#66 - Two lies you've been told
Plus: Listening well
Hello, dear readers! Welcome to issue #66 of Curiosity > Certainty 👏
Our holiday with our toddler turned out to be funner than expected. For me at least. We drove through forests, went on a safari, visited the zoo (and the aquarium), and plucked figs and guavas from trees. Being out and about gives such a lift.
Margaret Atwood spent her girlhood up in the woods in a cabin. Her father was an entomologist, her mother a free spirit. She spent her early years looking at insects, birds, the wild. With little occasion for human company. If you read Surfacing or Cat’s Eye, you will read those years in them.
What are we making of our children? What stories are we sowing in them?
Lifting the energy in the room
I was chatting with a colleague and in response to a point I made, he said, ‘You’re absolutely right’. The words lifted my mood.
Just like tracking user emotional energy in your product funnel can improve conversions, tracking your audience’s emotional energy in a conversation can improve the outcome of the discussion.
Often, in meetings, someone points out a minor flaw in or suggests a marginal improvement to a proposal. The intent behind this may be good–to make oneself useful. The effect is telling. A 5% suggested improvement suddenly brings down motivation of the presenter by 50%.
Did this person come into the meeting gung-ho about the idea she was going to propose? Of course! It was hers. Pointing out a tiny wrinkle has made her ready to disown.
And this behavior is contagious because there are more agents than principals in life. Agents need to constantly prove they’re smart, whether they hate themselves for it or not.
So, stop! But how? Marshall Goldsmith, probably the world’s best known executive coach, has some advice.
💡Ask ‘Is it worth it?’ before choosing to butt in. We tend to make sure what we’re about to say is correct. That’s table stakes. Go a level deeper than that.
💡Don’t start a sentence with any of these three words: no, but, or however. Disagree without being disagreeable.
Zoom and Teams will need us to rethink listening etiquette–body language, eye contact, chiming in–but virtual nuances aside, it is hard to speak well if you don’t listen well.
A lie about decision-making
Some time ago, to my question of how he made big decisions, my then boss and CEO had said he follows his gut.
I was surprised. The CEO of the company decides by gut! And here I was hoping for a time-honored process, the recipe to which would be worth an arm and a leg.
I was wrong. He was right.
Classical decision-making has a recipe. Collect all information you need, follow a prescribed process, and it’s very likely that you’ll reach the same conclusion as your CEO, or Einstein.
That’s how you buy a car, a TV, a laptop. Information is:
Available
Reliable (unchanging with time)
Objective
Because information doesn’t change quickly, you have the luxury of time (tomorrow is the same as today) and inexperience (high level of certainty makes experience surplus to need).
But a CEO does not get paid to decide on the right car or TV or laptop. She gets paid for capital allocation. Where to put money? Which bets to make?
I experienced this while working on investment decisions, where information is:
Missing
Only somewhat reliable (changes with time)
Subjective (how do you judge the character of a founder?)
Enter: trade-offs. Could you give up accuracy for speed? What steps can you skip? How much uncertainty can you bear? These become the new big questions.
If you’ve only learned the neat classical process at decision-making school, you’re in for a shock.
You’re a line cook who doesn’t have all the ingredients to make the perfect dish. What do you do? You call the chef.
A line cook knows the dish needs tomatoes at a certain temperature. The chef knows what to do when it gets too hot or cold, or the pantry’s out of tomatoes.
This is called gut. Also known as experience, judgment, intuition.
(Experience is not the same as intuition but for simplicity we can assume so).
The hardest decisions are made under uncertainty. There are no set options to pick from, only a variety of possibilities. This is called naturalistic decision-making.
You need a foundation in classical decision-making, of course, to buy your car, laptop, or even house. Anyone can build it as long as they can measure and compare and they are trained in the process.
But building naturalistic decision-making skills will make you rare and valuable. Here’s a start.
The second lie about decision-making
That if you know how to decide in uncertainty (that is, you’ve naturalistic decision-making skills), you will do so.
Untrue.
At your job, there’s a big difference between making a decision under uncertainty and making a decision under uncertainty that is justifiable to a group.
The signature of the classical decision-making process is that it is a recipe–it is predictable, followable, systematic. You can document it, explain it to anyone, email it to the board. This feature is a butt-cover. It protects your ass from getting kicked.
But making a judgment call when your job’s on the line or business is not doing well? You might as well plan for retirement.
Rory Sutherland says, ‘It’s unbelievably dangerous and risky being slightly bonkers in business. Try something a bit nuts that fails and your job is on the line. Try something rational that fails and you get to try again.’
This is where psychological safety helps. Without it, employees land hard or, worse, do not jump. Training employees on intuitive decision-making and encouraging them to use their experience and hone their instincts are crucial for fostering innovation. It is a form of empowerment that sometimes flies under the radar.
Regardless of what your employer offers, you can learn how to best use your knowledge in situations that are high stakes and uncertain.
Tiny Thought #12
An unsolved crime is not evidence that a ghost committed it. An unsolved problem in physics is not evidence of a supernatural phenomenon. Every scientific discovery reveals further problems; if not, progress would stall with no frontier left to scale.
Tiny Thought #13
Evolution in human biology: random mutation supported by natural selection leading to a superior adaptation.
Evolution in human knowledge: conjecture supported by experiments leading to superior knowledge.
Analogous with a difference: knowledge evolution is intentional, not random
PS: Both tiny thoughts in this issue distilled from The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.
***
Thank you for reading! I would love to how I can make this newsletter more useful for you. Let me know in the comments or write to me at satyajit.07@gmail.com. Stay well!