. So, I said, “Do you like anything other than Led Zeppelin?” He said, “Yeah, absolutely, but you handle all that.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, that’s a great system there for decision-making right there, is that he had a system which was Led Zeppelin, and you had to work a little harder with your music decision-making. That’s my forced segue, Paul. How am I doing?

Paul Magnone
They’re pretty good. Pretty good, yeah. So, it was option one was always locked in, and then it was what was the next option, so.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so you have codified some of your wisdom in the book Decisions Over Decimals: Striking the Balance between Intuition and Information. And, can you tell me, when it comes to this decision-making stuff, do you have a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery that you want to share right off the bat?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, I think why this is intriguing to people, and we’ve spoken to thousands of executives and probably thousands more students as we teach at Columbia University when I say we, first of, it’s myself and Oded Netzer, who’s the Vice Dean of Research at Columbia Business School, and Christopher Frank, who is currently Vice President at AmEx Market Insights, leading the market insights team there. And we’ve come together over the past seven years, and we teach what we have learned.

So, obviously, there’s a heavy dose of theory here, but we’re practitioners, we’re in the trenches. And so, what we reflect back is “What are the practical tools and techniques that lead to better decision-making?” And you start to discover that it’s a hot topic but it makes people anxious. So, we live in a time today when data is exploding and yet it feels invasive and intimidating. So, for a lot of people, data is just not fun. And other people say, “I love data,” and then they kind of fumble the football.

So, in reality, we’re fortunate to have this staggering amount of information at our fingertips and yet we often hear people say, “But I don’t have enough data.” Okay. Well, maybe you’re not putting things in perspective. And, ultimately, with all this information and all these things that are flowing by, we consistently see poor decision-making and wasted investment, wasted resources at companies, wasted just time and effort and so forth, and we took a step back and said, “Well, why is this? Is it caused by fear, or overconfidence, or bias?”

And we realized that, with some focus and some of the techniques that we talk about, we can build a tribe of better decision-makers and maybe make a dent on all these wastes. That’s kind of our motivation behind it all.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that sounds exciting and I’d love to dig into just that. I’m intrigued then, in your subtitle, you got “Striking the Balance between Intuition and Information.” We’ve got boatloads of information. When it comes to intuition, first, could you define it for us and what’s its role here?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, so that’s a great question. And the fact is where you’re constantly challenged by people saying, “So, you’re going to teach me intuition? Don’t you either have it or don’t have it?” And the answer is, “Well, people often have intuition and they’re not listening to it.” And so, when you look at what’s referred to as the theory of learning, there’s competence and complexity. So, you begin, think as a toddler, you don’t know what you don’t know. And, suddenly, you start to put some things together, you start to hear some things, and you start to see patterns, and you start to learn.

And then, as you start to learn, you realize there are things that you don’t know. So, now you’re at the next level. You’re now conscious about your incompetence. And as you progress up this ladder, and there’s multiple steps along the way, you eventually get to the age of…or to the point of a teenage driver, a driver for the first time. You’re now, hopefully, consciously competent, you know what your limitations are, you know what’s happening around you. And by the time you get to be a seasoned driver, you don’t have to think so much when you’re making a choice.

When you’re driving and you’re a seasoned driver, and there’s a snowstorm, you might turn down the radio a little bit because you want less input signal, but you have a sense, and you’re sensing with your fingers what’s happening, you’re sensing all around you, and you might not even sense what’s about to happen but you see up ahead, “Hey, I remember that when I get to a curve like that, in a situation like this, with the weather this way, I should probably do the following.” So, there’s a sense of acumen that builds up over time.

And the fact is, in a business world, we say, “No, no, I just want the data. Just tell me how much it’s snowing. Just tell me the tire pressure.” Really, is that all you need to know? Or, do you really need to sense and respond in real time, and really get a sense for what’s happening? And really terrific leaders talk about the fact that they have a feel for the business. So, let’s take your question and go ask some business leaders, “What do you mean by feel for the business?” They may have different answers, but, ultimately, it’s some level of intuition about their business, how it’s impacted by the world, how their business impacts the world.

And so, this notion of intuition is the companion to all the data that we dive into or that we think we want to dive into. And so, the notion is we have to balance that. So, rather than make a decision based on just data, or based on just gut or intuition, trust your gut – there’s another wonderful top gut by a colleague of ours – what we’re saying is that balanced view is what’s important, and threading that needle, and building the toolkit for yourself so you can balance the data and the human judgment, that’s the path forward.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And I see additional interplay there associated with intuition. We have hordes of data at our disposal. It can be hard to even know what sorts of analyses to run on that, and intuition can serve up fantastic questions for investigation or hypotheses, like, “You know, I have a sense that maybe this is going on. Now, let’s take a look at data to see, in fact, if it is or is not.”

Paul Magnone
Yeah. And we hear a lot about data scientists, and, “Well, I need a data scientist.” To do what? At the end of the day, there’s a set of people that need to come together to drive a decision. There’s the business leader who should be data-driven, who should be paying attention to the data, but not only paying attention to the data. There is the data scientist, there is the data engineer who brings all the data together, but there’s also a data translator. And that person really ensures that what we’re solving for aligns with the business need.

And we also like to talk about a data artist, because, at the end of the day, we need to tell a story, and you need to compel people to action, and doing that requires you to put all of this in some sort of frame that is understandable and digestible. And so, that’s kind of a team that comes together to say, “Listen, yeah, there’s all these components, but how do I compel people to make a choice and how did we make the right choice?”

Pete Mockaitis
A lot of great stuff there. Maybe to tie some of it together and launch us, Paul, could you perhaps give us a cool story or a case study of a professional who did some great work with both intuition and information to come up with some rocking breakthrough decisions?

Paul Magnone
Well, I don’t know if this was a rocking breakthrough decision, but I will tell a personal story about when I was working for, probably at the time, a Fortune 20, maybe Fortune 50 company. You guys can sort out who that is. And we were investigating whether to work with a heavily backed startup in Silicon Valley, and I was charged with doing the due diligence, the business side of the due diligence, and I had a colleague of mine who was leading the technical due diligence.

And after weeks of investigation, we looked and said, “You know, this is, I think, a fascinating company but we’re not sure even after weeks of investigation,” because when we got to some detailed questions, they hid behind non-disclosure agreements and other issues and so forth. And the technical side we felt, “Well, we could probably recreate what they did but maybe there was something compelling here that we didn’t understand, so maybe we’ll take a flyer on that and give it a shot.”

On the business side, they kept on telling us, “You know what, you’re going to have a wildly profitable business if you base your business on our new technology.” Now, in hindsight, there were some signals that got my attention, specifically, they weren’t answering questions in much detail. And then, finally, after pressing them, their business development lead sent me a spreadsheet, and he said, “Look through this, and you can model out how profitable your business will be based on our technology stat.” And I called them back five minutes later, and I said, “Well, either your spreadsheet is broken or your business is broken.”

And I know I took a provocative approach to my comment there, but that was built on the intuition that we were all starting to build up the perspective that there was something that wasn’t quite right. The spreadsheet, let me describe that for a minute. There was a very large Excel, with one cell that I was allowed to put a number in, and this was a business around computing infrastructure, so servers. So, there 10,000 servers in the cell.

And it showed, when you did all the math, it showed a wildly profitable business running 10,000 servers. And he said, “Put in a 100,000, put in a million. You’re a huge company. You’ll just do more.” So, I put in one server because I want to understand at the atomic level…

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, fixed costs, labor costs, scale.

Paul Magnone
Yeah, what’s granular. One server. Wildly profitable. And I said, “Oh, that’s interesting.” So, I put in zero servers. Wildly profitable. So, either they had some magic or there was something that was wrong. Now, why do I tell this story? At the end of the day, we had data, we had insights, we had spent time with them, but, really, it was that blend as I described before of a lot of information, or seemingly a lot of information, but our intuition telling us, “We’re really not seeing the right information. There’s something they’re not showing us.”

And by pushing on that button right there, it opened up a further discussion. We, ultimately, wound up not doing business with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. So, tell us, how can we become similar Jedi masters, Paul, to get that sense of, “What’s missing? And how do I push on it?” Any key questions or frameworks or tactics that get us to making more good decisions more often?

Paul Magnone
Sure. Sure. So, there are really three fundamental ideas to lean on, I think, behind the book. So, leaders have just an enormous amount of data but we all see it. They’re not making better decisions. So, why is that? So, they’re denouncing the data, or they’re choosing to trust their gut, or they’re spending so much time trying to get a perfect decision. And they think the same data is the new oil so there’s spending as much as they can to build a bigger and better data refinery for that oil.

When, instead, what leads to a great decision is the balance that we’ve been talking about. So, that’s the first thing. Don’t lean in to one side or the other. Focus on that balance. The second thing is you don’t need to be a math whiz to drive great decisions. The smartest person in the room is the person who asks the better question. And that person, that leader, blends information and the intuition and the experience, as we described before, that leads to the better outcomes.

Think about it, you’re in a meeting, and the person who had the factoid, you don’t go up to that person and say, “That was amazing that you had that fact at your fingertips.” But the person that asks the question that nobody expected, that insightful thing that cuts right through, that’s the person you want to go have coffee with, right?

And the third thing is, as humans, we are terrible decision-makers, and, largely because we don’t have our bearings. And so, one way is to really explore what’s happening in the decision and the moment that you make it, and one way to look at it is you’re balancing time, risk, and trust. And if you think about that, “Do I have no time? It’s a crisis, or, do I have a lot of time?” Are you a fireman or are you in Congress? Do you have a lot of time?

Is it a high-risk or a low-risk situation? Are lives at stake? Are billions at stake? Or is it a throwaway decision, and it’s a reversible decision? Some decisions people agonize over and yet they’re reversible. And then the last part, trust, do you trust the data? Do you trust the person that gave you the data? Do you trust the organization that stands behind that data?

So, as you triangulate all those three, that in itself is a framework that should help you make some better decisions. Ultimately, we pull all this together and we refer to all of this as quantitative intuition, which is intentionally an oxymoron because you’re bringing the quant side with the intuitive side. And we define that as the ability to make decisions with incomplete information, and you’re using three techniques: precision questioning, contextual analyses, and the synthesis to see the situation clearly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you perhaps walk us through an example in which we’re applying these principles to an actual decision?

Paul Magnone
Sure. So, let’s talk about a day in the life of one of your listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Paul Magnone
Because you love your listeners, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
We sure do.

Paul Magnone
There you go. So, your leader comes in on a Monday or a Tuesday, and says, “How do we react to this headline from the competitor?” Or maybe you’re beginning a planning…yeah, right? I mean, it’d never happen.

Pete Mockaitis
My first question is which headline and which competitor?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, yeah, right. But everybody at this moment is thinking this just happened yesterday. Or, maybe you’re beginning a planning cycle for a new product launch. Or, maybe your business is in decline and you’re trying to decide where to place the resources that are scarce. So, in each case, regardless of your role, if you’re in product or sales or marketing or manufacturing, everybody’s taught like a bias to action, so they start to jump in, “What? Let me go dive in.”

And what you should be doing is defining what problem you’re solving first. So, put that problem in context, “Here, our competitor announced this. Here’s the headline from our competitor. Let’s zero in on that one.” Well, put it in absolute terms, put it in context, absolute terms. Look at it over time and relative to what’s going on elsewhere.

So, the competitor said, “I just sold 100 shovels yesterday.” “That’s awesome. I sold 200 shovels yesterday.” Or, “I sold 200 and the competitor sold 500.” While you’re busy high-fiving that you sold 200 shovels, your competitor is walking all over you. By the way, why did that happen? Well, there was a freak snowstorm in July. Okay, so were you going to base your business and change your strategy based on an anomaly? No.

So, what are the assumptions that are going into that decision? Do you believe those assumptions? Is that true? And is it maturely important to your business or is it a blip? These are kinds of the things that you need to think about, those parameters, so we can go through any number of examples. But I think your listeners are probably living this every day.

And through this all, they need to synthesize all these different datapoints. So, we preach a lot about synthesizing. What happens most often is people are in meetings and you’re summarizing what you already know, or you’re summarizing to get to a point that you think the boss has already said because they’ve already anchored you somehow with one of their early comments. So, synthesize the datapoints and then go to the data after that. Then go to the data, right?

So, start with those first principles, “What is it that we really know? What problem are we solving? Do we really want to grow a product line, or are we stable, or are we under attack?” And then make a recommendation after you’ve set the frame for the problem, and then interrogated the data. So, this is what we refer to as being a fierce data interrogator, not a random data interrogator.

So, ultimately, we think of this as jazz. It’s not waterfall because a lot of the behaviors in these different disciplines – products, sales, marketing, manufacturing – tends to be rigid, it tends to be a waterfall, and they don’t read and react – to borrow a term from sports – they don’t read and react in the moment. And, ultimately, it needs to be jazzed.

You know the theme of your business, and you may go often at different directions but you’ll come back, and the drummer is going to go and do something, and, hopefully, it fits in the context, and you’re going to come back. So, it’s jazz. Go to the question, go to the technique that’s valuable in that moment, and don’t just rely on kind of the rigid thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when you talk about jazz, I’m imagining it like, for marketing, “We launched a campaign, and then we see how it did, and then we interrogated, in terms of we get some contexts. Like, how well is that campaign performing based on general benchmarks, or historical other campaigns, or competitors, if we can know that?”

And then you say, “Oh, wow, that’s awesome. Let’s double down the budget in this channel with this messaging to this segment,” or, “Uh-oh, that’s very disappointing. Let’s perhaps reallocate budget in a different vibe.” So, it’s like jazz in that something happens and we respond in flow to it as oppose to, “Nope, it says in this quarter we’re spending $50,000 on Facebook ads, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Paul Magnone
Right, “Let’s go to the spreadsheet and say what I’m permitted to do.” That’s not thinking. That’s reacting. And that same marketing lead, marketing team, what you described is Monday morning. Wednesday morning, they have a different headline, and their competitor just announced something that’s shocking. So, in one scenario, they’re being proactive on a product launch and seeing the results, and then doubling down, as you said. In another scenario, they’re suddenly under attack, and that was all in the same week. So, how do you make decisions in those different situations, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, I want to talk a little bit about your phrase quantitative intuition. It sounds like you described a bit of that. But how do we get better at that in terms of this number feels high, wrong, low, crazy? Like, how do we know that or get there?

Paul Magnone
Right. Well, we try to not say crazy but, yeah, it’s really those three dimensions that I talked about at the end there. It’s precision questioning, contextual analyses, and syntheses. So, let’s break all those down. Precision questioning, as I said before, we tend to kind of react to the factoids and not take a step back, and say, “Well, listen, let’s put all this in context. What are the first principles? What are the fundamentals of our company? Am I reacting to an anomaly? Or, am I really making a decision based on a thought-out element?”

And precision questioning is really a technique where you will ask, “You know what, I want to understand what to do with a millennial audience.” “Great. Could you say more?” “Well, I want to understand how to sell this product to a millennial audience.” “Any millennial audience?” “I want to understand how to sell this product to a millennial audience that has this kind of budget.” You’re asking more granular questions until you get to an atomic level that people say, “Oh, what you’re really looking for is this well-defined decision, this well-defined task.”

And most often, we don’t spend the time to get granular. And one of the techniques that we talk about to do that is, we call it an IWIK framework, “I wish I knew,” and just the nature of that question implies permission, “What is it you want to know? What is it you know about a millennial?” So, spending the time, it requires a little patience. But spending the time upfront to do that precision questioning to narrow and get clear about it, to get concise about the thought, is critically important. That’s the first piece for precision questioning.

The second piece is the contextual analyses. So, as I said before, look at everything in context. What is the situation in absolute terms? What is it over time? What is it relative to what else is going on with my competitors, with other divisions in my company? And as you look at that context, you’ll come to the realization, “This is important to my business or not. Is this a blip? Or, this requires us to really consider a change to our strategy.”

And then the last piece is the syntheses, which almost no one does. Everyone summarizes and gives you every piece of information. Some of this is pride, “Look, I spent three weeks putting together 47 incredible spreadsheets and reports.” “That’s awesome. Put that in the appendix and tell me what you’ve learned from that. Tell me what’s surprising you in that. Tell me what is crystallized that you, as a smart person that we hired into this company, believe based on what you’ve just interrogated.”

Most of the time, people bring that to their leader, and say, “Look at all this work that I’ve done.” And the way we like to think of syntheses is everybody is the director of a movie. If you look at a movie, maybe an hour and a half, two hours, there’s what? Hundreds of hours on the cutting room floor because you don’t have to tell every detail. You can put all that in an appendix, but focus on what’s critical and what matters.

In journalism, they talk about not burying the lead, being very critical about what is the most important aspect. And we get away from that in business. So, you pull all that together and that’s what we refer to as quantitative intuition. And so, we talk about a set of techniques to go through that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, I’d love to hear, do you have some super favorite questions that you’ve relied upon and you find super valuable in many different decision-making contexts?

Paul Magnone
So, yeah, it’s a great question. And we’ve talked before about putting things in context, which I think is one incredible pillar. But one of my favorite questions is a very short question, which is, “What surprised you?” Real simple. And the fact is if anyone has ever gone to a party, what happens when you leave the party? The people that you’re at the party with don’t talk about, well, yes, they had enough drinks, they had enough food, but that’s not the conversation. It’s what surprised them about the interaction between people, what surprised them about a particular situation.

So, in our personal life, we make the space and we give ourselves permission to have a conversation about surprise. But in the business world, no, no, no, the boss wants to talk about this, “I have a sneaking suspicion that we should be interrogating this other dimension but I’m not even going to bring it up.”

So, if you make the space for surprise, if you have the courage, or, as a business leader, you ensure that your team feels empowered to say, “Yup, we’re going to do the analyses that was asked for, but I’m going to make the space for surprise, and say this is an outlier that doesn’t make sense. This is an outlier that I think we should interrogate more. Or, really, we’re investigating the wrong thing, and the surprising thing is here’s a critical issue.” So, be open to that surprise and make the space for that conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that question. Please, Paul, more like that.

Paul Magnone
Yeah, we talk about IWIKs, “I wish I knew,” that’s probably one of the most critical techniques that we talk about. And, really, as I said before, you’re going back and forth between these various techniques, and you may find something in the surprise. This gets back to the jazz. When you have that surprise conversation, people can then say, “Oh, you know what, I want to go back and redefine the problem. I want to go back and maybe do a different set of IWIKs to explore an area, explore an adjacent area, explore a different area because, now, I’m tuned a little differently.”

So, really, it’s a lot of back and forth with these techniques. We also talk very much about guesstimating because, at the end of the day, what we’re taught from grammar school and up is “What’s the answer? What’s the number?” And mathematical precision matters, I’m an engineer by training. Everybody of the three authors were all technical, but guesstimating is really helpful.

So, the classic problem is, “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” Well, you don’t need a census to go do that. You can figure that out on the back of a napkin. And the majority of people are asked on a daily basis to provide an estimate on the back of a napkin, “Well, what do you think? What’s in the zone here?” because we can course-correct once we know that we’re in the zone. And they’re at a loss for, “Well, how do I guesstimate?” So, we talk about a series of techniques around guesstimating.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re bringing me back to my case-interview days, Paul.

Paul Magnone
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Good times. All right. Well, so lots of good stuff. Could you bring it together in a cool example in terms of a person or a team used a number of these techniques from beginning to end to reach a fantastic decision?

Paul Magnone
Sure. One other company, this is one of the other authors had this direct experience, so we will again mask the company to protect the innocent or goofy, either way. But there was a question around what was the performance in a region of, again, a Fortune 100 company. What was the performance in a region?

And there were about 47 markets in the region, and looking through the region, they did the analyses. They practically looked at IWIKs, and said, “Here’s what’s important in the region. Here’s what we’ve discovered,” and made their quarterly business recommendation on where to put more investment, how to align the team, and how to allocate the resources.

At the end of the meeting, the senior leader said, “This is terrific. We really have our bearings here. Is there anything that surprised you in what you’ve seen so far?” And this was Chris, Chris Frank, said, “Yeah, what really surprised me is there are 12 of the 47 segments had a sharp rise in customer satisfaction, and I can’t explain it.”

So, what he did is he buried it in the appendix because it wasn’t terribly clear. And after a lot of time doing the correlation and the analyses, there was no answer to why, and so they were just outliers. So, the leader said, “So, read off what those 12 markets were.” And as he read through them, they mapped one for one with a pilot program that the company had in those 12 markets, and they intentionally didn’t tell anybody because they didn’t want to bias anyone doing the analyses.

And because of leading into that simple question, “What surprised you?” the whole room had a revelation that, “Oh, this is really a better way to engage our customers,” and that led to a multimillion-dollar investment in a customer engagement program that didn’t exist. So, the data was all there but they weren’t looking for it the right way, and they didn’t have the insight from their leader to ask the right question.

Now, if you used these techniques proactively, you would say, “You know what, I’m going to spend 45 minutes on here’s our quarterly business review, business report. I’m going to spend 10 minutes on here are some anomalies and surprises that I think we should investigate more.” So, as a practitioner, as a business person, and you want to be awesome at your job, make the space for that. Insist that, “You know what, you hired me for a reason. Here’s something that I think we should really look at.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, tell me, Paul, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, I think that the last piece is about as simple as it gets. When you’re bringing people together, you need to tell them before they even get in the room, “Am I informing you of situations, so everybody’s up to speed and has a common knowledge base? Or, am I compelling you to action today? Am I asking you to make a choice? And then, have I armed you on your team beforehand with everything to make that choice?”

I don’t know how many meetings I’m in where partway through the meeting, because everybody texts during meetings, people are texting each other, “What is the purpose of this? What are we doing? Didn’t we already have this conversation?” So, being very deliberate is very much appreciated, and having a conversation for awareness is fantastic. But setting people up for a decision, and bringing everybody along, that’s really important because decisions are team sports. Bringing everybody along the right way really matters.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, this is a favorite quote, I use it all the time, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” And so, that’s from H.L. Mencken, who’s a journalist in the early 1900s, and to me it speaks volumes of what we see today, where people have their fingertips on data and yet are just grasping at what seems to be the very first thing that they can answer with, and they’re not spending the time to dive in to the detail.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Paul Magnone
Yeah, I think I’ll share a book, which feels like a study. It’s Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. And so, in some ways, our book Decisions Over Decimals echoes and builds on the system-one and system-two thinking, and we’re providing practical tools and techniques that balance the data and the human judgment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Paul Magnone
I’d have to go with The Road Less Traveled, the first version. I think he redacted or refuted some of what he said in his second version. But it’s very much about understanding yourself and how to solve problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Paul Magnone
Well, I’m partial to the Google tools, and then, of course, the techniques and frameworks that are in this book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit, something you do that makes you awesome at your job?

Paul Magnone
I’m not a practitioner of meditation but I think it’s really important to get centered and take a step back, and say, “What’s really happening?” And I try and make the time to do that, ideally, on a weekend, and really gather and reset. So, however people do that, whether it’s meditation or a night out dancing, whatever works for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Paul Magnone
I’m not sure it’s retweeted but I often say you can have your own opinions but you can’t have your own facts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Paul Magnone
Well, our website is DOD, which stands for Decisions Over Decimals, it’s DODTheBook.com. You can reach out to myself or Chris or Oded on LinkedIn. And, obviously, in addition to everything else that we do, we teach at Columbia, so multiple ways to get a hold of us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Paul Magnone
Make the space to share what you really think. As I’ve said multiple times, synthesize, don’t just summarize, and create that space to have real dialogue on the issues. So many times, that’s what we want and that’s not what we’re doing. And be brave and bold and make that space.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paul, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you many wise decisions.

Paul Magnone
Thank you very much, and to you as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Eric, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Eric Johnson
Pete, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom when it comes to decision-making. It’s one of my favorite topics. We’ve had luminaries like Annie Duke and others on the show, so excited to get into your perspective. But I’d love it if you could kick us off by sharing a particularly tricky decision that you’ve had to make in life and kind what was hard about it and how did you, ultimately, come to that decision?

Eric Johnson
So, one of the things that was most devastating in my life was actually a diagnosis of stage 4 Hodgkin’s. Now, granted, that’s a buzzkill to kick this off, but one of the things that got me thinking about is how people make such serious decisions about treatment, and the way that people actually pose those options to people, changes what they choose. And I became madly obsessed with the literature, and that sort of kicked me off, a lot of my interests in choice architecture.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, that’s fascinating right there. So, life or death, high-stakes decisions, you would think, unlike software where you have like a bold, blue, highlighted choice of the two, which is nudging you that way, that people might be a little bit more robust in working through this. But can you expand upon that? Like, how might presenting the options lead people to choose one treatment or approach more or less often than another?

Eric Johnson
So, my experience is interesting but there’s actually a nice study that makes the point even better, and that is they were looking at, actually, patients who were at the end of their life. For some reason, this is going to be a depressing day today but I’ll try it not to be. And they gave them the choice of two different kinds of end-of-life care, “Just pre-check one box or the other. One is called comfort care. The other is called, essentially, extreme care. We’ll do everything we can to keep you alive and the other case, we’ll just take care of your pain.” And there was a 30% difference between people’s choices.

And the question is “Why is that the case?” It’s because that’s not something we’ve thought a lot about. So, you might think an important decision is something where it doesn’t matter how you ask the question. Well, this is an important decision we don’t get to make very often. Hopefully, almost never. And so, lots of the decisions we make in life are things where we don’t have a clear preference, and that’s one of them, but some of them are pretty common.

Like, “What are you going to eat in a restaurant?” You may have a rough idea, “I don’t like liver,” but there are a lot of options out there. You’re trying to predict what you’re going to like in a half hour when you’ve actually finished the meal.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, yeah, that’s powerful and, in some ways, and I guess the why behind it being a number of things, it’s like, “Well, I don’t know, I guess this is what’s checked, that’s what most people do. I guess this is the standard or recommended go-to option if it’s the one that’s checked.” Or, maybe it’s like, “This decision is so overwhelming and intimidating that it’s kind of a relief that something has been sort of been checked for me, so I’m just going to roll with it.” We’re speculating here but what do you think is behind that?

Eric Johnson
So, you got two of the three things, I think, happens. One is basically it’s easier to take the default – ease. Second thing is endorsement. It’s as if the person who designed the menu, chose something for you so that must be the best thing. But there’s something that’s a lot more fundamental, which is we actually think about things differently depending upon how they’re framed.

So, there’s a great study I love, which actually gives people the choice between 70% lean hamburger or 30% fat hamburger. Now, you’re smart, your audience is smart, you realize that’s the same thing. But, yet, people, when they have the word fat as a description, think about the hamburger differently. They think about clogging their arteries. They think about it being juicy. When it’s lean, they think about protein and muscle mass. It’s actually as if they’re eating two different things even though the label is the only thing that differs.

When you ask about how much they’ll pay, they pay different amounts. Or, you ask people how good the burgers taste, they rate it differently. So, that study shows that when we’re in these situations, what I call assembled preferences, it’s actually the label that changes what we think.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fascinating. And so, the 70% lean won on all the dimensions of measurement.

Eric Johnson
Except unless you like a really juicy burger.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Okay. Well, so that’s one big surprise right there in terms of just the way things are presented to us changes how we think about them, and, thus, what we select even if it’s high stakes. Any other really big surprises or discoveries you’ve made over your lifetime of work in this domain?

Eric Johnson
So, that first thing is called a default. I want to give it a name so we have a handy name. It’s not default like going broke. It’s like default in what happens when we don’t take an action. A second thing that surprised me, actually, as I was writing the book, is the effect of order. What you see first can be more attractive. This is why you go down to a supermarket, people actually pay to be in different positions of the aisle so you’ll see them. So, something at eye level is actually, typically, gets more attention and is seen first. So, it turns out when you look at the many studies that have been done, effective order is surprisingly large.

Pete Mockaitis
And first is where you want to be if you want to be chosen. Is that right?

Eric Johnson
Well, almost most of the time, particularly if it’s a place where the decision-maker is in control. So, they look at first, they look at second, and then they stop. So, on lots of websites, for example, people only will look at one or two options, click on them to look at them more carefully. But let me give you the counter example. Imagine, instead, we’re going back to the same restaurant we had the menu at before, but now the waiter, it’s a fancy place, is reading you the menu. Now, are you going to pick the first or what else is going on there?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s so funny, that happened to me a few times, whatever that says about my dining choices, but I remember I feel like a little bit nervous, like, “Okay. All right. I really got to strap in, listen, pay a lot of attention.” And I’m thinking, I don’t know if this is what most people do, but like, “Okay, I got to think. I’ve got to give something, a judgment of like thumbs up or thumbs down.” Like, “You’re a finalist or you’re out,” like right away, or else I just can’t even process seven options given to me verbally.

So, I’m like, “Okay, don’t even need to think about that one. Okay, don’t even need to think about…oh, maybe. Prime rib. Interesting. Remember that one.” And so, I’m trying to hold finalists in my head, and then I usually have to ask them and repeat something, like, “What was the third one again?”

Eric Johnson
Right. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s me but I might be an anomaly.

Eric Johnson
But you’ve gotten a great intuition for it. Because what happens, of course, is what’s the one that’s not going to be clobbered by the next one? The last one. And it turns out, in those situations, where the decision-maker is losing control, last has a big advantage. One of my favorite studies of this is, you may or may not have seen it, but there’s a famous song contest that’s been held for over 50 years in Europe called the Eurovision Song Contest.

And it turns out, people have done studies, last has a big advantage there because people remember it. Memory is really important in both cases, but, yeah, between the head, “Who knows what Estonia…” I’m sorry, any Estonian listeners, “But who knows what Estonia did in the second song?” You remember who was the last. So, order, to go back to your question, is surprisingly important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, it sounds like we’ve, maybe, potentially mentioned this, but just to make it explicit, can you give us what is the big idea, core thesis, behind your book The Elements of Choice? It sounds like we’re hitting it. There are things like this that are impacting our choices. Or, how would you articulate the main idea?

Eric Johnson
So, there are two main ideas. The first one is how questions are posed make a difference. But the second one that’s probably most relevant to your listeners is that you are a choice architect. You are a designer. You make the decisions whenever you present somebody with a choice, whether it be your spouse, someone who reports to you, someone you report to. Whenever you’re presenting choices, you’re actually a choice architect. You have control over many of these things, like what the default is, what the right order is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then give us some core principles then in terms of if I have something…Well, I guess, first of all, this presupposes that you’re offering people choices as opposed to saying, “This is what we’re doing now.” Now, I guess you may or may not have the authority or power, influence, sway, relationship, to just, by fiat, say, “This is what’s happening now.” But, maybe, before we delve into the how do we present choices, I’d love to get your take on under what circumstances is it optimal to present multiple choices versus just the, “Hey, I’d like to do this,” or, “How about we do that?”

Eric Johnson
Well, it’s interesting. You say it in a way that says, “How about if we do that?” and in your voice there was a question mark, as if I can come back and say something else. An extreme would be, by fiat, “We are going to go and order this,” and that certainly saves lots of work in decision-making but people often feel like they have lost a lot of power or input or it can be demotivating.

So, a slightly gentler version of that is how many options do you give somebody? Do you give them one, which is your extreme case, in which case, it’s not really a choice? Or, do you give them two, or four, or five? It’s actually quite an interesting aspect of choice architecture.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes. And so, I’m curious, are there certain…what are the criteria or factors which might lead me to think, “Hmm, I’m going to go with one choice or option versus a multiple choice or option”?

Eric Johnson
So, how well do I know the person making the decision? If I know a lot of their taste, I can cut down the number of things I show them. So, a menu, when I tell my wife, “What’s on the menu?” Let’s say I’m calling her and saying, “What’s on the menu?” because she’s running a few minutes late and wants me to order for her, if I know her taste, I can give two or three. If it’s somebody I don’t know, I’m going to expand the number of options. I’m going to try and figure out what options are different. So, the more I know the person who’s making a choice, assuming I’m trying to help them, the fewer options I can give them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it makes sense certainly as a principle. Okay. And then I’m thinking if it’s just from a general, like influence-mastery perspective, I’m thinking in the course of, let’s just say, I want boss, or collaborator, peer, to come my way with something. And I guess there’s a whole another set – we had Bob Cialdini on the show who was awesome – of principles associated with being influential. But here, it seems like we’re specifically zeroing in on, in a world where we’re sharing multiple options and we would like them to pick the one we want them to pick, how do we do that?

Eric Johnson
So, I think we’ve covered two things already. One is default, say, “If you don’t have anything else in mind, here’s the default.” So, I’ll give you an example of that that turns out to be very handy in my life. I could say to somebody, “Oh, we should get together for a meeting. What’s good for you?” That’s giving them, in essence, an infinite number of options. Instead, I could say, “Look, 9:30 on Tuesday is good for me, but I’m flexible.”

Now, from my perspective, as the designer, as I call that person, I’m going to increase the probability that gets chosen and it’s better for me. From the other person’s perspective, it saves them a little bit of effort. Instead of having to go through their whole calendar, they can look first and start with that as a starting point. And so, that actually probably makes both the designer and the chooser, or the person making the choice, better off.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I like that. And then, it’s funny as I’m thinking about, I’ve had some conversations with some sales-type folk in which they’re reaching out, and they say, “Hey, would you like to meet at this time or that time?” And I’m thinking, “Well, neither of those times because I don’t want to meet with you at all.” Any thoughts on, I don’t know if you call that presumption, or when there’s a good possibility that they don’t want none of your options? Like, how does that come across in terms of this little…?

Eric Johnson
So, let me step back one second. The premise of the book is actually a little bit different than it would be if I was doing sales. And it’s basically you’re trying to make the chooser make the choice that’s in their best interest. And the world we’re talking about, of course, that may not always overlap but you probably want to get a time that doesn’t get somebody that has to drive into work an hour early for the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. And if you’re an ethical salesperson, hopefully, your solution really is, worth their time and effort relative to the alternatives.

Eric Johnson
And, in fact, I’m an optimist, and I think they’re trying to get the right product to you or make you a repeat customer.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure, I’m with you.

Eric Johnson
So, default would be one. We’ve already talked about sorting, what would be first, second, third. And if it’s a salesperson, that’s actually getting closer to a place where it’s a verbal list so you have to be careful that the last is going to be something that’s also remembered. You have to be careful in that decision as well. So, those would be two very concrete steps you could make in setting appointments.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. And so then, let’s hear some of the others. We’ve talked about the ideal number of options. So, there’s the one or there’s the infinite, and then there’s some discrete numbers in between. How do we think about that?

Eric Johnson
Well, I think there, the issue is basically, again, a lot of us are going to be thinking about the decision-maker and how well you know them, but let me give you a sort of application that’s not exactly how to be great, at least on your job per se. But there’s a really nice example at dating sites. Dating sites differ in the number of options.

So, let me ask you how you do this. If you go to Tinder, the number is infinity. There’s actually something called Tinder thumb for swiping too much. Now, on the other hand, there was a site called Coffee Meets Bagel.
Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I utilized that back in the day. That’s great.

Eric Johnson
It gave you one option, originally, or a small number of options, and they were good. Now, the thing about the chooser who thinks about those two things differently. In Coffee Meets Bagel, you would read the profile and go beyond the picture.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you have more time.

Eric Johnson
Yeah, you have more time and you’re not screening. On the other hand, with Tinder, you’re looking at pictures, I suspect, and then pictures get a big weight, and all the other things like personality get almost no weight. So, it depends on what you want the person to do. If you want them to make a good choice, it’s probably a reason to reduce the number of options.

So, if I gave them too many options, that can result in a poor choice because they may be more shallow in their evaluation, kind of like a Tinder effect, versus if I gave them a limited number of choices, like, “Hey, here’s three really good options,” as opposed to, “Well, there’s 14 things we can do,” then they’re like, “Well, I don’t know. That consulting firm seems to have a cool name, so let’s go with them,” versus, “Oh, three. Okay, I can kind of get into a little bit of detail here and think through the pros and cons of this.”

Eric Johnson
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, so then, three, I said, was kind of arbitrary. But do you have some thoughts on two versus three versus four versus five?

Eric Johnson
Right. Well, one of the things that’s very tempting to write a book like this is to say five is the magic number. But imagine we’re designing an airplane, would I say, “Two engines is always the right number of engines”? No, it depends on the kind of plane it is. So, rather than say three, I want to give you the principles to think about, which is one thing is that you increase the number of options, people get more variety, but they tend to get overloaded.

So, there are lots of cases where you want to give people variety, particularly if they don’t know you well, but I don’t want to go, like the New York City school system gives kids 769 different high schools they could choose between. That’s a bit too many.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’m thinking about my toddler, I kind of give him two shirts, generally, to choose from, and that seems to work pretty well. What do you think?

Eric Johnson
As they get older, they may want a little more, a couple more. But, notice, you’re doing something super important there, which is you’re limiting the choice or the options you want by assuming…you picked those two shirts.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s cold outside so I’d like the long sleeve situation, “This one is cleaner than the other one and a nice shirt.”

Eric Johnson
A friend of mine solved a problem, how to get their three-year old, so this might be useful, to bed by changing it to, “Do you want to go to bed or not go to bed?” to, “Do you want to fly in the bed or do you want to bounce in the bed?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. I did that one.

Eric Johnson
No more fighting but, notice, control of the choice set is a lot of control there. And I think, as a parent, you’d argue it’s in both your and their best interest.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. Like, “Do you want to fly to the car like an airplane or hop to the car like a kangaroo?”

Eric Johnson
You’ve done this before.

Pete Mockaitis
I can’t get away with that with grownup professionals. “You pay them with a check or with Venmo?”

Eric Johnson
Right. But you could, for example, limit…let’s take a common that many of your listeners have, which is pension plans. How many pension plans are you offered? Which ones? That’s a real-world example that I think is really important. And the funny thing is, for many of these things we’re talking about, people aren’t aware of their effects.

So, the defaults, people have actually done studies where they say, “Okay, now you’ve made a choice,” people see different defaults, they choose different things. And you say, “Did the default affect what you chose?” And they say, “No. It might affect other people but I made my decision based on what I wanted.”

So, the interesting thing for folks here is that the choices you make as an architect, as a designer, actually are things that will influence people and often they won’t realize the influence you have.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful and the results can be massive when you come to retirement age, like, “Oh, shoot. There might’ve been a whole lot more money had I chosen a different option,” or a whole lot less. So, okay, we got a number of elements. Any other key elements you want to cover?

Eric Johnson
I think we’ve gotten a big list. The only other one that I think would be important is when you give people choices, you often describe the choices.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you.

Eric Johnson
So, what might be called attributes, so price, quality. For a car, it’s how many miles per gallon it gets, how fast it gets. Another thing that a designer does is present attributes. Imagine you’re giving someone a choice between two consulting assignments. You might use travel. You might use challenge. You might use opportunity for advancement. You, as a designer, get to choose which attributes are first and what’s presented.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s true.

Eric Johnson
So, I know it’s a long list but these all are things that you, as the designer, have as tools.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you describe choices or attributes, are there any best or worst practices there? Because, again, I’m thinking about the overwhelm, I guess there’s relevance, like, “I might not care about your liter is a turbo horsepower or whatever. Like, those numbers don’t mean things to me.” And maybe I should be better educated about vehicles. That’s come up before. “But I’m just not.” So, any pro tips on best and worst practices for great descriptions within the attributes?

Eric Johnson
So, I think one of the things that is a classic result is imagine calories. Now, if you’re really concerned about your weight, you probably understand calories, but a very nice example is to convert that into the number of miles walked you would have to do to walk off those calories.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Got you.

Eric Johnson
The general principle is making sure the attribute is in a concrete way that people understand.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I think that’s a great in terms of I think like computer things, in terms of like I understand very much what the impact of a 1-terra byte versus a 2-terra byte drive is, and I just bought a 2-terra byte, versus others, like, “What’s that even mean in terms of movies or songs or pictures or whatnot?” Because I often find myself, if I’m reading something and I’m just sort of out of my depth, I don’t know, I’m thinking about power tools or drills or impact drivers or something, they have numbers, like, “Is that good? I hope. It’s probably not horrible if you’re telling me about it. So, certainly, it has to be kind of relevant and understandable.”

And I guess I’m also thinking about just like, “How much is too much?” And now I’m thinking about sales landing pages on websites. And some of them can just go for dozens of pages, like, “Wow, people are reading that?” And others are pretty darn quick in terms of header, subhead, couple bullets, and then that’s that. How do you think about how we make the decision for more versus less?

Eric Johnson
The really interesting thing about your point is that people seem to be very sensitive to the initial cost of information. So, if you land on a page that has an ugly font and it’s hard to look at, even if the offer is attractive, you’re likely to bail. So, we know a lot just by watching firms do their customer funnel, how they actually acquire customers, that each click is very important, and to minimize the effort for each of those clicks is terribly, terribly important in attracting customers. And, again, if you think about trying to get somebody at work to sign on for a project, very similar stories apply.

Pete Mockaitis
So, reducing the friction, making it as easy as possible to do that.

Eric Johnson
Particularly at the beginning.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then I’m curious about, so the flipside, any sort of like mistakes, or cognitive biases, or things we really got to be on our guard for when we are trying to make optimal decisions and present choices optimally to others?

Eric Johnson
So, the first big mistake is most of us don’t realize we’re designers so we’re doing this very haphazardly. So, we use what is first in our mind is what we tell people. So, if you’re saying, “Where do we go to lunch?” well, what happens is the thing that you think of first, it may not even be where you want to go. But, in general, I think neglecting choice architecture is the biggest mistake that we make. It’s because we don’t think it affects us, and, in fact, we don’t even realize how it affects other people. So, there are now a lot of studies showing that people don’t do things that would be in both their best interest and that chooses best interest.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good. Thank you. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Eric Johnson
Well, I think the only thing I would say is realize that deciding how to present information to people is almost a secret power that you have, that it’s actually something that is a source of your ability to help other people, that if you don’t know about it, you’re neglecting a really important aspect of your job as a boss, or as a colleague, or as a report, any of the above.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you talk about power, that makes me think, can you share with us some more of the most sort of eye-popping sort of results or case studies and how little changes make huge differences? So, that pre-checked thing, that was pretty wild in terms of, “How do you want to be taken care of in your final years?” I mean, wow, what a huge impact just to pre-check can make. Any other striking examples or cases that leap to mind?

Eric Johnson
Well, let me talk about another of the tools we’ve talked about, which is order, what’s presented first. It turns out, on ballots, somebody is first, someone is second, etc. What research shows is the first choice gets about 2% more vote even in presidential elections. So, if we think about go back to the year 2000, Gore versus Bush, remember it all came down to Florida. In Florida, there was like 500 votes separating them.

It turns out, Bush, George W. was first in the ballot in Florida because the governor, his brother, Jeb, got to pick who was first. And, of course, any governor would pick the member of their own party. It wasn’t because it was his brother. That probably made the difference in who was elected president of the U.S.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog. That was a big case study. Thank you, Eric.

Eric Johnson
It’s not my research but it’s actually there was a case, by the way, in Texas where two Supreme Court justices who ran against each other, Pete Greene versus Rick Greene, whichever Greene, there they randomized. That’s how we know it made a difference. They picked one first in half the time, the other first the other half the time. There was a 20% difference between who got the vote depending upon who was first.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! So, it was 20% when we actually got to randomized it, so it might be much bigger than 2%.

Eric Johnson
Right. In that case, because they had the same last name, and nobody knew who they were, that’s one of the reasons it’s 20%.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, fair enough. Well, that’s really heavy. I’m just sort of sitting and processing that for a moment. And then for our elections in the U.S., is that normally how it goes, the governor gets to pick? Or is alphabetical? Or does it vary state by state?

Eric Johnson
It varies a bunch by state by state but often it’s, in some places, the incumbent, which gives them an advantage. In other states, it’s the party in power that gets to be first. In Delaware, it turns out, just to be equally surprising, the Democrats always are the first slot in the ballot.

Pete Mockaitis
Always. Okay. All right. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Eric Johnson
So, something I’ve thought a lot about is a quote that I saw when I was a young person reading science magazines, and it was a Browning quote, “For a man’s reach should exceed their grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” In other words, keep striving. You’re not going to get there, but go for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Eric Johnson
Well, I think I have to admit that I very much like one that I did, which used the default manipulation to change people’s willingness to be organ donors.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us the result. What went down?

Eric Johnson
Well, basically, if you look at people’s willingness, not necessarily to be a donor, but to be willing to be a donor, there is a 40% gap between those people where you are a donor by default, which happens in several European countries, and countries like the U.S. where you have to choose to be an organ donor. So, the default actually can change people’s willingness to be an organ donor.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog. And a favorite book?

Eric Johnson
When I was very young, I read two books at the same time practically, and they would change my life. One was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The other was Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And growing up in New Jersey and not seeing much of the world, this really opened up my eyes.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Eric Johnson
I actually use, I’ve tried a lot, like many people, many different kinds of planning software. I use something called Marvin, but the important point is not the software. It’s basically sitting down every day and doing a to-do list that includes time, not just, “I’m going to do it in this order,” but, “I’m going to do it at this time.”

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share, something that really connects and resonates with folks you’re chatting with?

Eric Johnson
One of the things that I find interesting about using social media and, particularly, to promote the book, is to see what other people are saying. And I think one of the things that I hear people are repeating, so I let them choose, is basically, “Being a choice architect is something that’s a power that I didn’t know I had.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Eric Johnson
Well, really good, Twitter is @ProfEricJohnson. And there’s also a nice website on TheElementsofChoice.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Eric Johnson
I think, basically, realize that you actually have the power whenever you present choices to another person that, if you don’t think about it, you’re going to waste an important part of what you can do on your job.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Eric, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck with all of the choices you make and present.

Eric Johnson
Thank you very much. It’s been a lot of fun, Pete.