#63 - The Antithesis Principle and a Decision-Making Framework to Save You Stress
Plus: What I missed at the eye doctor
Hello, long-time readers, new subscribers, and visitors! Welcome to issue #63 of Curiosity > Certainty 👏
This week I unpack three ideas from three figures I listen to carefully. All are original thinkers, great synthesizers, and voracious readers. One of them is the CEO of Stripe. One is an ad man. One is a product leader.
The Antithesis Principle
One of my favorite nuggets from Shreyas Doshi is his ‘Antithesis Principle’.
Take any behavioral rule of thumb. A confident person appears more competent than someone similarly skilled but less sure of herself.
Here’s how people apply the rule.
The foolish one is inattentive. She looks past it. Sometimes, though, the foolish one becomes a contrarian. She rejects the rule. ‘I don’t think people are this stupid’. Or ‘I don’t think it applies to me. I’m different’.
The smart one learns to use the principle to their advantage. ‘If confident comes across as competent, I’ll appear sure-footed in my interview’.
Like the smart one, the wise one learns to use the principle on others as a lever of influence. But she also applies it to herself by adopting the opposite behavior as the world.
She thinks: ‘If confidence is seen as competence, I’ll appear confident. But I’ll not be the person who’s fooled by confident appearance. I’ll look under it’.
The wise one is both a smarter transmitter and a smarter receiver. A better interviewee but also a better interviewer.
Here’s another example of the antithesis principle in effect. The practice of shooting the messenger for bringing an unsavory message is called the ‘Persian messenger syndrome’ (after ancient Persians who were known to kill the messenger who brought bad news).
Smart one: I’ll try not to be the bringer of bad news. If I must, I’ll hide it under good news.
This is not uncommon in firms. Think of those tense product review and governance meetings. Think of leaders protected from reality, like children spared the news of their parents’ separation.
Wise one: I’ll convey bad news suitably but I won’t diss someone for their mere association with bad news.
Berkshire Hathaway has a rule: ‘Always tell us the bad news promptly. It is only the good news that can wait’. Pretty sure this doesn’t work for Putin.
Most advice you get on social media appeals to the smart one in you. ‘Here’s how you must project yourself to catch the world’s limited attention’.
But in the quest to project ourselves advantageously, we forget that we’re being projected to as well. We forget to defend ourselves against the levers of influence at work on us. We forget to become the opposite of the audience we’re projecting to.
It is impossible to neutralize the effect on ourselves of the same principles that we have learned to apply expertly on others. But being aware of them and being able to call it out with a name goes some way. Shreyas’ Antithesis Principle stirs recognition and leads to action.
Letting go to make better decisions
When it comes to decision-making, leaders sometimes make this costly mistake.
They treat all decisions the same.
Every decision is important; every decision is their decision. Soon, their calendars are full and they’re making decisions while having lunch, dropping kids to school, and so on.
What they’re missing is a system for categorizing decisions. So that when they’re presented with a decision, they first ask ‘What kind of a decision is this? Do I need to make it?’
A way to do this is to size up decisions by reversibility and impact. As a leader, you get the most ROI spending time on decisions that have low reversibility and high impact.
The remaining three quadrants–decisions with high reversibility or low impact–are occasions to prioritize speed. The best way for that is to delegate, to let others working with you make them and build their decision-making muscle.
There’s another reason why leaders should stay away from easily reversible or low impact decisions. These decisions play out quickly and need swift course-correction. When a leader is directly involved, reportees stick to the chain of command. Information has to travel up the length of the chain, and the decision has to travel down before it is executed. That eats up time.
Suddenly, your pre-targeting campaign is running three weeks behind schedule and has cost you 10X man hours. And in that time, your competitor has dropped something into the market and now there’s panic everywhere.
Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, has some advice to offer on this: ‘There are some decisions where if I’m making it or if I’ve to make it, that probably suggests that something else organizationally or institutionally has broken.’
When you as a leader are borrowing time from your most meaningful and hard-to-reverse decisions to invest in reversible decisions that are fit for your team, something is wrong.
But it is wrong only if you can spot it. Too often, you don’t.
When you don’t, you wonder why things take so long to execute and your team burns under your magnifying lens.
It sets off a vicious cycle. All because you don’t have a system.
Things that matter and cost nothing
You would think things that matter would cost the world. That sounds right.
Sometimes they don’t. Often they just need you to think and act in a way where you leave logic and embrace alchemy (my tip of the hat to Rory Sutherland)
When we get stuck with hard problems we look to change reality. That’s hard to pull off.
A smarter way is to take the back door: Don’t correct reality, correct perception.
You want your customers to have a fantastic experience? So you offer discounts, run loyalty programs, gift goodies. These are all tested though expensive ways to make customers smile. How about some better and cheaper ways?
Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, an early online distributor of independent music, found automated order emails boring. So he wrote a goofy one with satin pillows and angels and private jets. Customers loved it. Don’t believe me? Google “private CD Baby jet”.
In 2002, Virgin Atlantic kicked off their cheapest loyalty program. They introduced airplane-shaped salt and pepper shakers, Wilbur and Orville. First-class passengers pinched them whenever they could. Virgin turned a blind eye to the thievery. Why? Because it made grown-ups (with money) act like happy children.
How do you pull off alchemy?
First off, pretend you don’t have money to throw at your problem.
This is easier said than done. If you do have money, like in any big org, it calls for Hulk-like self-denial.
Next, don’t look to change the product. Change its meaning to those who use it.
Governments tend to approach the problem of tax evasion with the stick. Imagine if, instead, they told taxpayers what causes their taxes were deployed to and allowed them to share the same on social media. Suddenly, tax-paying citizens are flaunting what schools they helped build with their contribution.
Finally, understand that with humans there’s a logical reason and there’s a real one, and the two aren’t always the same.
I went to an eye clinic earlier this week. They put drops in my eyes and made me sit with eyes closed for an hour. They gave me a discount, free coffee, air conditioning. You know what I missed most? Disposable ear plugs that I could stuff in my ears and drift off into the magical world of an audiobook.
By all counts of logic, they did good. Yet, I felt bummed sitting shut-eyed in silence without any special meditative powers to boot.
The engineer assumes meaningful change can only happen with a meaningful investment of resources. The alchemist knows a small change in perception can lead to a big change in behavior.
We choose by memory when we decide whether or not to repeat an experience. The customer who got the funny order email; the first-class passenger who pinched the salt shaker; and I (if I had gotten those ear plugs) – all created memories. And memory is perception that lasts.
Tiny Thought #8
Tiny Thought #9
