MAKING GOOD DECISIONS AND MAKING YOUR IDEAS STICK

How do we make good decisions?

When I chose my last house, it took me five seconds to make the decision. And my friend and I recently bought an ex-racehorse because we liked the look of him. Stupid? Or not?

There is a growing body of evidence that snap decisions can sometimes be superior to more well thought out ones.

A team at the University of Amsterdam carried out research by asking participants to choose themselves a new car. They assessed the cars by considering attributes such as engine size, number of seats, age, fuel economy, etc. They were either told four attributes (a simple task) or twelve attributes (a complex task).

When the participants were considering just four attributes they performed better when they were allowed time for undisrupted, deliberative thought. This made them less likely to pick a dud. But when there were twelve attributes, they actually performed better when they were forced to make a snap decision.

It seems that for complex decisions, the number of variables may overload our conscious reasoning powers. However our unconscious minds are still able to process this information, providing us with an answer but with no rational justification for that answer.

The statue that didn't look right

It seems that for complex decisions, the number of variables may overload our conscious reasoning powers.

These ideas were popularised in Malcolm Gladwell's book: "blink". Gladwell gives many examples of effective snap decisions, including the case of the statue that "didn't look right". This sixth century BC statue was confirmed to be genuine by numerous experts during a fourteen month period of scrutiny. It underwent electron microscopy, mass spectrometry, X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence before the experts declared it genuine and the Getty Museum in California bought it for ten million dollars.

However there was a problem. Once it was on display, some experts thought the statue "didn't look right". One said: "I felt as though there was a glass between me and the work". Another felt a wave of "intuitive repulsion".

It turned out that the statue was a fake. The experts' "hunches" were confirmed, although they never knew consciously exactly what they had seen.

What does this research mean?

It doesn't mean your hunches are always right. You do have to be knowlegable to get a reliably good hunch. Your average punter wandering around the Getty museum wouldn't have the information in his unconscious mind to make a sensible snap judgement. So it's not always a good idea to go with your gut instinct in areas where you have little knowledge.

For this reason (amongst others), I'd urge you not to go to your local livestock market and invest in an ex-racehorse.

Although a "gut feel" approach has obvious limitations, it makes sense to give it a try, particularly if we are the sort of people who usually analyse everything logically.

Where a decision is personal and complex, it can be very useful to try a decision making strategy that uses your unconscious, intuitive mind as well as analysing all the pros and cons. Some of the coaching questions we use at Templeton Finn are aimed at tapping into this, and a good exercise is explained on our website - see below.

Making your ideas stick

Why do we remember and pass on urban myths involving Kentucky fried rats but forget what our partner said this morning about the firm's marketing strategy?

This is the subject of the book "Made to Stick" by Chip and Dan Heath.

The book explains how we can make our ideas memorable even when they don't involve rats and fast food outlets. To summarise, you need to make your message simple, unexpected, concrete and emotional, and it helps to use stories.

For example if you want to persuade the public that sharks aren't dangerous, you could wax lyrical about their kind natures and provide lots of reassuring statistics, but it's more effective to say:

What's more likely to kill you:

A SHARK; or A DEER?

ANSWER - a deer. In fact it is 300 times more likely to kill you (via a collision with your car)."

This is unexpected, concrete and emotional, plus you tend to summon up an image of a tribe of machine-gun-wielding deer stampeding the hills, despite the car collision explanation. So it can't fail to be memorable.

Whilst it can be more of a challenge to do a similar makeover of your firm's marketing strategy, the book is aimed at business communication and is a really worthwhile read.