We are in unprecedented historical territory when a Senator calls the President of his own political party “an utterly untruthful President” as Bob Corker did in regard to Donald Trump, and when another Senator from the same party, Jeff Flake, describes the President as having a "flagrant disregard of truth.” Consider the recent example of Trump making false statements about his phone conversation with a Gold Star widow, and then doubling and tripling down on them. For a more policy-oriented example, recall how Donald Trump’s rally speech in Phoenix on August 22 was full of falsehoods. He gave a revisionist and false history of his reaction to the Charlottesville violence to make himself look better, made false statements about media reporting and misled the audience over his economic achievements. Trump’s actions point to the normalization of post-truth politics, when appeals to personal beliefs and emotion win out over objective facts. To avoid this normalization, we need to borrow the successful tactics of the environmental movement.

Trump’s behavior – the speech and the attacks on the Gold Star widow – represents part of a broader pattern: Of Trump’s statements fact-checked by Politifact, an astounding 49 percent are false. By comparison, his Democratic opponent in the U.S. presidential election, Hillary Clinton, has 12 percent of her fact checked statements rated false; 14 percent of Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s are.

Despite Trump’s extremely high rate of deception, many still believe him. As an example, 44 percent of those polled believed his falsehoods about Obama wiretapping Trump Tower during the 2016 election campaign. Unfortunately, 29 percent of the public, and only 12 percent of Trump supporters, trust fact checkers.

Moreover, research on debunking falsehoods shows such debunking sometimes backfires. Called the backfire effect, scientists have shown in a number of cases people believe in falsehoods even more strongly after being presented with contradictory evidence. This situation enables Trump to pollute our politics with deception, destroying trust in our democratic political system.

Political and social science research summarized in the 2003 Trust and Governance, edited by Valerie Braithwaite and Margaret Levi, shows trust is vital for healthy democracies. Citizens in a democracy have a basic expectation of their public officials being trustworthy, in their words and actions. In return, citizens comply with laws, pay taxes and cooperate with other government initiatives. By comparison to a democracy, an autocratic state bears a much higher resource burden of policing to make its citizens comply with its laws. In his 2002 work, Trust and Trustworthiness, political scientist Russell Hardin also shows the vital role of trust in creating and cultivating civil society in a democracy. When political leaders act in ways that destroy trust—as Trump is doing through misleading statements and outright lies—people will increasingly stop complying with laws, paying taxes and engaging in civil society. Trump’s actions are fatally undermining the health of our democracy.

His behavior falls within the sphere of what behavioral scientists term “tragedy of the commons,” following a famous 1968 article in Science by Garret Hardin. Hardin demonstrated that in areas where a group of people share a common resource—the commons—without any controls on the use of this resource, individual self-interest may often lead to disaster for all involved. Because each individual may well have a strong interest in using more of the common resource than is their fair share, all suffer the consequences of the depletion of that resource. Environmental pollution is a clear example where the common resource of clean air and water is abused by polluters who destroy this shared resource.

Trump is abusing the commons of trust in our political environment, and he is setting a clear example for other politicians to follow through his successful tactics. West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin are adopting the post-truth tactics of condemning media as “fake news” whenever the media report stories unfavorable to them. As an example, Bevin personally attacked a journalist who reported on Bevin’s purchase of a mansion for about a million dollars under market value from a hedge fund manager, which some suggested might be a bribe in return for under-the-table political favors. Such trickle-down of post-truth politics points to its normalization within our political system, thus enabling corruption and undermining our democracy.

How do we stop this pollution of truth? The modern environmental movement has been dealing successfully with a tragedy of the commons: industrial pollution. The historical consensus is that the launch of the modern environmental movement came with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. This and other similar publications brought about an awakening of the public to the dangers posed by environmental pollution to individual and community health, and led to the coordinated movement of activists—Republican and Democrat—fighting for the environment.

As a result, environmental problems drew much wider public attention. Consider the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. The river has had a long history of pollution, and in June 1969 oil-covered debris caught fire, causing $100,000 worth of damage to two railroad bridges. This event drew national attention and became a major story in Time. Cleveland’s mayor testified before Congress to urge greater attention to pollution by the federal government. Notably, the Cuyahoga River had experienced many other fires due to industrial pollution, such as one in 1952 that resulted in over $1.3 million in damage—10 times that which incurred in 1969. This much bigger and more destructive fire, however, inspired little national attention—or efforts to change the situation—as compared with the conflagration of 1969.

The marked difference in the reaction to the two fires stemmed from the launch of the modern environmental movement, combining the coordinated actions of activists to seek out and highlight these problems with heightened public attention awareness of the danger of environmental pollution. We can do the same for the pollution of truth by launching a nonpartisan pro-truth movement. Such a movement would require a coordinated group of activists holding public figures accountable for deception as well as publicly highlighting the danger that post-truth politics poses to the health of our democracy.

Whereas the 1960s required the publication of books to raise awareness and launch a movement, our contemporary digital environment gives us easier tools. One example is the Pro-Truth Pledge project at ProTruthPledge.org, which allows private citizens and public figures to take a pledge committing them to 12 behaviors that research suggests are most likely to lead to a truth-oriented society. This site both offers a coordination venue for those determined to roll back the tide of lies and protect our democracy, and raises awareness of the dangers of political deception. Hundreds of private citizens across the U.S. and many dozens of public figures have already taken the pledge, including household names such as Peter Singer, Jonathan Haidt, and Steven Pinker as well as over 50 Democratic and Republican politicians.

By launching a pro-truth movement uniting people across the political divide, we can avoid the normalization of post-truth politics. Doing so will help ensure that the kind of falsehoods uttered by Trump get a response equivalent to the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga river, rather than the 1952 one. Whether the pro-truth movement takes off depends on how many people choose to take the pledge and join the effort to protect the health of our democracy from the pollution of truth.

How did Donald Trump win, when he used so many misleading statements and outright deceptions? Couldn’t people see through them? As an expert in brain science, I want to share why his followers fell for his lies and what can be done to address this situation in the future.

First, let’s get the facts straight. Politifact.com, a well-known non-partisan website, rates only about 4 percent of statements by Trump as fully “True” and over 50 percent as either completely “False” or what they call ridiculously false – “Pants on Fire,” with the rest in the middle. By comparison, Hillary Clinton rated 25 percent as fully “True” and only 12 percent as either “False” or “Pants on Fire.”

The Washington Post, one of the most reputable newspapers in the country, wrote that “There’s never been a presidential candidate like Donald Trump — someone so cavalier about the facts and so unwilling to ever admit error, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.” In their rulings on statements made by Trump, this paper’s editors evaluated 64 percent of them as Four Pinocchios, their worst rating. By contrast, statements by other politicians tend to get the worst rating 10 to 20 percent of the time.

These sentiments are representative of other prominent news media and fact-check outlets, yet according to an ABC News/Washington post poll, most voters on the eve of the election perceivedDonald Trump as more trustworthy than Hillary Clinton. This false perception came from the Trump campaign building up on previous Republican criticism of Clinton, much of it misleading and some accurate, to manipulate successfully many voters into believing that Clinton is less honest, in spite of the evidence that she is much more honest than Trump. The Trump campaign did so through the illusory truth effect, a thinking error in our minds that happens when false statements are repeated many times and we begin to see them as true. In other words, just because something is stated several times, we perceive it as more accurate.

You may have noticed the last two sentences in the previous paragraph had the same meaning. The second sentence didn’t provide any new information, but it did cause you to believe my claim more than you did when you read the first sentence.

The Biology of Truth Vs. Comfort

Why should the human brain be structured so that mere repetition, without any more evidence, causes us to believe a claim more strongly? The more often we are exposed to a statement, the more comfortable it seems. The fundamental error most people make is mistaking statements that make them feel comfortable for true statements.

Our brains cause us to believe something is true because we feel it is true, regardless of the evidence – a phenomenon known as emotional reasoning. This strange phenomenon can be easily explained by understanding some basic biology behind how our brain works.

When we hear a statement, the first thing that fires in our brain in a few milliseconds is our autopilot system of thinking, composed of our emotions and intuitions. Also known as System 1, the autopilot system is what the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Kahneman identified as our two systems of thinking in his 2011 Thinking, Fast and Slow, and represents the more ancient system of our brain. It protected us in the ancestral environment against dangerous threats such as saber-toothed tigers by making us feel bad about them and drew us toward what we needed to survive such as food and shelter by making us feel good about them. The humans who survived learned well to heed the autopilot system’s guidance, and we are the children of these humans.

Unfortunately, the autopilot system is not well calibrated for the modern environment. When we hear statements that go against our current beliefs, our autopilot system perceives them as threats and causes us to feel bad about them. By contrast, statements that align with our existing beliefs cause us to feel good and we want to believe them. So if we just go with our gut reactions – our lizard brain – we will always choose statements that align with our current beliefs.

Where Do We Get Our News?

Until recently, people got all their news from mainstream media, which meant they were often exposed to information that they didn’t like because it did not fit their beliefs. The budget cuts and consolidation of media ownership in the last decade resulted in mainstream media getting increasingly less diverse, well described in the 2009 Media Ownership and Concentration in America by Eli Noam. Moreover, according to a 2016 survey by Pew Research Center, many peopleare increasingly getting their news mainly or only from within their own personalized social media filter bubble, which tends to exclude information that differs from their own beliefs. So their own beliefs are reinforced and it seems that everyone shares the same beliefs as them.

This trend is based on a traditional strong trust in friends as sources of reliable recommendations, according to the 2015 Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Report. Our brains tend to spread the trust that we associate with friends to other sources of information that we see on social media. This thinking error is known as the halo effect when our assessment of one element of a larger whole as positive transfers to other elements. We can see this in research showing that people’s trust in social media influencers has grown over time, nearly to the level of trust in their friends, as shown by a 2016 joint study by Twitter and analytics firm Annalect.

Even more concerning, a 2016 study from Stanford University demonstrated that over 80 percent of students, who are generally experienced social media users, could not distinguish a news story shared by a friend from a sponsored advertisement. In a particularly scary finding, many of the study’s participants thought a news story was true based on irrelevant factors such as the size of the photo, as opposed to rational factors such as the credibility of the news source outlet.

The Trump team knows that many people have difficulty distinguishing sponsored stories from real news stories and that’s why they were at the forefront of targeting voters with sponsored advertorials on social media. In some cases they used this tactic to motivate their own supporters, and in others they used it as a voter suppression tactic against Clinton supporters. The Trump campaign’s Republican allies created fake news stories that got millions of shares on social media. The Russian propaganda machine has also used social media to manufacture fake news stories favorable to Trump and critical of Clinton.

Additionally, Trump’s attacks on mainstream media and fact-checkers before the election, and even after the election, undercut the credibility of news source outlets. As a result, trust in the media amongst Republicans dropped to an all-time low of 14 percent in a September 2016 Gallup poll, a drop of over 200 percent from 2015. Fact-checking is even less credible among Republicans, with 88 percent expressing distrust in a September 2016 Rasmussen Reports poll.

All this combined in the unprecedented reliance on and sharing of fake news by Trump’s supporters on social media. With the rise of the Tea Party, a new study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University used Politifact to find that Republicans have tended to make many more false statements than Democrats. Lacking trust in the mainstream media and relying on social media instead, a large segment of Trump’s base indiscriminately shared whatever made them feel good, regardless of whether it was true. Indeed, one fake news writer, in an interview with The Washington Post, said of Trump supporters: “His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything.” No wonder that Trump’s supporters mostly believe his statements, according to polling. By contrast, another creator of fake news, in an interview with NPR, described how he “tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait” due to them practicing fact-checking and debunking.

This fact-checking and debunking illustrates that the situation, while dismal, is not hopeless. Such truth-oriented behaviors rely on our other thinking system, the intentional system or system 2, as shown by Chip and Dan Heath in their 2013’s Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. The intentional system is deliberate and reflective. It takes effort to use but it can catch and override the thinking errors committed by system 1 so that we do not adopt the belief that something is true because we feel it is true, regardless of the evidence.

Many liberals associate positive emotions with empirical facts and reason, which is why their intentional system is triggered into doing fact-checking on news stories. Trump voters mostly do not have such positive emotions around the truth, and believe in Trump’s authenticity on a gut level regardless of the facts. This difference is not well recognized by the mainstream media, who treat their audience as rational thinkers and present information in a language that communicates well to liberals, but not to Trump voters.

To get more conservatives to turn on the intentional system when evaluating political discourse we need to speak to emotions and intuitions – the autopilot system, in other words. We have to get folks to associate positive emotions with the truth first and foremost, before anything else.

To do so, we should understand where these people are coming from and what they care about, validate their emotions and concerns, and only then show, using emotional language, the harm people suffer when they believe in lies. For instance, for those who care about safety and security, we can highlight how it’s important for them to defend themselves against being swindled into taking actions that make the world more dangerous. Those concerned with liberty and independence would be moved by emotional language targeted toward keeping themselves free from being used and manipulated. For those focused on family values, we may speak about trust being abused.

These are strong terms that have deep emotional resonance. Many may be uncomfortable with using such tactics of emotional appeals. We have to remember the end goal of helping people orient toward the truth. This is a case where ends do justify the means. We need to be emotional to help people grow more rational – to make sure that while truth lost the battle, it will win the war.

P.S. To learn more about truth-seeking strategies in politics and other life areas, check out the article author’s book, The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is the author of the forthcoming The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide. One of the lead creators of the Pro-Truth Pledge, he is a professor at Ohio State and President of the nonprofit Intentional Insights. Connect with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky on Twitter, on Facebook, and on LinkedIn, and follow his RSS feed and newsletter.  

The front-runner candidate for Alabama Senate, Republican Roy Moore, called The Washington Post “fake news” after the newspaper published a thorough investigation reporting on sexual encounters between Moore and multiple teenage girls, one as young as 14. Moore’s attacks on this highly-reputable newspaper are part of a recent broader pattern of prominent public figures using the label of “fake news” to denounce quality investigative journalism that reveals corruption and abuse of power. Such attacks pose an urgent and systemic danger to our democracy, as they encourage corruption and abuse of power by undermining credible media reporting on such behavior.

As a high-quality, well-respected venue, The Washington Post would not publish such a controversial story without a thorough investigation. The article was based on multiple interviews with over 30 people who knew Moore at the time the sexual encounters happened, between 1977 and 1982. The journalists were careful to paint a balanced story, including some negative facts about the women who accused Moore, such as divorces and bankruptcies.

Perhaps most telling of the high quality of reporting and credibility of the newspaper is the fact that a number of prominent Republican leaders are calling on Moore to withdraw from the race. Immediately after The Post publishes its story, Republican Senator John McCain called for Moore to step aside immediately, and Montana Senator Steve Daines withdrew his endorsement, as did Utah Senator Mike Lee. After a fifth woman stepped forward to accuse Moore independently of The Post’s story, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated that Moore “should step aside,” and so did Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

On the other hand, Republicans well-known for making false accusations of mainstream media outlets being “fake news” defended Moore and supported his attack on The Post. For example, former Donald Trump adviser and head of Breitbart Stephen Bannon accused the The Post of being “purely part of the apparatus of the Democratic Party” for conducting its thorough investigation. Prominent Virginia Republican Corey Stewart also refused to criticize Moore and instead attacked the newspaper. A number of Fox News commentators, such as Gregg Jarrett, also attacked The Post.

Unfortunately, these attacks on quality investigative reporting represent part of a broader trend of conservative politicians across the country adopting the tactic of condemning media as “fake news” whenever there are stories unfavorable to them. As an example, Republican Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin tweeted that the reporter Tom Loftus of the largest newspaper in Kentucky, The Courier-Journal, is “a truly sick man” for “sneaking around” Bevin’s manor. Loftus at the time was working on a story about how Bevin faced an ethics complaint over an accusation of bribery for purchasing this manor for about a million dollars below market price from a local investor, Neil Ramsey. Apparently, shortly before getting a million-dollar discount on this manor, Bevin appointed Ramsey to the Kentucky Retirement Board, which oversees $16 billion in investments.

Republican Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie used a similar approach when caught abusing his power. He ordered a number of state-run beaches in New Jersey closed on June 30, yet he used a closed state beach in Island Beach State Park for himself and his family on July 2. Reporters for New Jersey’s largest newspaper, The Star-Ledger, secretly photographed him and his family using the beach. When asked about whether he was on the beach that day, Christie denied it. When confronted with photographic proof, Christie did not acknowledge and apologizing for his lies and his abuse of power in using a closed public beach for the benefit of himself and his family. He instead attacked The Star-Ledger for its reporting.

Without the attacks on the media, the investigations of Christie and Bevin would have simply revealed the sordid affairs of corruption and abuse of power. Our democracy would have worked correctly with voters appropriately getting the important information from credible sources, the largest newspapers in Kentucky and New Jersey. With these accusations, Bevin and Christie distract attention from the corruption and abuse of power, and instead present themselves as fighters against supposed media bias.

In doing so, Moore, Bevin, Christie and many others are tapping the anti-media bias of the Republican base inflamed by Trump’s attacks on the media. He has expressed pride over his branding of high-quality venues like “CBS, and NBC, and ABC, and CNN” as “fake news.” We are now reaping the whirlwind of politicians caught engaged in immoral, abusive, and corrupt behavior using Trump’s anti-media rhetoric to protect themselves and continue engaging in such activities.

Now, it doesn’t mean that Democrats will not try similar tactics. For example, the prominent film director Harvey Weinstein, a well-known and high-profile fundraiser for and influencer in the Democratic Party, accused The New York Times of publishing fake news when they revealed his sexual harassment. However, neither the Democratic base nor prominent Democrats bought this accusation, and Weinstein was quickly ousted from his leading roles.

By contrast, Bevin’s popularity in the polls was climbing in Kentucky, a conservative state, at the same time that he was making his accusations. Moore has continued to be staunchly supported by the Alabama Republican Party and base, despite the accusations and the withdrawal of support from many mainstream Republicans. Only in New Jersey, a liberal-leaning state, did voters express discontent over Christie’s behavior.

However, all of us – regardless of our party affiliation – will be greatly harmed if politicians are able to get away with corruption, immorality, and abuse of power through labeling of credible media sources as fake news. This tactic is posing an existential and systemic threat to our democracy, and we must do everything possible toprotect quality journalism and overall promote truthful behavior.

P.S. Want to promote truth and fight lies? Take the Pro-Truth Pledge at ProTruthPledge.org, get your friends to take it, and call on your elected representatives to do so.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is the author of The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide. He is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University, President of the nonprofit Intentional Insights, and co-founder of the Pro-Truth Pledge.

It’s the holiday season, which means plenty of opportunities for uncomfortable interactions with friends and family who are truth deniers. For example, my close friend invited me to her holiday party recently, where I sat across the table from her brother Mike. We got to talking about Donald Trump’s recently-successful efforts to ban people from many majority-Muslim countries from entering the US and his retweeting of anti-Muslim videos.

Mike strongly supported Trump’s ban and rhetoric, and other anti-Muslim policies. By the end of that meal, he grew to be much more tolerant and inclusive of Muslims. To get him to update his beliefs  – something I do regularly during interviews with conservative talk show hosts –  I relied on my research on how to get people to accept the facts, specifically a strategy that can be summarized under the acronym EGRIP (Emotions, Goals, Rapport, Information, Positive Reinforcement).

The typical response to truth deniers of presenting facts and arguing is generally not effective in changing people’s minds on charged issues. Research on the confirmation bias shows that people tend to look for and interpret information in ways that conforms to their beliefs. Moreover, studies on the backfire effect reveal that when people are presented with facts that challenge their identity, they sometimes develop a stronger attachment to their incorrect belief as a defense mechanism.

If someone denies clear facts, you can safely assume that it’s their emotions that are leading them away from reality. You need to deploy the skill of empathy, meaning understanding other people’s emotions, to determine what emotional blocks might cause them to deny reality. In Mike’s case, it was relatively easy to figure out the emotions at play by making a guess based on what research shows about what conservatives value: security. I confirmed my suspicion through active listening and using curiosity to question Mike about his concerns about Muslims, and he shared extensively his fears about all Muslims being potential terrorists.

Next, establish shared goals for both of you, crucial for effective knowledge sharing. With Mike, I talked about how we both want security for our society. I also pointed out how sometimes our emotions lead us astray. We might want to eat all the Yule log on the table, but it would harm our health, so we should focus on our goals over our gut intuitions. We should also commit to the facts, as we want to avoid deceiving ourselves and thus undermining our safety and security. I told him that I - along with thousands of others - committed to the Pro-Truth Pledge and asked him to hold me accountable. He appreciated me sharing about this commitment, and it raised my credibility in his eyes. 

Third, build rapport. Using the empathetic listening you did previously, a vital skill in promoting trusting relationships, echo their emotions and show you understand how they feel. In the case of Mike, I echoed his fear and validated his emotions, telling him it’s natural to feel afraid when we see Muslims committing terrorism, and it’s where my gut goes as well.

Fourth, move on to sharing information. Here is where you can give the facts that you held back in the beginning. There were eight terrorist acts in the US motivated in part by Islamic beliefs in 2016, with nine terrorists in total. Given that there are about 1.8 million Muslim adults in the US, you have a one-in-200,000 chance that any Muslim you see would commit a terrorist act in one year. That's like picking out a terrorist randomly from the number of people in several football stadiums, and focusing our efforts on surveilling Muslims will make us less secure by causing us to miss the actual terrorists.

Moreover, the FBI praises Muslims for reporting threats, and anti-Muslim policies will make Muslims less likely to report threats. Besides, we already see Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric used to recruit terrorists in the US, and more anti-Muslim policies will only result in more materials to recruit terrorists. The key here is to show your conversation partner, without arousing a defensive or aggressive response, how their current truth denialism will lead to them undermining the shared goals we established earlier.

Mike was surprised and moved by this information, presented in an emotionally-sensitive manner. He agreed that anti-Muslim policies seem unwise, and we should be more tolerant and inclusive for the sake of increasing our security, even if that’s not how we intuitively feel. I offered positive reinforcement for his orientation toward the facts, a research-based tactic of encouraging people to change their identity.

Think of how much better your holiday dinner could go if you use EGRIP instead of arguing!

Image of hand with Christmas gifts (Max Pixel)

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is the author of The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide. He is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University, President of the nonprofit Intentional Insights, and co-founder of the Pro-Truth Pledge.

President Donald Trump called the recently-passed tax bill “an incredible Christmas gift” for middle-class Americans. In reality, the tax bill takes money from the pockets of middle-class Americans and gives it to corporations. Anyone who claims the tax bill primarily benefits the middle class is spreading falsehoods.

With the new bill, the tax rate for corporations is reduced from 35 percent to 21 percent. That makes a total reduction of 40 percent from what they were paying earlier. Other benefits for corporations include doing away with the alternative minimum tax, along with many provisions that will reduce the taxes they do pay.

What about tax cuts for individuals? Consider a household making $50,000 to $75,000: the average tax cut for them is 1.6 percent, or $870. The wealthiest would get the biggest tax breaks, as a household earning over a million would see an average cut of $69,660, or 3.3 percent increase.

Unfortunately for individuals, the tax cuts they get are limited to 8 years, and expire after 2025. So without any changes, the same household making $50,000 to $75,000 would actually be paying $30 more in taxes after 2025. The wealthy would be much better off, with the average household making over a million getting a cut of more than $23,000 after 2025, along with a host of other benefits. Overall, after that date, households making over a million  –  approximately .6 percent of all taxpayers  –  would get 81.8 percent of the total benefit of this bill. By contrast, the corporate tax rate cuts are permanent, and will not expire.

This extremely disproportionate tax cut comes with a hefty price tag. The nonpartisan and authoritative congressional scorekeeper Joint Committee on Taxation found that the tax bill would cost approximately $1.4 trillion, which would be added to the existing $20 trillion national debt.

Who will now be responsible for paying the taxes to address this debt? Due to the extreme tax cut for corporations, individual American taxpayers will have a much bigger proportional tax burden in paying for the debt. Since the most wealthy had especially large tax breaks, and they tend to be the large shareholders in corporations that benefit from this law, middle-class Americans will be increasingly stuck with the tab for the debt. This is especially the case after 2025, when the tax breaks for individuals expire.

The Republican politicians who support the tax bill say it will pay for itself by creating jobs and improving the business climate, and thus in the end benefit the middle class. However, they are not experts at economics. The Joint Committee on Taxation, which is acknowledged as nonpartisan and expert by Democrats and Republicans alike, found that over 10 years the tax bill would produce $400 billion in revenue, leaving unpaid an additional $1 trillion. Likewise, a survey of top economists indicated that the vast majority believed the tax bill would not substantially improve the US economy, would substantially increase the debt burden, and would redistribute wealth from the middle class to corporations and the wealthy.

Deferring to expert analysis is a critical component of truthfulness. Any time we see someone  –  especially a politician  –  reject expert analysis, we should be very suspicious, and see whether they have hidden motivations to mislead us. After all, while politicians are not experts at economics, they are experts at getting elected. They have strong incentives to do what would get them elected and mislead the public if needed.

In the case of this tax bill, the hidden motives are quite obvious. For example, Representative Chris Collins, a New York Republican, told a reporter that “my donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again’” regarding the tax bill. According to Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, if the tax bill is not passed, the “financial contributions will stop."

In order to ensure they get elected, Republicans had to pass the tax bill in order to keep getting donations from the wealthy and corporations, who really pay attention to and know what is going on. Now, President Donald Trump is calling on his Republican colleagues to sell the tax bill to everyday voters, who pay much less attention to the details of tax policies.

Republicans have been misrepresenting the essence of the tax bill all along. They presented it as all about tax cuts to the middle class, even though the biggest cut has been for corporations. Repeating this falsehood invokes the illusory truth effect, a psychological phenomenon where a false statement repeated often enough becomes seen as true. Indeed, most of the Republican base bought these falsehoods, with around 60 percent thinking the bill primarily favors the middle class.

In reality, the tax bill falls into the classic category of trickle-down economics. This policy approach involves taking money from the middle class and giving it to corporations via such tax cuts. Republicans justify trickle-down economics by saying that corporations will use such money better than middle-class Americans, despite experts disagreeing with them about the growth resulting from the tax bill.

Historically, trickle-down economics has been most strongly associated with Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately, Reagan’s economic policies had bad economic consequences. More recently, thorough analyses of trickle-down economics by such reputable organizations as the International Monetary Fund suggest that this approach does not stimulate economic growth. Instead giving money to the lowest income earners stimulates growth much more. However, that’s not what the tax bill does.

We may debate about the effectiveness of trickle-down economics. However, the more salient point is that the large majority of Republicans have not been courageous enough to say openly that this tax bill is an example of trickle-down economics. While we may disagree on whether trickle-down economics works, we should all agree that spreading falsehoods about the reality of the tax bill erodes our democracy.

Will the misrepresentations of the tax bill succeed or will the American people recognize the truth about this tax bill as taking money from the pockets of middle-class Americans and giving it to corporations? You can make a difference by calling out any politicians and journalists who misrepresent the tax bill and calling on them to commit publicly to truthful behavior, as well as committing to truthful behaviors yourself by taking the Pro-Truth Pledge at ProTruthPledge.org.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is the author of the #1 Amazon bestseller The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide. He is anAssistant Professor at The Ohio State University, President of the nonprofit Intentional Insights, and co-founder of the Pro-Truth Pledge, which aims to unite all who care about facts and truth.

Donald Trump’s “Fake News Awards” for what he calls “the most corrupt & biased of the Mainstream Media” have drawn mockery. However, behavioral science research suggests they are deadly serious. These awards create an institution for Trump’s relentless attacks on mainstream media and position Trump as the only voice who gets to determine truthful media. Unfortunately, the typical style of news coverage will perpetuate Trump’s agenda. However, a different style informed by behavioral science strategies would convey more accurate information and address the damage from the Fake News Awards.

The purpose of any award is to create an institutionalized way of promoting a certain cause through drawing public attention. As an example, consider perhaps the most well-known prize in the world, the Nobel Prize, awarded for the most important scientific and cultural advances. Every year, the media is filled with headlines describing the awards and their recipients, resulting in significant public attention that uplifts the importance of science and culture.

This attention taps into the “availability heuristic,” our tendency to assign excessive importance to whatever happens to be at the forefront of our minds, and the “priming effect,” where we perceive exaggerated connections between past and future stimuli. Thus, the Nobel Prize causes the public to focus on scientific and cultural achievements, and interpret future advances in light of the winners of last year’s Nobel Prize.

More subtly, an award positions the grantor of the award as the sole legitimate voice in determining who deserves the award. Several Swedish and Norwegian institutions decide who gets the various Nobel Prize awards. Perhaps the most prestigious one, the Nobel Peace Prize, is determined by a committee elected by politicians in the Norwegian Parliament. Thus, the internal domestic politics of Norway powerfully influence this prize.

In parallel, the Fake News Awards promote Trump’s attacks on mainstream media. In a January 2, 2018 tweet, he described the award as highlighting “Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories.” We can get a more clear nature of what he means by “various categories” from when Trump first tweeted on November 27, 2017 about handing out a fake news trophy for “the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me).”

Trump, in other words, aims to use the award to perpetuate the narrative of himself as the victim of unfair and dishonest mainstream media coverage: after all, he is well-known for using the label “fake news” to attack accurate news stories that he doesn’t like. The President will use these awards to draw massive public attention to supposed “fake news” coverage by mainstream news sources. In fact, he even delayed the granting of the awards due to the extensive public attention to the awards.

Official Fake News Trophy Featured in GOP Email 1/18/18

The availability heuristic will cause the public to focus on “fake news” in mainstream media’s coverage of the President, regardless of whether this coverage is accurate or not. The priming effect will move news consumers to be more likely to perceive negative coverage as fake.

Since such awards will likely be given annually, they will institutionalize Trump’s agenda of attacking the mainstream media, while also legitimating Trump as the grantor of these awards. He will get to determine which media venues get labeled as providing “the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted” coverage. You can bet that it will not be the media venues that actually are the most dishonest, but the ones that depict Trump in a negative light, regardless of how factual (or not) such depictions may be.

Some believe that Trump will lose credibility from granting these awards because he will draw attention to unflattering stories about himself. Unfortunately, behavioral science research suggests that the style of coverage by news media will facilitate Trump’s agenda.

The typical style of headlines about any awards generally focus on who got the awards. Unfortunately, research shows that only 41% of readers go beyond the headlines, with most getting their news from the headline alone. Many of the rest do not read beyond the first paragraph, which in most stories would summarize who received the awards and in what category. Even the ones who do go further will experience “anchoring,” a thinking error where the first information we get about a topic drastically colors our overall perspective. Yes, first impressions really do matter.

Studies reveal that the standard journalistic methods of correcting people’s misconceptions with accurate facts backfires in the long term. If you first state the false information and then provide evidence of why it is wrong, people will tend to forget over time the evidence for why it is wrong, and start to misremember the original falsehood as true. Thus, even though many articles covering the Fake News Awards will eventually explain that these awards are meant to perpetuate Trump’s attacks on mainstream media and were awarded at Trump’s sole discretion, the damage will already be done.

To prevent this outcome of media consumers getting the wrong impression about the Fake News Awards, mainstream media need to go against its typical style of reporting, and instead align its coverage with behavioral science research. Instead of headlines about who received the awards, headlines should say something like “In Yet Another Attack on the Media, Trump Issues Fake News Awards” so that the majority of their readers who only glance at the headlines get the right impression. The first paragraph of the article should focus on how this award attempts to perpetuate and institutionalize Trump’s attack on the media and position Trump as the sole voice of truth, before talking about who received the awards.

Articles on the awards should devote some space to the “Press Oppressors awards” issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists. These awards - issued in response to Trump’s announcement of the Fake News Awards - focus on world leaders “who have gone out of their way to attack the press and undermine the norms that support freedom of the media.” Can you guess who received the “Overall Achievement in Undermining Global Press Freedom” award?

You as a media consumer can encourage media venues to cover the Fake News Awards appropriately by writing letters-to-the-editor suggesting more appropriate coverage, or more simply by tweeting and emailing them with a link to this article. You can also encourage them to take the Pro-Truth Pledge at ProTruthPledge.org to commit to truthfulness. Consider taking the pledge yourself, which aims to unite all private citizens and public figures who care about truth and facts in our society.

You can also make sure to share only articles that cover the awards appropriately. When others post articles on social media with problematic coverage, you can make comments that give a more accurate impression and draw attention to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

You have the power to address the damage from these awards.

Caption: photo of woman playing tennis (Skeeze/Pixabay)

Guest post by Peter Livingstone

After hearing several references to a 1973 book called Extraordinary Tennis for the Ordinary Player by Simon Ramo, I decided to give it a read. I was wowed! It’s not because I used it to improve my game. In fact, you might be surprised to learn that I don’t play tennis, and I don’t plan to start because I read the book. What compelled and excited me was the bigger lesson conveyed by the book.

Ramo describes how in amateur tennis, about 80 percent of points are lost, not won. Lost points, as defined by Ramo, are those resulting from a player making an unforced error, such as hitting an easy return out-of-bounds, rather than hitting a brilliant shot that is impossible for an opponent to return. The lesson is that the vast majority of amateur tennis players will have much more success by working on “not losing,” rather than by trying to “win.”

I was struck by the fact that this simple idea is transferable to nearly every aspect of one’s life. Here’s how I think it can be applied to not be a loser in the game of life.

Caption: Photo of family playing "The Game of Life” (Kathryn/Flickr)

A Bit More About Dr. Ramo… and Tennis

Simon Ramo was a prominent American physicist, engineer, and businessman. Later in his life when he wanted to improve his tennis game, he applied the same rigorous, evidence-based approach that led to his successful career.

As a scientist and statistician, he gathered data by simply counting points won versus points lost. What he discovered is that in amateur tennis, the game’s outcome is determined by the player who makes the most mistakes. Thus, the best strategy to win in amateur tennis is to keep the ball in play, allowing the other player to make more errors. Occasionally, your opponent will hit a shot you can’t return. More frequently, however, he or she will hit it into the net or out-of-bounds, or fail to return it at all.

Keep in mind that Ramo discovered that outcomes in professional tennis work the opposite way - about 80 percent of points are won. That is, the professionals who win hit extraordinary shots that are essentially impossible to return. So, unless you are one of those professionals, the best way to win is to avoid losing!

Transferring Tennis Lessons to Life Lessons

Domain independence is the idea that certain knowledge may be applicable across other fields. I think Ramo’s insights into tennis can be considered domain independent for many other endeavors.

"In order to succeed it is necessary to know how to avoid the most likely ways to fail." When I first read this statement, referred to as Minsky’s Admonition in The Systems Bible, it struck me that it could have been lifted directly from Dr. Ramo’s book on tennis. Hyman Minsky was an American economist whose research attempted to provide an understanding and explanation of the characteristics of financial crises.

I doubt there was ever any collaboration between Ramo and Minsky, so I take this as evidence of domain independence. Two different people, researching two completely different subjects, have come to the same conclusion on achieving success!

Here are a few other areas where I think this concept may apply.

Investing

In the classic investment book Winning the Loser’s Game, Charles Ellis makes the case that investing works much the same way as tennis. Ellis proposes that most investors, like most tennis players, end up defeating themselves by making avoidable mistakes. Like Ramo, Ellis uses compelling mathematical evidence to make his arguments.

Consider, for example, some statistics: The average annual compounded return of the broad US stock market, as measured by the S&P 500 Index, for the past 30 years was just over 10%. For that same period, the average individual investor in stock market funds achieved a return of slightly less than 4%. For an individual investing $300 a month in a retirement account over 30 years, this is a difference of having about $650,000 versus $200,000.

Why do most investors underperform the market by so much? While a fraction of the underperformance can be attributed to trading costs and other fees, Ellis explains that most investors are like amateurs playing tennis. That is, they think they can outperform the market by attempting brilliant, “winning” moves, but by doing so make unforced errors. One such error is trying to “time” the market through a pattern of buying and selling. Another error includes buying into “hot” funds or individual stocks - those that have had recent superior performance - and selling losers. These actions, more often than not, lead to buying high and selling low, the exact opposite of a winning strategy. Also, paying high fees to funds you expect to outperform will usually lead to underperformance. Funds that charge high fees, on average, underperform funds with low fees. One might get lucky once in awhile, but over time these actions lead to the huge discrepancy between the market performance and average individual performance.

What’s the best way to avoid these investment mistakes and achieve results close to the market average? It’s the same as in tennis: just work on “not losing." For individual investors with a long-term time horizon, the best option is to systematically invest in a low cost fund that tracks a broad market index, such as the S&P 500, or a global index such as the MSCI ACWI, which includes the US and most other world markets. Put your money into these investments incrementally over time and leave it there, at least until you are close to retirement.

Health and Fitness

Ramo lists a group of “don’ts” for tennis - those behaviors, characteristic of many amateur players, which should be eliminated. Simply focusing on reducing, and preferably eliminating, these actions can significantly improve one’s play. As in tennis, improvements in health and fitness can come from the elimination of harmful actions.

According to the ongoing Global Burden of Disease study, tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the US and the world. Diet is the second highest risk factor after smoking. Many diet-related diseases are the result of overconsumption of calories in the form of simple sugars. Additionally, increasing death rates from the abuse of alcohol and opioids in the US has been widely acknowledged as a public health crisis.

It may take you a bit of reframing to view behaviors such as smoking, poor eating, and drug abuse as errors. Additionally, identifying these errors is usually pretty simple, but eliminating them can be extremely difficult. Behavior change is hard. Here is an article I found useful on how to avoid impulsive temptations, and one on building willpower.

Many of us think improving our fitness is only possible by adding activities to our routines, such as going to the gym or taking up running. Consider, however, some things we can eliminate to get actually more exercise.

How many times have you stood on an escalator, or ridden an elevator, only to find that someone who took the stairs arrived at the same destination as quickly as you? Do you have the opportunity to walk or ride a bike to some destinations, rather than take a car or bus?

By framing some of these modern conveniences as errors to eliminate, you may be able to improve your fitness without sacrificing time or money. There may be tremendous opportunity for improving your health and fitness by just working on eliminating some things you are doing, rather than doing more.

Diminishing Returns

Learning to avoid mistakes may be one of the fastest and easiest methods of improving. Have you ever noticed how quickly you can improve when you start learning something new, especially if you’ve had the opportunity to learn from a good coach or teacher? I’ve really enjoyed watching children learn a new activity from a good coach, whether it be playing a sport, or even a board game requiring some skill.

It seems to me that most of their improvement, at least initially, comes from learning how to avoid mistakes. Of course, those improvements usually tend to slow down over time, a phenomenon known as diminishing returns. As we improve, it naturally gets harder to keep up that rate of improvement, or learning curve. Perhaps most of that rapid improvement comes from simply learning to not make mistakes. Keep this in mind to avoid frustration. The more you improve, the harder it may be to become even better.

…But Will This Approach Lead To Mediocrity?

By now you may be thinking “If all I do is focus on not losing, won’t I just be mediocre in everything?” No doubt many of us can and do achieve greatness in some domains, but consider these two points:

1) Since no one starts off anything at a high level of expertise, why not begin by “not losing” and learn first to avoid errors?

2) Even people talented, dedicated, and lucky enough to achieve greatness in one or two fields will undoubtedly be closer to ordinary in many other areas. It is important to recognize at what, if anything, you are truly great or desire to be great, and what falls in your “ordinary” range.

Let’s consider an example of how someone at the top of their field could have used this approach for a better outcome in another endeavor. History is filled with many top performers in one field having disasters in other areas. In 2009, Sports Illustrated estimated that 78% of NFL players have gone bankrupt or have been in financial stress within two years of retirement, and that 60% of former NBA players are broke within five years of retirement. Considering that the average annual salary of these professionals in 2012 was about $2 million and $5 million, respectively, this seems unbelievable.

Sticking to our tennis theme, consider the case of Bjorn Borg. Undoubtedly the greatest tennis player of his time, and considered by many one of the greatest ever, Borg won 64 titles, including 11 Grand Slams, over a 10 year career. His tournament earnings alone, in today’s dollars, were about $15 million. Borg retired from professional tennis in 1983 and pursued business opportunities. By 1990 his companies collapsed and were declared bankrupt. In 2006, Borg was forced to sell off many of his trophies to achieve "financial security”.

According to tennis writer Richard Evans, Borg “was much too trusting. He made bad choices which led to bad luck.”

Perhaps Borg, and many other top athletes, fall into the trap of approaching personal finance in the same manner as winning in their professional field. Maybe Borg would have fared better by approaching his businesses and personal finances from an “ordinary” perspective, at least until he developed into an extraordinary businessman.

The Relativity of Ordinary

Being a scientist, Ramo paid homage to Albert Einstein by invoking the term relativity. What if, relative to your opponent, you are the equivalent of a pro? In this case, Ramo’s advice for tennis should not be taken as absolute, but should be adapted for the situation.

Perhaps, given a weaker opponent, you can benefit by trying a more aggressive court position, much like a professional. You can use this adaptation in other areas of life too. As you improve and get closer to a professional level, consider some actions that challenge your abilities. Just don’t try these during a critical “match” point. For example, if you’re just learning how to drive, you might want to practice in an empty parking lot, maneuvering around rubber cones, before you cruise through busy city streets. It’s OK to make some errors, providing you learn from them and you are willing to accept their consequences.

What if, on the other hand, you really are a pro player, but your play has become a little erratic and you are temporarily making more errors? It can be difficult admitting part of your game is ordinary. If this is your case, Ramo suggests considering that you may be only a bit ordinary. You are still eligible to benefit from working on winning by not losing, and by eliminating errors.

As Ramo puts it, you can improve, going from “ordinary” to “ex-ordinary,” whether or not you ever become extraordinary.

Questions to Ask Yourself

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky serves as the volunteer President of the nonprofit Intentional Insights and is a co-founder of the Pro-Truth Pledge. He authored a number of a number of books, most notably the #1 Amazon bestseller The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide, and is regularly featured in venues like CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Newsweek, The Conversation, CNBC, and elsewhere.

At least 10 US children died and over 400 were sickened after taking homeopathic teething medicine laced with a poisonous herb called “deadly nightshade.” Carried by CVS, Walgreens, and other major American pharmacies, the pills contained this poison based on the alternative medicine principle of homeopathy, the treatment of medical conditions by tiny doses of natural substances that produce symptoms of disease. 

These children did not have to die. Numerous research studies show that homeopathy does not work. Despite this research, homeopathy is a quickly-growing multi-billion dollar business, taking advantage of people’s distrust in science and the lack of government regulation of “alternative medicine.”

These deaths are among many terrible consequences of the crisis of trust suffered by our institutions in recent years. While headlines focus on declining trust in the media and the government, science and academia are not immune to this crisis of confidence, and the results can be deadly.

Consider that in 2006, 41% of respondents in a nationwide poll expressed “a lot of confidence” in higher education. Less than 10 years later, in 2014, only 14% of those surveyed showed “a great deal of confidence” in academia.

What about science as distinct from academia? Polling shows that the number of people who believe that science has “made life more difficult” increased by 50% from 2009 to 2015. According to a 2017 survey, only 35% of respondents have “a lot” of trust in scientists; the number of people who do “not at all” trust scientists increased by over 50% from a similar poll conducted in December 2013.

This crumbling of trust in science and academia forms part of a broader pattern, what Tom Nichols called The Death of Expertise in his 2017 book. Growing numbers of people claim their personal opinions hold equal weight to the opinions of experts.

Children dying from deadly nightshade in homeopathic medicine is only one consequence of this crisis of trust. For another example, consider the false claim that vaccines cause autism. This belief has spread widely across the US, and leads to a host of problems. For instance, measles was practically eliminated in the US by 2000. However, in recent years outbreaks of measles have been on the rise, driven by parents failing to vaccinate their children in a number of communities.

Should We Actually Trust Scientific Experts?

While we can all agree that we do not want children to suffer, what is the underlying basis for why the opinions of experts - including scientists - deserve more trust than the average person in evaluating the truth of reality?

The term “expert” refers to someone who has extensive familiarity with a specific area, as shown by commonly-recognized credentials such as a certification, an academic degree, publication of a book, years of experience in a field, or other way that a reasonable person may recognize an “expert.” Experts are able to draw on their substantial body of knowledge and experience to provide an opinion, often expressed as “expert analysis.”

That doesn’t mean an expert opinion will always be right: it’s simply much more likely to be right than the opinion of a non-expert. The underlying principle here is probabilistic thinking, our ability to predict the truth of current and future reality based on limited information. Thus, a scientist studying autism would be much more likely to predict accurately the consequences of vaccinations than someone who has spent 10 hours Googling “vaccines and autism” online.

This greater likelihood of experts being correct does not at all mean we should always defer to experts. First, research shows that experts do best in evaluating reality in environments that are relatively stable over time and thus predictable, and also when the experts have a chance to learn about the predictable aspects of this environment. Second, other research suggests that ideological biases can have a strongly negative impact on the ability of experts to make accurate evaluations. Third, material motivations can sway experts to conduct an analysis favorable to their financial sponsor.

However, while individual scientists may make mistakes, it is incredibly rare for the scientific consensus as a whole to be wrong. Scientists get rewarded in money and reputation for finding fault with statements about reality made by other scientists. Thus, for the large majority of them to agree on something – for there to be a scientific consensus – is a clear indicator that whatever they agree on reflects reality accurately.

The Internet Is for… Misinformation

The rise of the Internet, and more recently social media, is key to explaining the declining public confidence in expert opinion.

Before the Internet, the information accessible to the general public about any given topic usually came from experts. For instance, scientific experts on autism were invited to talk on this topic on mainstream media, large publishers published books by the same experts, and they wrote encyclopedia articles on this topic.

The Internet has enabled anyone to be a publisher of content, connecting people around the world with any and all sources of information. On the one hand, this freedom is empowering and liberating, with Wikipedia a great example of a highly-curated and accurate source on the vast majority of subjects. On the other, anyone can publish a blog piece making false claims about links between vaccines and autism or the effectiveness of homeopathic medicine. If they are skilled at search engine optimization, or have money to invest in advertising, they can get their message spread widely.

Unfortunately, research shows that people lack the skills for differentiating misinformation from true information. This lack of skills has clear real-world effects: just consider that US adults believed 75% of fake news stories about the 2016 US Presidential election. The more often someone sees a piece of misinformation, the more likely they are to believe it.

Blogs with falsehoods are bad enough, but the rise of social media made the situation even worse. Most people re-share news stories without reading the actual articles, judging the quality of the story by the headline and image alone. No wonder that research indicates that misinformation spreads as much as 10 times faster and further on social media than true information. After all, the creator of a fake news item is free to devise the most appealing headline and image, while credible sources of information have to stick to factual headlines and images.

These problems result from the train wreck of human thought processes meeting the Internet. We all suffer from a series of thinking errors such as confirmation bias, our tendency to look for and interpret information in ways that conform to our beliefs.

Before the Internet, we got our information from sources such as mainstream media and encyclopedias, which curated the information for us to ensure it came from experts, minimizing the problem of confirmation bias. Now, the lack of curation means thinking errors are causing us to choose information that fits our intuitions and preferences, as opposed to the facts. Moreover, some unscrupulous foreign actors - such as the Russian government - and domestic politicians use misinformation as a tool to influence public discourse and public policy.

The large gaps between what scientists and the public believe about issues such as climate change, evolution, GMOs, and vaccination exemplify the problems caused by misinformation and lack of trust in science. Such mistrust results in great harm to our society, from children dying to damaging public policies.

What Can We Do?

Fortunately, there are proactive steps we can take to address the crisis of trust in science and academia.

For example, we can uplift the role of science in our society. The March for Science movement is a great example of this effort. First held on Earth Day in 2017 and repeated in 2018, this effort involves people rallying in the streets to celebrate science and push for evidence-based policies. Another example is the Scholars Strategy Network, an effort to support scholars in popularizing their research for a broad audience and connecting scholars to policy-makers.

We can also fight the scourge of misinformation. Many world governments are taking steps to combat falsehoods. While the US federal government has dropped the ball on this problem, a number of states passed bipartisan efforts promoting media literacy. Likewise, many non-governmental groups are pursuing a variety of efforts to fight misinformation.

The Pro-Truth Pledge combines the struggle against misinformation with science advocacy. Founded by a group of behavioral science experts (including myself) and concerned citizens, the pledge calls on public figures, organizations, and private citizens to commit to 12 behaviors listed on the pledge website that research in behavioral science shows correlate with truthfulness. Signers are held accountable through a crowdsourced reporting and evaluation mechanism while getting reputational rewards because of their commitment. The scientific consensus serves as a key measure of credibility, and the pledge encourages pledge-takers to recognize the opinions of experts as more likely to be true when the facts are disputed. Over 500 politicians took the pledge, including members of state legislatures Eric Nelson (PA) and Ogden Driskell (WY), and members of US Congress Beto O’Rourke (TX) and Marcia Fudge (OH). Two research studies at Ohio State University demonstrated the effectiveness of the pledge in changing the behavior of pledge-takers to be more truthful with a strong statistical significance. Thus, taking the pledge yourself, and encouraging people you know and your elected representatives to take the pledge is an easy action to both fight misinformation and promote science.\

Conclusion

I have a dream that one day, children will not be dying from taking poisonous homeopathic medication or getting sick with measles because their parents put their trust in a random blogger instead of  extensive scientific studies. I have a dream that schools will be teaching media literacy and people will know how to evaluate the firehose of information coming their way. I have a dream that we will all know that we suffer from thinking errors, and watch out for the confirmation bias and other problems. I have a dream that the quickly-growing distrust of experts and science will seem like a bad dream. I have a dream that our grandchildren will find it hard to believe our present reality when we tell them stories about the bad old days.

To live these dreams requires all of us who care about truth and science to act now, before we fall further down the slippery slope. Our information ecosystem and credibility mechanisms are broken. Only a third of Americans trust scientists and most people can’t tell the difference between truth and falsehood online. The lack of trust in science - and the excessive trust in persuasive purveyors of misinformation - is perhaps the biggest threat to our society right now. If we don’t turn back from the brink, our future will not be a dream: it will be a nightmare.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky co-founded the Pro-Truth Pledge (at ProTruthPledge.org), a project joined by anyone who cares about creating a united constituency of all who care about truth and facts. He authored a number of a number of books, most notably the national bestseller The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide, and is regularly featured in venues like CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Newsweek, The Conversation, CNBC, and elsewhere. Connect with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky on Twitter, on Facebook, and on LinkedIn, and learn more about him on his website.

“Truth isn’t truth” according to Rudy Giuliani, a statement he made on August 19th on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The phrase was immediately derided as a verbal blunder embodying the Trump administration’s complete disregard for the facts. Yet a closer look at Giuliani’s message shows an underlying strategic approach to undermining the truth similar to that used by “scientists” producing industry-sponsored studies rejecting human-caused climate change and links between tobacco and cancer.

The transcript of the exchange reveals how Giuliani made his statement while defending Donald Trump’s unwillingness to testify for Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. According to Giuliani, “I am not going to be rushed into having him testify so that he gets trapped into perjury. And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth.”

The moderator, Chuck Todd, responded: "Truth is truth." Then, Giuliani said: "No, it isn’t truth. Truth isn’t truth." Giuliani went on: “Donald Trump says I didn’t talk about Flynn with Comey. Comey says you did talk about it, so tell me what the truth is” and then added “we have a credibility gap between the two of them. You’ve got to select one or the other. Now, who do you think Mueller’s going to select? One of his best friends, Comey, or the president.”

Let’s unpack that exchange. Giuliani’s first statement conveyed that there are many versions of the truth, and denied the existence of any underlying factual reality.

Todd pushes back, saying - “truth is truth” - referring to truth as what physically happened in reality, independent of anyone’s interpretation or spin. Giuliani disagrees, stating “truth isn’t truth”: he denies the existence of anything that really happened, implying that it’s all about different interpretations and the one who determines the interpretation wins.

He uses this denial of factual reality to defend his reluctance for Trump to testify. After all, once Trump’s testimony is on paper, the president can be charged with perjury if his version of the truth does not win out. Giuliani then suggests that the Mueller is biased and will side with his friend Comey over Trump, leading to Comey’s version winning out.

It’s telling that this exchange occurred just as the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump is looking to reverse the long-standing position of the EPA that there is no safe level of fine particle pollution. This reversal is occurring regardless of the lack of science behind the new position and the extensive research showing that exposure to fine particles contributes to asthma and heart attacks. Likewise, the Trump administration is planning to repeal the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions, with no credible science behind this repeal.

What are the parallels behind these seemingly different events? The strategy widely used by climate change deniers - and now adopted by the Trump administration - of casting doubt on truth as a way of promoting their political agenda.

A widespread consensus among climate scientists exists on the reality of substantial human-caused climate change. Unfortunately, less than 20 percent of Americans are aware of this consensus, despite extensive communication about this consensus by scientists.

Why? Research shows this low level of awareness comes from economically and politically motivated challenges to the reality of climate change from groups with substantial access to resources that influence public opinions. Most notably, the fossil fuel industry has funded the research of a tiny minority of scientists in order to cast doubt on human-caused global climate change.

Why do people believe this tiny minority of scientists? Because the fossil fuel industry then used its enormous financial and political resources to spread this paid-for “research” widely.

People who are not experts in climate change are thus exposed extensively to false information due to the huge megaphone of the fossil fuel industry. Such exposure triggers the “illusory truth effect,” a psychological phenomenon where the more we are exposed to a lie, the more likely we are to believe in. Indeed, research on climate denialist messaging demonstrates that exposure to such information substantially reduces both people’s belief in human-caused climate change and the truthfulness of climate science.

These tactics used in climate change denialism are part of a broader pattern of science denialism perpetrated by groups with economic and political interests in casting doubt on credible research as well as undermining belief in scientific truth more broadly. Thus, many of the same “scientists” who are now at the forefront of climate change denialism produced research denying the links between smoking and lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the hole in the ozone layer. As a tobacco executive wrote, “doubt is our product” - no doubt the same kind of product peddled by fossil fuel executives funding “research” denying climate change.

Giuliani is in the same boat of peddling doubt as a strategy. His denial of an underlying truth of reality uses the same strategy used by deniers of climate change and links between smoking and cancer. Just as they use industry-funded “alternative science” to cast doubt on ever finding the truth of reality, he claims that we can’t speak about what really happened - “truth isn’t truth” - because alternative narratives exist.

Whether in the courtroom or in the lab, peddlers of doubt like Giuliani decimate our ability to make the kind of sound decisions on which democracy relies. To preserve our democracy from destruction by such tactics requires an organized effort to unite all who care about truth across the political spectrum. Regardless of what Giuliani states - or what the industry-funded “scientists” claim - truth is truth, and it must be protected for the sake of our shared future.

We conducted a second study, the one published in Behavior and Social Issues, to address the weakness of the first study’s reliance on self-reporting. The second study sampled 21 people, and involved researchers observing and evaluating the quality of Facebook engagement by study participants on their own Facebook profile.

Similarly to the first study, the second study avoided the Hawthorne effect of study participants being impacted by observation by evaluating past behavior. Researchers looked at the first ten Facebook posts with news-relevant content made four weeks after the pledge. Then, the researchers compared these ten posts to the first ten posts for the same period the year before the study participant took the pledge. Each post was coded according to quality, from 1 of lowest level of alignment with the PTP, to 5 of highest alignment.

The second study showed that the average PTP alignment before taking the pledge was 2.49, and after taking the pledge was 3.65, and conducted a paired t-test to examine whether Pro-Truth Pledge Alignment is significantly different after taking the PTP. The null hypothesis H0 for the paired t-test states that there is no significant alignment difference before and after taking the pledge and the alternative hypothesis H1 proposes a significant difference. There was a significant difference in the scores for Pledge Alignment before]]> Sat, 10 May 2025 07:30:17 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/154145 https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/154145 0

Are you getting all you want? Are you achieving all of your goals and succeeding in life? Are you living a fully intentional life?

If you are, I salute you. I can’t make the same claim. To live a more intentional life, I constantly strive to gain greater agency, the quality of living intentionally.

In doing that, it helps to take the following three steps: evaluate reality clearly, make effective decisions, and achieve your goals.

Step 1: Evaluate Reality Clearly

What does it mean to evaluate your reality clearly? That means gaining a deep understanding of your external environment – your immediate surroundings, your social circle, your career, and anything else of relevance. That also means your own internal environment – your patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving.

Four factors obstruct our ability to evaluate reality clearly:

• Social prescriptions about appropriate ways of perceiving reality.
• Cached thoughts based on our previous experiences that lead us astray.
• Thinking errors that our brain makes due to faulty wiring.
• Finally, an emotional reluctance to face the truth of reality when that requires changing our minds and updating our beliefs based on new information.

Learning about and watching out for these challenges in a systematic manner improves our decision-making.

Step 2: Make Effective Decisions

Next, you want to make effective decisions about how to reach your goals. Consider your options, based on your knowledge of your outer and inner environment. Be aware that you can change both your external surroundings, and your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, to help you to get what you want in life.

Evaluate the various paths available to you, assess the probability that each path will get you to your goals. Then make a plan for how to proceed, and take the path that seems best suited to go where you want.

Step 3: Achieve Your Goals

Finally, implement the decisions you made and travel along the path. Remember, you will usually encounter some unknown obstacles on your road to what you want. Be excited about getting feedback from your environment and learning about better paths forward.

Take the opportunity to change your path if a new one opens up that seems better suited to help you meet your goals. Be open to changing your very goals themselves based on what you learn.

As you can imagine, these things are easy to say, but hard to do. It’s very helpful to get support along the way, through learning about strategies oriented toward this purpose. However, above all, it takes your own commitment to the goal of gaining greater agency over your life and living intentionally to succeed in life.

Key Takeaway

To live a truly intentional life, make sure to take these three steps: 1) Evaluate Reality Clearly; 2) Make Effective Decisions; 3) Achieve Your Goals ---> Click to Tweet

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Bio: Known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky authored the national bestseller on avoiding professional and personal disasters, The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide, and you can pre-order his new book, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. He has over 20 years of experience dramatically empowering leaders to avoid business disasters as the CEO of the boutique consulting and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts. Tsipursky also has a strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, with dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications. Visit his website DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com, subscribe to his monthly Disaster Avoidance Tips, email him at gleb[at]disasteravoidanceexperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, on Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, on Facebook DrGlebTsipursky, and on LinkedIn Dr. Gleb Tsipursky.

When was the last time you saw a major project management or process management failure? Such disasters can have devastating consequences for high-flying careers and successful companies. Yet they happen all too often, with little effort taken to prevent failure.

For example, many leaders stake their reputations on key projects such as successful product launches. However, research shows that most product launches fail. Nike’s FuelBand, launched with much fanfare in 2012, flopped on arrival. By 2014, Nike fired most of the team behind FuelBand, discontinuing this product.

One of the most important types of projects for a business is a merger or acquisition. Yet 70 to 90 percent of mergers and acquisitions fail to create value, and CEOs who lead failed M&As are frequently replaced. For instance, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer left in large part due to the tensions around his push to acquire Nokia, which eventually led to Microsoft writing off $8.4 billion.

Process failures can be just as bad. Safety failures led to the recall of over 20 million pounds of food across the US in 2018; from 1996 to 2017, more than 390 million cars and other motor vehicles had a recall, along with 154 million motor vehicle parts.

Japanese airbag maker Takata Corporation, with revenue of $6.6 billion and over 50,000 employees in 2016, declared bankruptcy in 2017 due to the costs of a recall and lawsuits over faulty airbags. Boeing’s engineers knew that the 737 Max aircraft display alert system software failed to meet requirements, but failed to do anything about it before the deadly October 2018 Lion Air crash. The grounding of Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft after that crash and the March 2019 Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, caused in large part by the display alert system software, cost the company over a billion.

Of course, while examples from big companies make the headlines, mid-size and small businesses have their share of catastrophic project management and process management failures. Such mistakes largely come from the many dangerous judgment errors that result from how our brains are wired, what scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases. Over 100 cognitive biases exist, and more are found all the time by scholars in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience. 

These errors lead to dangerous mistakes in the workplace, in everything from mergers and acquisitions to assessing company performance. They also hurt is in our personal life. For example, a Top10.com survey shows that we tend to go with our gut reactions and thus fall for cognitive biases in our shopping decisions.

Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to notice and address these dangerous judgment errors. You can do so using structured decision-making techniques for making quick everyday decisions, for more complex and significant ones, and for critically important and highly complex choices.

But what do you do after you make your decision? You also need to avoid failures and maximize success in implementing decisions, as well as in managing projects and processes that result from these decisions.

The most relevant scholarship in implementing decisions deals with prospective hindsight, meaning looking back in advance. Prospective hindsight helps you anticipate and avoid threats as well as notice and seize opportunities. Thus, you can defend yourself against failures and maximize the likelihood of success in major projects and processes, and in implementing decisions.

8 Key Steps to Preventing Project Management Failure

“Failure-Proofing” is a pragmatic and easy-to-use strategy for obtaining the benefits of prospective hindsight. Having developed this technique based on behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience studies, I then tested it on the front lines of my over 20 years of experience consulting and coaching leaders in large and mid-size companies and nonprofits avoid project or process failures. I wrote it up so that anyone – not only the people who hire me – can avoid such failures and maximize success.

Use Failure-Proofing after you decided to start any significant project and to check in regularly on existing processes. Don’t use Failure-Proofing on smaller, day-to-day decision-making, since doing so would take too much time. For those decisions, use the “5 Key Questions” technique instead. The failure-proofing technique is best done in teams, and should involve representatives of all relevant stakeholders; you can also do this technique by yourself, but consider showing your results to a trusted adviser for an external perspective.

Step 1: Gather

Gather all the people relevant for making the decision in the room, or representatives of the stakeholders if there are too many to have in a group.  A good number is 6, and avoid more than 10 people to ensure a manageable discussion.

Make sure the people in the room have the most expertise in the decision to be made, rather than simply gathering higher-up personnel. The goal is to address what might go wrong and how to fix it, as well as what might go right and how to ensure it. Expertise here is as important as an authority. At the same time, have some people with the power to decide how to address problems and seize opportunities that might be uncovered.

It’s very helpful to recruit an independent facilitator who is not part of the team to help guide the exercise. You can get someone from your Advisory Board, someone from another part of the organization, your mentor, or a coach or consultant. If you are going through this technique by yourself, write out various stakeholders that are relevant to the project or process, even different aspects of yourself that have competing goals.

Step 2: Explain

Explain the exercise to everyone by describing all the steps, so that all participants are on the same page about the exercise.

Step 3: Next Best Alternative

Then, develop two Next Best Alternatives (NBAs) to the project or process you are evaluating. Have each participant on the team come up with and write down one NBA anonymously. Anonymity is critical to ensure that unpopular or politically problematic opinions can be voiced (“perhaps we should wait for a better opportunity rather than acquiring this company”).

The facilitator gathers what people wrote – thus ensuring anonymity if the facilitator is not part of the team and doesn’t know people’s handwriting – and voices the alternatives. Then, have team members vote on the choices that seem most viable, and choose two to discuss. Make sure to give them a fair hearing by having two team members – including at least one with authority – defend each NBA.

After discussing the NBA, take an anonymous vote on whether the NBA seems preferable to the original project or process under discussion. If the original project or process still seems best (which is what happens in the large majority of cases), consider if the project or process can be strengthened by integrating any components of the two NBAs into your plan. If you are going through the technique by yourself, get outside input at this stage if you have difficulty generating an NBA.

Step 4: Reason for Failure

Next, ask all the stakeholders to imagine that they are in a future where the project or process definitely failed (an approach informed by the Premortem technique). Doing so gives permission to everyone, even the biggest supporters of the project or process, to use their creativity in coming up with possible reasons for failure.

Otherwise, their emotions – which determine 80-90% of our thoughts, behaviors, and decisions – will likely inhibit their ability to accept the possibility of project or process failure. That’s why simply asking everyone to imagine potential problems works much less well. Supporters of the project experience a defensive emotional response that leaves their minds much less capable of creatively envisioning possible problems.

After giving such permission, have each participant anonymously write out plausible reasons for this disaster. Anonymity is especially important here, due to the potential for political danger in describing potential problems (“the product launch will fail because the marketing department overhyped it, leading to unhappy consumers). Ask everyone to come up with at least three most plausible failures, while highlighting that the reasons for coming up with these failures is to address them effectively.

These failures should include internal decisions under the control of the project team, such as cost and staffing, as well as potential external events, such as an innovation introduced by a competitor. Encourage participants to focus particularly on reasons they would not typically bring up because it would be seen as rude or impolitic, such as criticizing someone’s competency, or even dangerous to one’s career, such as criticizing the organization’s strategy. Emphasize that everyone’s statements will remain anonymous.

The facilitator gathers everyone’s statements, and then highlights the key themes brought out as reasons for project failure, focusing especially on reasons that would not be typically brought up, and ensuring anonymity in the process. If you are going through this technique by yourself, write out separate reasons for project or process failure from the perspective of each relevant aspect of yourself.

Step 5: Most Likely Problems

Discuss all the reasons brought up, paying particular attention to ones that are rude, impolitic, and dangerous to careers. Check for potential cognitive biases that might be influencing the assessments. The most significant ones to watch out for are loss aversion, status quo bias, confirmation bias, attentional bias, overconfidence, optimism bias, pessimism bias, and halo and horns effect.

Then, assess anonymously the probability of each reason for failure, ideally placing percentage probabilities. If doing so is difficult, use terms like “highly likely”, “somewhat likely”, “unlikely”, and “very unlikely.” Also consider how harmful each reason for failure might be, and pay more attention to the ones that are most harmful.  Here, the expertise of individual members of the team will be especially useful.

The leader or person assigned as note-taker writes down all the problems brought up, as well as assessments of the probabilities. If you are going through the technique by yourself, get outside input at this stage.

Step 6: Fixing Problems

Decide on several failures that are most relevant to focus on, and brainstorm ways of solving these, including how to address potential mental blindspots. Also, discuss any evidence you might use that would serve as a red flag that the failure you are discussing is occurring or about to occur. For this step, it is especially important to have people with authority in the room.

The leader or note-taker writes down the possible solutions. If you are going through the technique by yourself, get outside input at this stage.

Step 7: Maximizing Success

We addressed failure: now let’s make sure you not simply avoid failure, but maximize success! Next, imagine that you are in a future where the project or process succeeded far beyond what you expected. Have each participant anonymously write out plausible reasons for this success. Next, have the facilitator highlight the key themes.

Discuss all the reasons, and check for the same cognitive biases as above. Evaluate anonymously the probability of each reason for success, and decide which deserve the most attention. Then, brainstorm ways of maximizing each of these reasons for success.

The leader or note-taker writes down the ideas to maximize success. If you are going through the technique by yourself, get outside input at this stage.

Step 8: Revising Project

The leader revises the project or process based on the feedback, and, if needed, repeats the exercise.

Conclusion

Make sure to use the “Failure-Proofing” technique prior to any large project and to evaluate existing processes and systems to prevent failures. To see case studies with in-depth guidelines of how you can apply this strategy as an individual or a team, see the Manual on Failure-Proofing.

Key Takeaway

To prevent a project management or process management disaster, imagine that it completely failed. Then, brainstorm all plausible reasons for failure, and generate solutions to these potential problems. Integrate these solutions into your project or process. —> Click to Tweet

To maximize project management or process management success, envision that it succeeded spectacularly. Brainstorm likely reasons for such success, and generate strategies that would lead to such success. Integrate these strategies into your project or process. —> Click to Tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• What questions do you have about applying this technique?

• Where do you think Failure-Proofing might best fit into your organization’s processes?

• What will be your next steps in most effectively bringing it to your team and integrating it into your organization’s processes?

Image credit: Flickr/freeimage4life

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on June 21, 2019. 

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky empowers you to avoid business disasters as CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts. He is a best-selling author of several well-known books, including Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters and The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise stems from his background of over 20 years of consulting, coaching, speaking, and training experience across North America, Europe, and Australia. It also comes from his strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, with dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters by getting a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace by signing up for his Disaster Avoidance Tips.

To evaluate unconscious bias caused by cognitive biases, first think about these three questions:

• What percentage of projects in your workplace miss the deadline or go over budget?

• How often do you see hiring decisions and employee assessments influenced by factors not relevant to job competency?

• How frequently are your team’s members overconfident about their decisions?

If you didn’t answer “rare to none” for any of these, you got a problem. In fact, these questions get at only 3 out of over a 100 dangerous judgment errors that scholars in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience call cognitive biases.

Do you regularly – over 10% of the time – see projects in your workplace go past deadline or over budget? It’s a sign that the cognitive bias known as the planning fallacy is undercutting performance. The planning fallacy refers to our intuitive belief that everything will go according to plan, resulting in us failing to plan for the many potential problems that cause projects to go over budget or past deadline. Cost overruns and delays result in serious damage to the bottom lines of our businesses.

How about assessments for hiring, performance, and promotion impacted by non-relevant factors? Well, two dangerous judgment errors play a major role in causing such problematic evaluations, the halo effect and the horns effect. The halo effect refers to the fact that if we feel a significant positive emotion toward one characteristic of someone, then we will have an overly positive evaluation of that person as a whole. That’s why taller men get promoted at higher rates into positions of authority, and both men and women perceived as physically attractive are more likely to be hired. The horns effect is the opposite: if we don’t like a characteristic that is significant to us, we will tend to have a worse evaluation of that person as a whole. For instance, overweight people are less likely to be hired.

Finally, excessive confidence in making decisions – and other work areas – is a symptom of the mental blindspot known as the overconfidence effect. Overconfidence has been associated with many problems in the workplace. For example, overconfidence leads people into financial shenanigans, such as overstating earnings. Overconfident leaders tend to resist constructive criticism and dismiss wise advice, letting their intuition drive their decision-making as opposed to making thoughtful plans. Overconfident shoppers tend to go with their gut and make unwise choices, as a survey by Top10.com has shown.

So now that you know about the planning fallacy, the halo and horns effects, and the overconfidence effect, you’re safe from these 4 cognitive biases, right? Unfortunately, just learning about these mental blindspots will not work to assess where they occur in your workplace or to defeat them, as research shows. In fact, some techniques that would seem intuitively to help address unconscious bias caused by cognitive biases make them worse.

Fortunately, recent research has revealed strategies that you can use to notice when you’re about to fall for these mental blindspots, as well as when you’ve been suffering from them for a while without knowing it. Moreover, it shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to overcome these dangerous judgment errors to avoid unconscious bias and make the best decisions, in your work and career, in your professional and personal relationships, and in other life areas as well. 

The first step to solving cognitive biases does involve learning about them. However, simply having knowledge doesn’t help. For instance, students who learned about mental blindspots showed the same vulnerability to these errors as students who didn’t.

What is much more helpful is making sure that people are strongly emotionally motivated to address cognitive biases. Our emotions determine 80-90 percent of our decisions, thoughts, and behaviors, and tapping our feelings is clearly effective in helping notice and address dangerous judgment errors. On a related note, it really helps for people to feel that the effort to address mental blindspots is important to them, getting them truly involved and bought into the outcome of debiasing cognitive biases.

To do so, you need to evaluate thoroughly the impact of each cognitive bias on your own professional activities, as well as more broadly in your team and organization. Then, you have to make and implement a plan to address the problems caused by such unconscious bias, again, not only for yourself but also for your team and your business.

Fortunately, you don’t have to address all the cognitive biases. Just going through the 30 most dangerous judgment errors in the workplace will get you the large majority of the benefit from such an analysis to help you avoid unconscious bias. All of these mental blindspots, along with clear next steps on what to do after the evaluation, can be found in the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace. It’s available for sale in print or digital form and you can get the digital version for free when you register for the Wise Decision Maker Course.

Assessment on Cognitive Biases in the Workplace to Address Unconscious Bias

The assessment starts with an evaluation of how frequently each of the 30 cognitive biases occurred in your workplace in the last year in the form of percentages. Don’t feel obliged to be absolutely precise, approximate numbers are fine.

If you don’t remember something occurring, give it a low percentage score, including 0 if you think it doesn’t occur. For instance, if all of your projects came under budget and within the deadline, then planning fallacy is not a problem for you.

Each of the 30 questions should take 10-15 seconds. Just put down the first number that seems to make the most sense for you. You can go back later and tweak it if needed. However, for the first run-through, do it fast. Remember, if you tend to be an optimistic person in general, temper your optimism and give a somewhat higher percentage than you intuitively feel is appropriate. Same goes for pessimism: give a lower percentage if you tend to be pessimistic.

Following this evaluation, you will score the assessment to see the current state of dangerous judgment errors in your workplace. Next, you’ll evaluate the impact of these problems on the bottom line of your personal work, your organizational unit, or the company as a whole, to the extent that you can estimate this question. After all, knowing the bottom line impact will enable you to decide how much to invest into addressing the problem. You’ll then evaluate the performance of your workplace on the four broad competencies of addressing cognitive biases: how the people in your organization do on evaluating themselves, evaluating others, strategic evaluations of risks and rewards, and tactical evaluations in project implementation.

Finally, you’ll get to the next steps. There, each dangerous judgment error is explained, focusing on its business impact. You’ll also get to decide which of the mental blindspots you’ll focus on addressing in the short term future.

The assessment will prove invaluable as you take the next steps to solve the problems you identified. You should have yourself and others in your organization do the assessment after you introduce the concept of cognitive biases but before you launch any interventions. Then, you can use your assessment results as a baseline to assess the impact of any interventions.

To develop your interventions, see the book that’s based around this assessment and provides both techniques and business case studies for how to address cognitive biases: Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. You can also learn and use research-based strategies to make the best decisions in quick everyday choices, in moderately important decisions, and in critically important ones.

Additionally, you would benefit from a method to avoid failure and achieve success when implementing your decisions, as well as another technique to address threats and seize opportunities in your long-term strategic plans. Finally, it would be really valuable for your to develop the mental habits and skills necessary to address the unconscious bias caused by cognitive biases. These techniques and skills, along with the knowledge in the book, will help you address effectively the dangerous judgment errors we tend to make.

While enacting the interventions, have yourself and the others in your workplace take the assessment regularly – once a week if the intervention is intense, once a month if it’s less intense – to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. Revise the intervention as needed to account for your results.

After the intervention is complete and you are satisfied, keep taking the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace every quarter. Doing so will help keep up vigilance and ensure that you keep protecting yourself from the disastrous consequences of falling into dangerous judgment errors.

Key Takeaway

To address unconscious bias caused by cognitive biases in your workplace, you need to evaluate their impact on your own professional activities and on your team and organization. Then, make and implement a plan to address these biases. —> Click to Tweet

Questions to Consider

• Which of the following biases most negatively impacts your workplace: the planning fallacy, the halo and horns effects, or the overconfidence effect? What does that negative impact look like?

• What would be the benefit to you, your team, and your organization of addressing the 30 most dangerous judgment errors in the workplace?

• How did you score on dangerous judgment errors in your workplace when you took the assessment? How do you feel about your score?

• What next steps can you take to bring the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace to your team and organization?

Image credit: Flickr/Geoffrey Fairchild

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on June 27, 2019.

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky empowers you to avoid business disasters as CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut, The Blindspots Between Us, and The Truth Seeker’s Handbook. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise stems from his background of over 20 years of consulting, coaching, speaking, and training experience across North America, Europe, and Australia. It also comes from his strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, with dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Guide.

Posted in Leadership, Wise Decision Making and tagged cognitive bias, cognitive biases, decision-making, implicit bias, leadership, Leadership Development, unconscious bias

Effective decision making to avoid failures and maximize success is your key role as a leader: that’s why “decision makers” is synonymous with leaders. Yet how can you ensure that your decision making results in the right calls as opposed to decisions disasters? 

Let’s say you make a poor choice on a hire for a major position. General Electric’s Board of Directors hired John Flannery as CEO in 2017 to restructure the company, but he didn’t work out. Shares fell by over 35% in the next year and the Board forced him out in 2018; immediately afterward, GE’s shares rose by 14%.

Or perhaps you make a major decision-making error in strategy. Research shows that 46% percent of companies go bankrupt due to wrong-headed strategic moves by their leaders. For instance, Toys ‘R’ Us went bankrupt due to a number of lousy strategic decisions by the company’s leadership, such as taking on too much debt and failing to compete effectively in online retailing.

Another type of problematic decision making is ignoring a looming problem: deciding not to decide. Kodak helped invent the digital camera, but dragged its feet on ramping up its investment into the digital camera market because its film business made more money. By the time it recognized the future was digital, more nimble competitors seized the market. Kodak proved unable to catch up, eventually filing for bankruptcy.

All of these examples from large companies have their equivalent in mid-size and small businesses. Bad leadership decision making helps explain why about half of all new businesses fail within 5 years.

Leaders commit serious decision-making mistakes largely due to the many dangerous judgment errors that result from how our brains are wired. Scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call such mental blindspots cognitive biases.

Fortunately, recent research in these fields has discovered strategies to realize when you’re falling into cognitive biases, as well as ways to defeat these dangerous judgment errors. These techniques are applicable in your work life, in your professional and personal relationships, your shopping choices, and in other aspects of your life.

Doing so will not only help you make the best decisions, whether quick decisions on a day-to-day basis or in more important cases, but also prevent failure and amplify success in implementing these choices. Furthermore, they can empower you to minimize threats and maximize opportunities when you make and enact your long-term strategic plans. 

Separately from these structured techniques, you’ll also need to gain mental skills and habits to notice and quickly overcome cognitive biases.

8 Steps to Effective Decision Making for Leaders

“Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” is a pragmatic and battle-tested strategy that helps you choose the best option among several that each have strengths and weaknesses. I developed this technique based on research on the multi-attribute utility theory.

Then, I used this model extensively during my consulting and coaching engagements for the last 20 years helping leaders in large and mid-size companies and nonprofits avoid business disasters. After perfecting it based on these engagements, I am sharing it with you. It will help you to make the right calls even if you don’t hire me.

Use the technique in cases where it’s worthwhile to spend serious time and energy on a decision, meaning where the decision is really significant. These might include:

• Making a substantial strategy shift
• Pursuing a merger or acquisition
• Making a key employee hire
• Choosing which new product to launch
• Deciding on a critical supplier
• Moving your headquarters
• Making a major career move
• Evaluating whether and how your systems and processes need to be adjusted to match changing market needs

“Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” can be used by yourself or with a team. This web app, designed specifically for use with the technique, helps make the decision-making process and the math involved easy and simple. Moreover, the app ensures that the decision making is transparent to and inclusive of all stakeholders.

My strong suggestion is to use this method together with the “Making the Best Decisions” technique. That’s because the “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” strategy focuses only on trade-offs between different options rather than all the other aspects of making the best decisions. I make sure that all of my consulting and coaching clients use these two techniques together, and I am giving you the same advice I give them.

Step 1: List Decision-Making Criteria

Write out all the relevant and important attributes for your decision, meaning the key criteria you will use to make your choice. Don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis by listing all possible criteria: try to limit yourself to 10, unless it’s a truly complex decision. For a key hire, you can use criteria such as “salary requirements,” “fit into organizational culture,” “ability to perform job,” “contribution to diversity,” and so on.

If you’re going through this process as a team, brainstorm the categories and then vote on which should make it into the top 10. Then put them into the web app for easing your calculations and guiding you through the process.

Step 2: Weigh the Attributes

Give weights to each of your attributes, from 1-10 on their importance to you (1 lowest importance, 10 highest). Make sure to use this step to evaluate honestly which of these criteria is more important to you. For example, you can weight “salary requirements” at 4, meaning you have a good budget, and weigh “fit into organizational culture” at 9, meaning it’s a critical factor for success in your firm.

If you’re doing this as a team, come up with weights independently and anonymously. Then, average out your weights.

Step 3: Rank It!

Rank each option that you are considering choosing on all the attributes in a decision matrix table, from 1-10 on how good they are (1-poor, 10-great).

Similar to above, if you’re doing this as a team, come up with rankings independently and anonymously. Then, average out your rankings.

Step 4: Math It!

Using the table, multiply weights by rankings – the web app makes it easy.

Step 5: Check with Your Gut

Your gut can give you some useful information, as long as you make sure to use your head to evaluate the data provided by your gut. Your gut is particularly valuable on questions that have to do with your values, and major decisions often relate to values questions.

Does the answer you got feel aligned with your intuitions? Would you be surprised if you looked back and wished you made a different decision? Experiment with adjusting weights and rankings to address gut feelings, but be cautious about trying to get the numbers to fit some predetermined choice.

Step 6: Check with Your Head

Check for potential dangerous judgment errors, especially ones resulting from paying too much attention to the gut. Look out for the 30 most dangerous judgment errors for decision making in the workplace.

Pay particular attention to cognitive biases to which you might be prone personally. Play around with adjusting weights and rankings to address such errors.

Step 7: Red Flags

Decide what kind of red flags you would use to reconsider the decision if relevant new evidence emerges that would influence your rankings and/or weights. It’s best to decide in advance what you would consider to constitute important evidence. By doing so, you’ll reduce the chance of being swayed by short-term emotions as an individual or simmering tensions and disagreements as a team.

Step 8: Choose and Commit

Make your choice and stick with it. This precommitment will help reduce feelings of anxiety and doubt, help you be happier, and reduce conflict in team settings.

Conclusion

The “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” strategy should be used every time you need to make a critical decision, by yourself or as part of a team. Using this technique will allow you and your team to be confident about the quality of your decision making and maximize the chance that you’ll make the right call. If you’d like case studies with in-depth guidelines of how you can apply this strategy as an individual or a team, see the Manual on Avoiding Disastrous Decisions.

Key Takeaway

Effective leadership decision making on critical decisions involves: 1) Deciding the decision criteria; 2) Weighing importance of criteria; 3) Grading your options using the criteria; 4) Checking with your head and gut; 5) Sticking to your choice. —> Click to Tweet

Questions to Consider

• Do you have any questions about where and how to apply this technique?

• How do you think using this technique might benefit your organization?

• What steps can you take to most effectively bring it to your team and integrate it into your organization’s processes?

Image credit: Rawpixel/Jira

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on July 1, 2019. 

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky empowers you to avoid business disasters as CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut, The Blindspots Between Us, and The Truth Seeker’s Handbook. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise stems from his background of over 20 years of consulting, coaching, speaking, and training experience across North America, Europe, and Australia. It also comes from his strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, with dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Guide.

Isn’t it tragic that so many prominent leaders rely on their intuition for their decision-making process? Gut reactions are seen as something almost magical, acquired either by hard-earned experience or possessed by a select few genius young CEOs who deserve a top-notch pay package. Top gurus reinforce such mystical beliefs with their advice.

Making the best decisions is seen as the key characteristic of top business leaders: why else is “decision maker” synonymous with “leader”? Unfortunately, leaders overwhelmingly fail to get professional development in their decision-making process. Yet research in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience showing that even one training session can significantly improve one’s decision-making ability.

Baseball is Ahead of Business in Its Decision-Making Process

The “magical” mindset toward following instincts over analysis to make decisions reminds me of the era of baseball before the rise of sabermetrics, data-driven decision-making process immortalized in the book and movie Moneyball. The movie and book described the 2002 season of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, which had a very limited budget for players that year. Its general manager Billy Beane put aside the traditional method of trusting the intuitions and gut reactions of the team’s scouts. Instead, he adopted a very unorthodox approach of relying on quantitative data and statistics to choose players using his head. 

Hiring a series of players undervalued by teams that used old-school evaluation methods, the Oakland Athletics won a record-breaking 20 games in a row. Other teams since that time have adopted the same decision-making process. 

Coaches and managers in other sports are increasingly employing statistics when making personnel and strategy decisions. For example, in professional football, punting and field goals have become less and less popular. Why? Statistical analysis has shown that going for a first down or touchdown on fourth down makes the most sense in many short-yardage situations.

What would you pay to have similar record-breaking innovations in your business that cause record-breaking growth 20 quarters in a row? You’ll score a home run by avoiding trusting your gut and going with your head instead. 

Don’t you find it shocking that business is far behind sports in adopting effective, research-based decision-making strategies? I know I do. 

We have so much more tools right now in the information age to make better decisions, both in terms of the data available and in techniques that we can use to optimize our approach to making decisions. Unfortunately, prominent gurus are doubling down on the actively harmful advice of trusting your intuition in our current information age.

Why is our intuition such a bad tool for making decisions? Because we suffer from many dangerous judgment errors that result from how our brains are wired, what scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases. Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies both to notice and to address these dangerous judgment errors. Such strategies apply to your business activities, to your relationships, to your shopping choices, and to all other life areas as well.

8-Step Decision-Making Process to Making the Best Decisions

So let’s set aside the bad examples of the business leaders and gurus who rely on their gut in their decisions and follow the successful strategy of using data-driven, research-based approaches. You’ll win using these strategies in business as much as you’ll win in baseball. 

Effective decision making doesn’t rely either on innate talent or on hard-learned experience, contrary to the popular wisdom attributed (debatably) to Mark Twain that “good judgment is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgment.”

The reality is that a first-rate decision-making process is both teachable and learnable. You can boil it down easily to an eight-step model for any moderately important decision. 

Hiring a new employee, choosing a new supplier, selecting a speaker for your upcoming annual conference, deciding whether to apply for a higher-level position within your company: all of these and many more represent moderately important decisions. 

They won’t make or break your career or your organization. Still, getting them wrong will hurt you much more than making bad everyday decisions, while getting them right will be a clear boost to your bottom line. 

Because of the importance of these decisions, wise decision makers like yourself don’t want to simply get a “good enough” outcome, which is fine for everyday choices where you’d use the “5 Questions” technique to make a quick decision. Instead, you want to invest the time and energy needed to make the best and most profitable decision, because it’s worth it to maximize your bottom line. 

In such cases, use an eight-step decision-making technique, which I developed and call “Making the Best Decisions.” It takes a minimum of 30 minutes if your initially-planned course of action is indeed correct, and longer if you need to revise things. If you do need to change things around, believe me, it will be very much worth it in time, money, and grief you save yourself down the road.

This method is battle-tested: I use it extensively with my consulting and coaching for leaders in large and mid-size businesses and nonprofits. I wrote it up so that others who can’t afford my services may still benefit from my expertise.

You can elaborate on this technique for the most important or really complex decisions with a more thorough approach to weighing your options. I also suggest you use a separate technique for avoiding failure and maximizing success in implementing your decision and an additional method to address threats and seize opportunities in your long-term strategic planning. Last, but far from least, you – and those you care about – will gain a great deal of benefit from the fundamentally important mental skills of quickly and effectively overcoming cognitive biases to avoid decision disasters.

Now, on to the model itself. 

First, you need to identify the need to launch a decision-making process

Such recognition bears particular weight when there’s no explicit crisis that cries out for a decision to be made or when your natural intuitions make it uncomfortable to acknowledge the need for a tough decision. The best decision makers take initiative to recognize the need for decisions before they become an emergency and don’t let gut reactions cloud their decision-making capacity. 

Second, gather relevant information from a wide variety of informed perspectives on the issue at hand

Value especially those opinions with which you disagree. Contradicting perspectives empower you to distance yourself from the comfortable reliance on your gut instincts and help you recognize any potential bias blind spots. 

Third, with this data you decide the goals you want to reach, painting a clear vision of the desired outcome of your decision-making process

It’s particularly important to recognize when a seemingly one-time decision is a symptom of an underlying issue with processes and practices. Make addressing these root problems part of the outcome you want to achieve.

Fourth, you develop clear decision-making process criteria to weigh the various options of how you’d like to get to your vision

If at all possible, develop these criteria before you start to consider choices. Our intuitions bias our decision-making criteria to encourage certain outcomes that fit our instincts. As a result, you get overall worse decisions if you don’t develop criteria before starting to look at options.

Fifth, you generate a number of viable options that can achieve your decision-making process goals

We frequently fall into the trap of generating insufficient options to make the best decisions, especially for solving underlying challenges. To address this, it’s very important to generate many more options that seem intuitive to us. Go for 5 attractive options as the minimum. Remember that this is a brainstorming step, so don’t judge options, even though they might seem outlandish or politically unacceptable. In my consulting and coaching experience, the optimal choice often involves elements drawn from out-of-the-box and innovative options.

Sixth, you weigh these options, picking the best of the bunch

When weighing options, beware of going with your initial preferences, and do your best to see your own preferred choice in a harsh light. Moreover, do your best to evaluate each option separately from your opinion on the person who proposed it, to minimize the impact of personalities, relationships, and internal politics on the decision itself. If you get stuck here, or if this is a particularly vital or really complex decision, use the “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique to maximize your likelihood of picking the best option. 

Seventh, you implement the option you chose

Before and during the process of implementation, make sure to consider how your decision can go wrong and guard against these failures. Most importantly, ensure clear accountability and communication around the decision’s enactment. 

For projects that are either complex, long-term, or major, I recommend using the “Failure-Proofing” technique to notice and address potential threats and to recognize and seize potential opportunities. That technique defends you from disasters in enacting your choices and optimizes the likelihood of you outperforming your own and others’ expectations.

Eighth, you evaluate the implementation of your decision

Revise both the process – and the original decision – as needed.

Note that you’ll often find yourself going back and forth among these steps. Doing so is an inherent part of making a significant decision, and does not indicate a problem in your process. For example, say you’re at the option-generation stage, and you discover relevant new information. You might need to go back and revise the goals and criteria stages.

Below is a quick summary you can print out and keep on your desk.

Conclusion

Don’t be fooled by the pronouncements of top business leaders and gurus. Your gut reactions are no way to make a good decision. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but you want to be right much more than that for the sake of your bottom line. So follow the shockingly effective example of baseball and other sports, and use data-driven, research-based approaches such as the 8-step model above to make the best decisions for yourself and your organization.

Key Takeaway

8-step decision-making process: 1) Identify need for decision; 2) Get relevant info; 3) Decide goals; 4) Develop criteria; 5) Generate a few viable options; 6) Weigh options; 7) Implement decision; 8) Revise implementation and decision as needed. —> Click to Tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• Where and how might you apply this technique?

• What resistance do you think you might face in bringing this technique to your team and organization? 

• What steps can you take to overcome this resistance?

Image Credit: Pixabay/olga-filo

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on July 9, 2019. 

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky empowers you to avoid business disasters as CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut, The Blindspots Between Us, and The Truth Seeker’s Handbook. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise stems from his background of over 20 years of consulting, coaching, speaking, and training experience across North America, Europe, and Australia. It also comes from his strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, with dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Guide.

First, the survey turns on its head the common theory of the “rational consumer.” Colleges teach students this theory as a basis for all of their business education. Many people go on to use this theory to run their businesses. However, some recent research in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience has been questioning this assumption.

The Top10 survey further supports the criticism of the “rational consumer” theory by showing that people don’t shop with their heads, they shop with their gut. Over two-thirds of respondents reported that they “trust their gut” often, very often, or always when making shopping decisions. So the large majority of people don’t fit the outdated theory. No wonder that half of all new businesses fail in the first 5 years or that most product launches flop: business leaders use the wrong framework to approach consumers.

Second, the Top10 survey shows the outdated nature of the widely prevalent assumption that word of mouth offers the best way of marketing and selling a product. In the past, recommendations from friends and family mattered much more than anything else, at 90% according to a 2012 HubSpot survey.

However, in 7 short years, the landscape changed. The 2019 Top10 survey highlights how recommendations from friends matter much less, dropping to 70%, and information from online sources such as user reviews has grown much more important, topping friend recommendations. Marketers and business leaders need to update their beliefs about what matters to shoppers to succeed in the new digital age.

Third, the Top10 survey breaks new ground on consumer price sensitivity. While many assume that price is the most important factor by far, the survey shows they’re wrong. In fact, only a quarter of respondents go for the cheapest option. Over half consider price as one of many factors.

Next, we’ll dive deeper into the survey findings on these three surprising results.

Consumers Go With Their Gut

Consumers, by and large, trust their gut when making shopping choices. Less than one third — specifically 31% percent — rely on their gut only sometimes, rarely, or not at all to make the right choice. By contrast, 69% rely on their gut often, very often, or always.

The large majority of shoppers choosing to rely on their gut is unfortunate for the sake of making wise purchasing decisions. We know that we are all vulnerable to unconscious dangerous judgment errors that scholars in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience call cognitive biases. These are the mental blindspots that lead people away from being the idealized rational consumers of classical economic theory, always focusing on their own best long-term interest when making shopping decisions.

Cognitive biases come mainly from relying on our gut reactions — our emotions and intuitions — to make decisions. It’s not only shopping: our emotions determine 80–90% of our thoughts, behaviors, and decisions in all life areas. In fact, people with brain damage that impairs their ability to process emotions have a great deal of difficulty making all sorts of decisions.

Now, emotions undoubtedly have a key role to play in shopping. After all, the large majority of what we buy is not meant to satisfy basic, primary needs like clothing and shelter. Instead, it satisfies our wants and desires and comes from our personal lifestyle and values, our tastes and preferences. Some people like chocolate ice cream, and some like vanilla; some people want to live in the big city, and some in the suburbs; some like Apple and some PC. As people say, there’s no arguing with taste, and our emotions determine our tastes.

The mistakes we make come from how we try to satisfy our tastes and preferences. For example, most consumers believe that more options would make them happier with both the process and outcome of their shopping. Yet in reality, it’s not true.

Having some choices makes us feel good, yet once we get beyond that small number, we feel less and less happy the more choices we get. The trick is that we tend to buy into the (false) concept that more choices will make us feel better.

For instance, in one study, shoppers at a fancy food market — not a lab — saw a display table with free samples of 24 varieties of gourmet jam. On another day, in the same market, shoppers saw a display table with 6 jam varieties. You won’t be surprised that the larger display attracted substantially more interest. However, people who saw the smaller selection were 10 times more likely to buy the jam, and felt better about themselves doing so than those who had to select among 24 varieties.

The problem here is a cognitive bias called loss aversion. Our gut reactions prefer avoiding losses to making gains. Thus, we want way too many choices, wrongly perceiving a limited number of choices as losing out, despite the real loss coming from less happiness.

Let’s take another example. Don’t you like it when you have the option to return what you bought if you didn’t like it? Well, another counterintuitive behavioral economics finding shows that, while we have a preference for being able to refund our purchases, we feel more satisfied with a shopping decision if it’s nonreversible.

As an example, in one study, students got to choose between 2 art posters. Half the students were not allowed to change their mind, while the other half were told they could exchange the poster they chose for another one in the next 30 days. While 66% preferred to be in the half of the group that could change their minds, later evaluations showed that those who couldn’t exchange their posters actually were substantially happier with their decision. The culprit here is a judgment error called choice-supportive bias, where we become happier with a choice after we committed to it, rather than pondering the prospect of returning it.

You might have heard the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” as referring to our desire to maintain a standard of living comparable to those around us, such as our neighbors, who we consider to be on a similar social level. Popularized by an early 20th century comic strip called “Keeping up with the Joneses,” this idiom points to an important aspect of our shopping behavior.

Our gut intuitions drive us to improve our social status, and the cognitive bias known as the social comparison bias in particular causes us to try to outcompete others in our tribal group through our shopping. Scholars term such status-driven shopping “conspicuous consumption,” referring to buying products not primarily for their actual practical use, but for the prestige value of the purchase in raising the buyer higher in the social hierarchy. Such conspicuous consumption often drives us to make the wrong choices.

Fortunately, savvy consumers — the 1.29% who never simply go with their gut — know that they can make much better decisions to satisfy their tastes and preferences by protecting themselves from intuitive reactions and instead relying on their head.

Recent research in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these dangerous judgment errors, whether in your shopping, your professional life, your relationships, or other life areas.

You need to evaluate where cognitive biases are hurting you and others in your team and organization. Then, you can use structured decision-making methods to make “good enough” daily decisions quickly; more thorough ones for moderately important choices; and an in-depth one for truly major decisions.

Such techniques will also help you implement your decisions well, and formulate truly effective long-term strategic plans. In addition, you can develop mental habits and skills to notice cognitive biases and prevent yourself from slipping into them.

What Sources Do Consumers Use to Make Shopping Decisions?

It’s a brave new digital world when supposedly savvy marketers and business publications writing in 2019 still consider word of mouth as the most effective and important marketing technique, while the Top10 survey clearly shows they’re wrong.

Why are they wrong? They’re relying on outdated information.

In 2012, Nielsen ran a survey showing that 92% of survey respondents trusted recommendations from friends and family. In Nielsen’s 2015 survey, only 83% trusted recommendations from family and friends, a substantial drop of about 10% over 3 years. Only 66% trusted consumer opinions posted online, which overwhelmingly come in the form of user reviews.

Top10’s survey shows that in the intervening 4 years, reliance on recommendations from family and friends dropped even further, to 70%. By contrast, the stock of user reviews grew substantially, to 77%, overcoming recommendations from friends and family. Other sources of online information are also catching up to recommendations from friends and family, with online comparison sites used by more than half of Top10 survey respondents?

What explains this change, which apparently has not yet been internalized by many marketers? In part, people’s increasing familiarity and comfort with online information and online shopping as a whole.

Shoppers are increasingly shopping online, with 2016 marking the year when consumers made more of their purchases online, a trend that continues to date. When consumers make online purchases, they often don’t have the opportunity to consult friends and family. They naturally turn to online sources for information, such as online reviews by others and comparison sites.

Another factor explaining this dynamic comes from generational change. As more millenials grow into their full economic potential, and more older people leave this world, trust in online sources of information only grows. The Top10 survey shows that younger people show more trust for online sources such as online reviews and comparison websites compared to older people. Other research from December 2018 shows that 80% of those between 18 and 34 wrote online reviews themselves, while only 41% of those over 55 did so. We’re naturally more invested in the kind of activities we do ourselves.

Unfortunately, many shoppers fall into dangerous judgment errors by trusting user reviews online. Bogus reviews are widespread. It’s easy to buy fake good reviews, while a number of people leave false bad reviews for a variety of reasons. Shoppers tend to focus most on extreme reviews, even though those are least likely to be accurate.

It’s not surprising that research shows that objective ratings produced by high-quality online comparison sites have a low correlation to online user reviews. Due to cognitive biases such as the illusory truth effect — where we tend to believe something that’s repeated often enough regardless of whether it’s true — enough user reviews repeating the same thing, good or bad, often drive us to make bad shopping decisions.

Price Sensitivity 

Too many businesses assume, based on advice by some online marketers, that price dominates consumer choices. The Top10 survey shows that’s just not the case.

Price is not nearly as important as it’s typically depicted. In fact, only a quarter of all consumers — just over 25% in the survey — are bargain hunters. Three quarters are willing to pay more if they are getting more for their money, and consider price as one of many factors.

The confusion in other surveys that trumpet price as the most important factor likely comes from the problematic way they phrase the question. After all, who wouldn’t consider price as an important factor? Many consumers may use price points as the first thing they look at when determining what purchase to make.

To delve more deeply into this question, the Top10 survey asked respondents to list all factors that matter to them when deciding which brand to purchase.

Framing the question this way resulted in price coming out on top as the factor most frequently listed as important.

So price indeed matters, just not nearly as much as typically depicted. The key is to ask how important price is — as the Top10 survey did when asking how much price means to consumers — not simply what factor is most important.

Conclusion

The three major surprises from the Top10 survey show that we need to update our beliefs about how consumers behave. They’re not rational, they’re less price sensitive than we think, and they rely more on — inherently unreliable — online user reviews than recommendations from friends and family. It’s very likely that the trend of increasing reliance on online sources of information will continue, hopefully shifting to more reliable sources such as online review sites. We can also hope that consumers will learn more about making wise decisions when they shop and avoid the dangerous tendency of going with their gut.

Key Takeaway

Consumers mostly make their shopping choices with their gut. As a result, they make many poor decisions. One of these decisions is to rely increasingly on online user reviews compared to recommendations from friends, even though user reviews are often misleading. ---> Click to Tweet

Questions to Consider  (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• When was the last time you made a shopping choice relying on your gut that you regretted?
• Is there anything in the article that will help you make better shopping choices?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Adapted version of an article originally published in Top10.com

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on August 30, 2019. 

Image credit: Pixabay/StockSnap

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky empowers you to avoid business disasters as CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut, The Blindspots Between Us, and The Truth Seeker’s Handbook. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise stems from his background of over 20 years of consulting, coaching, speaking, and training experience across North America, Europe, and Australia. It also comes from his strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, with dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Guide.

Want to avoid business disasters, whether minor mishaps, such as excessive team conflict, or major calamities like those that threaten bankruptcy or doom a promising career? Fortunately, behavioral economics studies show that such disasters stem from poor decisions due to our faulty mental patterns—what scholars call “cognitive biases”—and are preventable.

Unfortunately, the typical advice for business leaders to “go with their gut” plays into these cognitive biases and leads to disastrous decisions that devastate the bottom line. By combining practical case studies with cutting-edge research, Never Go With Your Gut will help you make the best decisions and prevent these business disasters.

The leading expert on avoiding business disasters, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, draws on over 20 years of extensive consulting, coaching, and speaking experience to show how pioneering leaders and organizations—many of them his clients—avoid business disasters. Reading this book will enable you to:

• Discover how pioneering leaders and organizations address cognitive biases to avoid disastrous decisions.
• Adapt best practices on avoiding business disasters from these leaders and organizations to your own context.
• Develop processes that empower everyone in your organization to avoid business disasters.

Book Video Trailer

Book Audio Trailer

Help yourself and others you care about avoid business disasters and maximize success: order a copy of the book right now!

Full Transcript of Trailer

Did you know that the biggest falsehood in business advice is “go with your gut”? I feel deep frustration whenever I see someone buy into some fire-walking guru’s toxic advice to go with your gut and shoot their career in the foot. 

Research in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics shows that our gut reactions are adapted for the ancestral tribal environment, not the modern business environment. And, you need to avoid these primitive instincts to go with your gut, and instead be civilized and go with your head to avoid the dangerous judgment errors that scholars like myself call “cognitive biases”. 

And that’s what Never Go With Your Gut is about. It’s the first book to focus on cognitive biases in business leadership, showing how these dangerous judgment errors bring down highly profitable companies and top-notch careers. More importantly, it uses cutting-edge research strategies and business case studies to show how pioneering leaders have actually successfully defeated cognitive biases. It gives you the tools that you need from them to defeat these cognitive biases and make the wisest decisions. 

Now, you can be confident that these techniques will work for you. Because as the author, I’m a top thought leader on these topics. I have over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Time, Fast Company, CNBC, CBS News, and Inc. Magazine. For the last 20 years, I’ve consulted, coached, and trained leaders on how to avoid cognitive biases and make the best decisions as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. 

And I’ve also spent over 15 years in academia, including seven years as a professor at Ohio State researching these topics. So I know both the latest scholarship and how to apply for this scholarship in business reality. 

My clients, on average, decrease their costs by 15% and increase their revenues by 20% in the next year after implementing these techniques. What would you give to hit the same numbers? 

Get a free book sample at DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com/NeverGut. You can also get the book on links from that same website, or at a bookstore near you. I want you to take advantage of the strategies in this book to maximize your success and leave business disasters to your competition. 

Image Credit: Disaster Avoidance Experts

Originally Published in Disaster Avoidance Experts

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky empowers you to avoid business disasters as CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut, The Blindspots Between Us, and The Truth Seeker’s Handbook. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise stems from his background of over 20 years of consulting, coaching, speaking, and training experience across North America, Europe, and Australia. It also comes from his strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, with dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Guide.

Videocast: "Your Dangerous Mistakes? Cognitive Bias in Decision Making at Work"

Podcast: "Your Dangerous Mistakes? Cognitive Bias in Decision Making at Work"

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article on Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace

• The assessment itself is available for sale in print or digital form

• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here

• You are welcome to register for the Wise Decision Maker Course and get a digital version of the assessment for free as part of the course

Video Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Guide. Today, I’ll share my story of discovering cognitive bias and what I did about it. When I discovered cognitive bias, I already knew that my intuitions sometimes led me astray causing me to make bad decisions, based on research about this topic.

But what I didn’t know was how many kinds of cognitive bias there actually were. When I found that there were over 100 cognitive biases, I was shocked, to be honest. I mean, that there were 100 ways my mind was screwed up and could make mistakes, I had trouble believing that. 

So, I went to Wikipedia, my first source of research, right? And I checked out the cognitive biases - you can check them out there too. And then, of course, looking to the research on this topic, which was pretty credible. But, I wanted to see how they actually impacted my life, so I went through the cognitive biases to see whether it felt true for me, whether I was actually making these same mistakes. 

I looked at one called the planning fallacy where we have a tendency actually to overestimate our plans and use too little resources of time and money and so on, and I noticed that, yeah, I tend to get to places late systematically, making that mistake. So that was clearly a problem. 

Now, another one was the illusion of transparency where we tend to overestimate how clearly we communicate something. And unfortunately, my wife does tell me that I tend to under-communicate and not communicate very clearly. I had that problem with some of my business colleagues as well. So that cost me some money, that was a problem.

Now, another problem was where we tend to be overconfident about the quality of our decisions and jump to conclusions. Unfortunately, that’s a pretty big problem for me. I tend to jump to conclusions way too often, or at least I did when I discovered them. I still have a tendency to try to do that and I try to avoid them. And it cost me a lot of money, and it caused me a lot of stress as well. 

So, I went through all the hundred kinds of cognitive bias and I saw that, yeah yeah yeah, they were pretty applicable so they were a real thing. And so, as much as I didn’t want to believe them, I was forced to accept that they were true and real and this is something I really need to work on.  

This was something that I decided to work on myself, and then eventually teach others when I did consulting, when I do consulting, coaching, speaking, and training for business leaders about these topics. I focus on helping them avoid such cognitive bias and make better decisions. 

As I started to work with business leaders, I discovered that not quite all hundred types of cognitive bias were as important to them. So, for example, there’s a cognitive bias called declinism where we tend to view the past more favorably than we tend to think the current time is or the future is. Now that’s a big problem in politics when we tend to want to go back to the past, but not really a big problem in business, I’ve noticed. 

Another one is hot hand fallacy, where we tend to think that if we experience success with a random event like, let’s say throwing some dice, we have a hot hand and we’ll experience success again. That’s a problem for gamblers, so it’s a serious problem. But it’s not a problem for business leaders. 

Another one is called the IKEA effect. Now, we tend to place too much value on objects and things and whatever that we created ourselves and that tends to be a problem for people in their personal financial lives. I’ve seen people, including some business leaders, have difficulty with selling their house, if they have put a lot of work into it or even their car because they really overprice it.  But it’s not a problem really for everyday business situations.  

So, I looked at the list of 100 kinds of cognitive bias. I developed a list of 30 types of cognitive bias that I saw as most relevant, most important for business leaders. And how I used it was that I gave it to my clients and I just worked with my clients to work through this list of 30 kinds of cognitive bias and see whether they were vulnerable to some of them in there, when I do personal coaching, of course with individuals, I go through their individual behaviors. When I do consulting on a whole organizational level, I do it as part of the consulting and that’s with all people and organization. And that’s called the needs analysis where I evaluate what are the problems and how they need to be addressed.  

So that was how I used it.  And once I perfected it, once I saw that it was really good, very useful, I wrote it up. I wrote it up as an assessment on dangerous judgment errors in the workplace, so that professionals, like yourselves, perhaps, who can’t afford my personal services, can still benefit from my expertise and can still avoid the dangerous, most dangerous judgment errors in the workplace, most dangerous mental blind spots. To help them avoid business decision disasters. 

So what I want you to do and what I think you would benefit from is to check out, first of all, the blog on the assessment. It’s linked in the notes, so you learn how to use the assessment most effectively, and so you can figure out how to use it for your needs.

Now, as always, as part of the Wise Decision Maker Guide, my goal is to provide you with excellent value in avoiding decision disasters. I hope the assessment helps you do so, and I‘d really like to hear from you about it. What do you think of using the assessment in your professional life?  Share your thoughts in the comment section, please, and please click “like” on this episode if you appreciated this episode, share the episode with others who you care about if you care about them avoiding decision disasters. Make sure to subscribe to avoid missing content for yourself on avoiding decision disasters. 

Now you can learn much more about this topic in my book on how to address judgment errors in business settings and maximize success, called Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. And I suggest that if you don’t want to buy the book, you can simply sign up for my Wise Decision Maker Course, which is again linked in the notes.  All right till next time, when you get another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Guide.

Image credit: Disaster Avoidance Experts

Originally published in Disaster Avoidance Experts

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky empowers you to avoid business disasters as CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut, The Blindspots Between Us, and The Truth Seeker’s Handbook. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise stems from his background of over 20 years of consulting, coaching, speaking, and training experience across North America, Europe, and Australia. It also comes from his strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, with dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Guide.

Any association would love a membership retention rate of 75 percent. Unfortunately, according to a 2017 report cited in ASAE’s Associations Now, retention rates for all members are falling. While in 2016, 73 percent of associations surveyed in the report had retention rates above 75 percent, in 2017 only 65 percent reached that rate. The numbers for new members are even lower.

Certainly, these numbers are concerning. Yet statistics make it hard to grasp the lived experience of new members. So let me share the story of someone who recently joined, and then left, an association.

A New Member Story

Sharon recently graduated college, secured a job, and joined a national association (which I won’t name) of over 30,000 members with 9 staff. Her main reasons for joining:

• Becoming part of a community of peers
• Networking with others
• Accessing vetted learning opportunities

She got a useful welcome email with resources from the association. She appreciated the discounts on webinars, her preferred method of learning as an introvert.

In the next newsletter, Sharon saw an invitation to the annual conference. In similarity to a growing proportion of inverted millennials who prefer digital over in-person engagement, she never liked large events. 

Sharon decided to check out the local chapter to decide whether to invest the effort and money needed to attend the national conference. Arriving at the local chapter meeting, Sharon found that existing members congregated in cliques and did not actively welcome new members. When she was live-tweeting the speaker’s talk, she overheard one older member saying to another how “kids can’t keep their hands off their phones nowadays.” The whole experience left a bad taste in her mouth and she decided to skip the annual conference. 

Instead, Sharon decided to try to engage with the community of her peers online. She went to the association website. Shocked to see no Instagram - her favorite social media and the preferred social media of many millennials - she clicked on the Twitter button. 

She saw that the association posted rarely, every 3-5 days, instead of the best practice of posting at least twice a day. Then, she went on Facebook, and saw that it committed the social media faux pas of simply reposting what the association posted on Twitter! 

Her last hope: LinkedIn. To her frustration, the button on the association home page was broken. She searched around on LinkedIn and finally found the association, but saw that it - unfortunately - reposted the Twitter feed. She searched for a LinkedIn or Facebook group for her association, but couldn’t find any.

Sharon thought about the situation. Joining the association didn’t help her achieve her goals of becoming part of a community or networking. The discounts on webinars didn’t come close to justifying. She decided to avoid renewing her membership and pay the non-member price for webinars.

Solving New Member Retention

How many Sharons do you have in your association? Perhaps many more than seems intuitive to you.

Research in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics shows that our intuitions make many dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases. 

Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these dangerous judgment errors, whether in your professional life, your relationships, your shopping choices, or other life areas. 

You need to evaluate where cognitive biases are hurting you and others in your team and organization. Then, you can use structured decision-making methods to make “good enough” daily decisions quickly; more thorough ones for moderately important choices; and an in-depth one for truly major decisions.

Such techniques will also help you implement your decisions well, and formulate truly effective long-term strategic plans. In addition, you can develop mental habits and skills to notice cognitive biases and prevent yourself from slipping into them.

An example of a cognitive bias that plagues new member retention is the false consensus effect, which causes us to assume that other people are more similar to us than they actually are. Thus, association leaders replace an accurate understanding of new association members with memories of ourselves as new members. We forget that millennials are more introverted and digitally oriented. 

Another one - the overconfidence bias - causes association leaders to be excessively confident about what new members want. What if the national association sent out digital surveys asking Sharon what she wanted? What if it made her feel listened to and built a relationship, something so many millennials seek?

It’s easy to do so using association engagement software, such as PropFuel and others. As a consultant and coach, I helped many association leaders implement effective member engagement plans that substantially improved retention.

Perhaps if Sharon’s association did so, it would have learned of her distress - and that of many other digital natives - at the sad state of virtual engagement. Perhaps it would have learned of the problematic environment in local chapters and would have guided chapter leaders to be more welcoming of new members and digital engagement at meetings. Perhaps through engaging her and listening to her, the association could have convinced Sharon that it would change its ways to appeal to millennials like her and she would have renewed her membership.

So how will you convince the Sharons among your new members to stay?

Originally published by ASAE’s Associations Now 

Image credit: Max Pixel/CC0 Public Domain

Key Takeaway

To improve new member retention, associations need to avoid dangerous judgment errors. An example is the overconfidence bias, which causes association leaders to be excessively confident about what new members want. ---> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider  (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• How have cognitive biases such as the false consensus effect and the overconfidence bias undermined your new member retention?

• How can you improve new member retention by addressing dangerous judgment errors?

• What next steps will you take based on reading this article?

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky empowers you to avoid business disasters as CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut, The Blindspots Between Us, and The Truth Seeker’s Handbook. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise stems from his background of over 20 years of consulting, coaching, speaking, and training experience across North America, Europe, and Australia. It also comes from his strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, with dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Guide.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on September 5, 2019. 

How can you make everyday decisions quickly? Answer 5 key questions: 1) What info do I need? 2) What cognitive biases might harm me? 3) What would a trusted adviser say? 4) How might this fail? 5) Why might I revise this decision? This episode of the “Wise Decision Maker Show” provides a videocast and podcast about these 5 key questions that you can use to ensure you make the best everyday decisions, in business and in life.

Videocast: “Are you prepared? || 5 Questions to Avoid Disasters in Everyday Decisions”

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:

Podcast: “Are you prepared? || 5 Questions to Avoid Disasters in Everyday Decisions”

And if you like audio, here’s a podcast based on the blog:

Or simply read onward!

Relevant Links

• Here’s the in-depth article on the “5 Key Questions”

• You can download a poster for your office or get decision aids with the 5 questions for yourself and your employees here.

• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here.

• You are welcome to register for the Wise Decision Maker Course and get a digital version of the assessment for free as part of the course.

• Article on the assessment to evaluate dangerous judgment errors in your workplace.

• Article on a thorough technique for making important decisions

• Article on an in-depth technique for making critically important decisions

• Article on a thorough technique to prevent failure and maximize success when implementing decisions

• Article on a thorough technique to make wise strategic plans

• Article on mental skills and habits to defeat dangerous judgment errors

Full Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker. Today we’ll discuss a hack for how you can make better decisions in your everyday settings, so better everyday decisions. Now, disasters in our businesses and our relationships and our personal life often result from a series of small mistakes that adding up together can lead to a lot, a lot of problems. So that’s what you want to avoid. You want to avoid problems in your everyday decision making. And this technique will you help you prevent these problems through investing very little effort, less than five minutes most of the time when you do this technique, to help you make the best decisions in everyday situations. And yes, since I often get asked, you can use this technique for major decisions if you’re facing a true emergency. But there’s much more effective techniques that are applicable to major critical decisions. So I advise you to not use this technique for major decisions unless it’s a super emergency.

So, I’ll admit it. I have a problem with premature email-sending. I tend to be an optimist and risk-blind, so I tend not to really focus hard on thinking about how my email can be misread in more hostile ways. I tend not to think - not to look it three times over, five times over, before I hit send. And I don’t look at the tone, all that stuff. I just don’t look at it, it’s not my intuitive nature to do that. I just want to write them quickly, you know. I get in trouble because of it. So, I’ve really gotten in trouble because of it, because I don’t look through my emails very closely, and I’ll tell you a story when I got in trouble.

I had a coaching client who ran a midsize growing technology company. And he wanted to acquire a smaller technology company. And they had some pretty serious concerns about his intentions to acquire this new technology company. It was an opportunity-buy, it was a sudden opportunity, you know, just came along and he was deciding to go for it. Not great from my perspective, so I wrote him an email saying that “Hey, this really doesn’t seem to align with your company’s strategy and you didn’t really seem to have done much due diligence on it. It’s very likely that this opportunity-buy will destroy value for you rather than create it, as most mergers do.”

So research shows that over 80% of ALL mergers and acquisitions, all mergers and acquisitions destroy value rather than creating it. You might be surprised by that but that’s what happens. You have to be very careful when you do a merger and acquisition to make sure to do it right. So I wrote my client this email and he took some offense at my criticism of his intention, his judgement, we soon ended our coaching relationship. So I was looking back at this obviously and I kind of, I look at the situation you know, what did I do wrong? What happened? And I saw that I really screwed up. I really should have phrased the email differently. Not being so transparent and direct with my concerns, but really taking my client’s interpretation of my tone, of my email into account, and have written it in a much more thoughtful manner. So I really think that I failed as a coach there because I accidentally inspired a defensive reaction in my client and that was not a good thing that’s never something I want to do, you know, either lose a client relationship or inspire an unnecessary defensive reaction.

So what should I have written? I should have started with expressing my excitement at the possibility of him furthering his own goals and furthering his company goals through making this acquisition. So starting with that side. And then I should have asked him, “hey, tell me, how does this acquisition fit into your broader merger and acquisition strategy? And what kind of due diligence did you do on it to make sure you didn’t end up like that other 80% - like the 80% of acquisitions and mergers that end up destroying value”. I should have asked him if he ever actually worked with this company, or if he can try out low level collaboration to make sure that there’s a culture fit. Because you know it’s really often the case there are two big problems that people don’t consider when doing mergers and acquisitions. They look at the externals, they look at the financials, they look at the technology their company possesses, if it has technology. But what they don’t look at is internal culture of the company and internal businesses, processes, and systems. So two things, internal culture, people, how they interact, and processes and systems. These internals are what most of the time cause destruction of value rather than creation of value. So this is especially likely in this sort of opportunity-buy, destruction of value rather than creation of value because you didn’t do the due diligence, you didn’t really examine it for a long time, you just see an opportunity and you go for it and seize it.

So, stating my worries is what lead to his bad response. Now, why would this new format, as I thought about it later not have led to this response as I realized it? Well first of all because I start the email by expressing excitement for this potential acquisition and saying that “hey, this can - you know, I’m excited about this furthering your goals, your personal goals, your company goals.” It would have placed us on the same side, would have placed us on part of the same tribe, it would have reminded him that my primary primary motivation, always, is to help him accomplish his goals and to help his company accomplish the company’s goals. Then, then I, by using curious questioning, I would have asked, you know, “hey, what is your company’s broader merger and acquisition strategy?” Now, I happen to know for a fact that he didn’t have a broader merger and acquisition strategy. BUT, by using questioning, I would have not rubbed his face into this problem, I would have posed this as something for him to think about, whether he should have a broader merger and acquisition strategy or not. And so that would’ve helped him think about this.

I would’ve also asked him about the due diligence of the both internals, both externals, which you pretty much do, you look at the financials, you look at the technology, you look at their various material wealth, properties, equity and so on. Now, I would’ve also asked him about the internal due diligence. Did he look at the systems and processes? Did he look at the internal culture? You know, perhaps some collaboration to evaluate internal culture and processes and systems would have been helpful. And that would have caused him to think about all of these things, to evaluate them, talk to me and/or others about them and likely, not, simply, not ending the coaching relationship, but have caused him to avoid this acquisition. Now, I know, because of checking up on this later, that the acquisition unfortunately proved pretty much a bust for my client, they were trying to acqui-hire, which is an acquisition hire. They were trying to both get the technology of the other company and just as importantly get the people who created this technology. Unfortunately they had significant culture clashes between the people of that company, between the internal culture and my client’s company, and the large majority of people ended up leaving because it was a bad fit, so they got much much less than they bargained for when they acquired that company, it was a really bad buy.

Now, such examples of bad decisions in everyday life, like the way I screwed up my email are very common. They usually don’t lead to the really really bad result that my email led to, but they sometimes do, of course. More often it’s more like a series of bad decisions and bad interactions that ends up leading to ruin, leading to really serious problems. Maybe I keep sending or somebody keeps sending emails with the wrong tone, with the wrong strategy, ah gosh I just had this happen. I had somebody who kept sending me emails which were really pushy. This person seemed like professional on the face, had a good Linkedin profile, had some good books published, but then he kept sending emails that were really making too many demands on me, weren’t really pushy, just asking asking asking not giving giving giving, and eventually I started ignoring him and disconnected from him on Linkedin, because, you know, I just don't wanna do that. Why would you work with someone who keeps asking and never giving? So that’s an example of where--what you don’t want to do, you want to think about how the other person interprets your emails.

Now, what about in the office - we talked about emails - what about communication in the office? How often have you seen minor little tensions build up over time and lead to major major office drama? Maybe you’ve participated, you know, that - it can be really serious. That’s communication in the office, not simply by email. What about when somebody skipped working, you or someone else, skipped working on important but not urgent tasks in favor of urgent and not really important tasks? We do that all the time, checking emails, going to work meetings, you know, responding to other people. But not working on important and not urgent tasks, like long-term projects over time, preparing for a presentation that’s six months away, or something like that. We often don’t do that and don’t think about these things. So that’s another problem in everyday decision making. Or let’s say time management, how often have you seen people be consistently consistently late somewhere, or not turning in their projects on time? It’s again, it’s the result of small everyday decisions that result in really big problems down the road. So added together, they really matter. And when we make the wrong choices repeatedly consistently as I did with my premature emails, this is pointing to cognitive bias problems.

Cognitive biases are what researchers in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics like myself understand and have found recently to be the cause for a lot of little judgement errors that we make on an everyday level, as well as major major catastrophic errors that we make in major critical decisions. These errors, cognitive biases, mental blindspots, the formal scientific term for them is cognitive biases if you want to look them up on Wikipedia or somewhere else. And there’s going to be a blog linked with the 30 most common cognitive biases, to this episode so you can check them out. They - these cognitive biases are systemic and predictable errors we make as human beings, in business, in relationships, in personal life, in all other areas. And because they’re systemic and predictable, like the systemic and predictable small everyday errors, we can avoid them, we can address them, we can solve them.

So, given that I suffered from these problems and my clients, my coaching and consulting clients, it’s what I do, consulting, coaching, speaking, and training, we both suffered from these problems, and small, everyday level problems. So what I decided to do is create a technique, a hack, a strategy, which you can use very quickly and very effectively to address the large majority of the small everyday decision making problems. And you do that by asking yourself five critical questions, it’s a checklist, of five - five critical questions that you ask yourself before making any sort of small everyday minor decision.

First question, what important information did I not yet fully consider? A common danger is looking only for information - for evidence that fits your perspective. So looking for evidence that fits the perspective that, you know, “I’m writing an email that actually helps my client” as opposed to looking for evidence that “my client might misread my email”. Or, when you’re working on important - when you’re working on urgent tasks, looking for evidence that maybe these are not really important tasks, but you should be working on other tasks that are important but are not nearly as urgent. So look for evidence that disconfirms your perspective, that goes against it, because if you can find - if you can’t find evidence that goes against your perspective, you’re likely to be heading in the right direction.

Another problem with this important information: just what the research shows is that we tend to not generate nearly enough options in our decisions, whether on an everyday level or in major decisions. So what you want to do is generate at least five acceptable options, five acceptable options, that you think, “oh, these are good enough”, before you choose one to go with. You know, for example, if you are writing an important email you want to make five drafts or at least five ways of saying things, and think about which ways are the most effective at various segments of the email. Or if you’re trying to, you know, work - communicate with your colleagues about something minor and annoying that they’re doing, you wanna think about different ways of saying it, so that it doesn’t end up getting into a blame game, getting into a major conflict.

And the other thing you want to do, is you want to look only at information that actually is important. It’s very easy, unfortunately too easy, to keep gathering information for some people who are analytically minded. Not me, I tend to rush to decisions, I’ll - and I tend to, this technique helps me avoid rushing to decisions. But there are some people who are really analytically minded, and who tend to gather lots and lots and lots of information, much, much, much more information than they need. So you wanna look at only important information, so that you don’t get stuck in what’s called analysis paralysis and keeping analyzing information. Ideally you’d want to decide what information is important before you actually go ahead and try to make the decision. So that’s the first question.

The second question: what relevant dangerous judgement errors have I not yet addressed? And I told you that there’s going to be a blog linked with the 30 most common dangerous judgement errors, and it has a link to the assessment that you can take on the 30 most dangerous judgement errors in the workplace. And so you wanna be thinking about these dangerous judgement errors, and which ones seem most applicable to the question at hand.

Third question: What would a trusted and objective advisor suggest I do? Now, if - you probably have a mentor of some sort, you probably have a peer who you trust, in the company or outside the company. Maybe you have someone from outside your workplace who is not a peer in your work, but who is someone whom you trust in your everyday life, you know, a spouse or someone like that, a good friend. Or perhaps you have a consultant, a coach, somebody like that who you can turn to to give you advice on these topics. So that’s one aspect of this question. The other aspect of this question if you don’t have time to consult this person, if it’s a rushed decision, or what you want to do, in this case is imagine what this person will tell you. Now, interestingly enough, when we imagine what this person who we know, imagine this specific person, very clearly, imagine her speaking to you and giving you specific advice, your trusted objective advisor, imagine her telling you, “hey, this is what I think you should do, this is what I think you’re missing,” will get actually most of the benefits of this person themselves. We can’t perfectly model this person of course, but, we can do it most of the way. So over 50% of the benefits will come from you very specifically and concretely imagining what this person would actually tell you.

Now, the fourth question, we’re transitioning with this question from making the decision to implement the decision. The question is: how have I addressed all the ways that this decision can fail? Now, if you choose the best option, but you fall down on the implementation of that option, you know, maybe you decided on the right tone for your email, but you screw up writing the actual email. Maybe you decide to work on important not urgent things, but you keep getting distracted by the next shiny object of the urgent thing despite your intention, despite the choice that you made. There’s so many people who do that. I mean like, when somebody comes into your cubicle and says “hey, can you help me with this?” And, I’ve - I help people who can’t say no to such requests, despite them committing to working on their own important and not urgent projects, and what you need to learn is asking this question. So for example, if you have an office door you wanna keep it closed, in that sense, or pre-commit to saying that, “hey I can’t help with this because I have this really super important and urgent project - I have a super important project that needs to be done”. So something like that, and there are many techniques that you can use. But the critical thing is you want to evaluate all the ways that this can fail, and address them in advance. So, the one thing you might discover while you’re working on this is that the option you pick of the five acceptable options might not be nearly as good as you thought, because they’ll fall down on the implementation. You know, so that’s something you’ll want to be ready to recognize, admit to yourself honestly as opposed to keeping blind - going blindly with this option even - even if you don’t think it will work very well which too many people tend to do, and instead go on to choose one of the other five acceptable options that you generated early on in the process.

So, going on to the last question, the final question, the fifth question: what new information would cause me to revisit this decision? This is a surprisingly powerful question. Why is this? There are too many leaders I know, as again people who tend to be risk-averse and analytical, who are plagued by self-doubt, about decisions - about decisions that they made, you know, who - let’s say send the email, and they immediately think of “oh, you know, this person how can she misread this email and get mad at me” or something like that. So you don’t want to be the kind of person who is plagued by that doubt. And that’s the one problem that this question will help resolve.

The other problem even more common that this question helps resolve is when teams of people are making small everyday decisions. So let’s say you’re in your meeting, discussing a topic and you have some conflict around - because naturally there are conflicts around decision making. But you say, “okay, you know, this is what we’ll do”. Unfortunately what I’ve often seen happen which you’ve probably seen as well, is people who disagreed with the original decision, any time there’s a problem with the choice that was made, they keep bringing it up. They keep hashing over all decisions were made in small everyday matters and saying “oh I told you so, we shouldn’t have done this, this is going to be a problem, we should change our minds.” So you wanna avoid that. And that’s when you - that’s how you avoid it by deciding it in advance what kind of information would make you as an individual or as a team revisit this decision. So you can set a financial trigger for this, for example, “if we don’t reach thirty million in sales for your decision”. Or a survey trigger, such as “if we don’t reach 15% increase in customer satisfaction”. Or a prospect trigger such as, you know, “If we don’t secure thirty new prospects in the next three months”. All of those are ways that you can set a trigger to revisit the decision. And if your trigger is not met, then you just go ahead with the decision. So it will help you a lot down the road that’s why you should use this.

Now, how my clients and I tend to use this decision aid [the Five Questions] is to have it in front of us at all times - have it in front of us at all times. So I made this decision aid into the form of a four-sided folding business card so I keep one on my desk at all times and a lot of my clients do the same thing. So here it is, you see the four - you see the five questions and you see it’s a five-sided - it’s a four-sided business card size. And here I can - inspirational quote on the back “Beware of going with your gut, our intuitions are adapted for the ancient savannah and not to modern business environment and often lead to business disasters.'' So that’s another nice reminder. But the crucial thing is these five questions. So keeping these on your desk facing you when you’re typing out your email, looking at your spreadsheets, making your everyday decisions is critical. So that’s what many of my clients do.

Another thing that many of my clients do is hang it in the form of post upon the wall. So, oh, I forgot to say this, what something that my clients do with this is also keep it on - in their wallet.-I have it in my wallet for when I’m away from my computer and I’m making decisions elsewhere, so to remind myself. Another thing you can do with this is hang it on a poster. Print out a poster with these questions and hang it on a wall in your office for all your employees and so on. And you by the way can get this decision aid for all your employees as well. And there’s a link to where you can get the four-sided folding business cards and the poster in the show-notes to the episode.

Now, leaders as I mentioned often get the decision aid for all of their employees not only something for themselves, but for all of their employees, because often their employees are making these small everyday decisions all the time. When you know, everything from sending emails to working with clients and deciding, you know, how to deal with a customer service problem, working with suppliers, so on. They integrate asking these questions into their business systems. It’s a part of their business process, it’s part of their business systems. That way, if you integrate this, you can be confident that all of your employees are minimizing the risk of business disasters in their individual and team decision making processes. You can also hold your employees accountable - you can make sure they’re held accountable for asking these questions. Because if an employee fails to ask one or more of these questions. For example, if they fail to ask “how can this decision have gone wrong?” Then you can make sure that they are appropriately penalized for not following the process. That is a simple process, if they don’t follow the process they can be penalized, it’s under their control.

However if a decision went wrong, that resulted in a serious problem, in a way that wasn’t under their control, that they could not have realistically predicted. You know, sudden tariffs hit and they couldn’t have predicted these tariffs. Or you know, there was a tornado and their supplies got delayed or something like that. They can’t predict these things. Then you should hold the employee blameless even if a problem - a serious problem occurred as a result of their everyday decision making if they couldn’t have predicted them and if they actually did ask the questions.

So having a shared approach to decision making will enable everyone in your company to also be more efficient in their decision making as a team in a team activity. So what a lot of leaders do is make sure to ask all their employees before any meetings, where usually decisions have to be taking place, at least some decisions, they make sure - they ask their employees to think about these decisions in advance and answer these five questions. And then in the meeting themselves they of course have the four-sided business cards in front of all of the employees when they’re holding the meeting. And they use the four-side, the business cards with the five questions to structure the meeting agenda. It’s a natural structure for the meeting agenda. You go through all five questions and then you commit to the decision.

So that’s a very very effective mechanism that makes your meetings much shorter because you know what questions to ask. Knowing what questions to ask is often the most critical and problematic part of making a decision. And knowing these questions and knowing that you’re going to be asking these questions makes things much easier and more efficient down the road.

So, additionally everyone has much more confidence in the decisions that they make because they follow a shared process. It’s transparent, it’s clear, you know how you evaluate information and how you make the decisions. Now, I don’t think that we like to say this, but as I mentioned at the beginning, if you are in a real slam, if it’s a real emergency, you can use these five questions for making major, major, major decisions. So for example, if you’re having a meeting with a business colleague and the business colleague makes a sudden unexpected proposal to you, and says you know, for some reason, for you know, whatever random reason, it’s only available in this period of time when you can trust that that they’re not trying to screw you, that, you know, it really is available for only a short period of time. But you can take less than five minutes to ask these five questions. You know, you’re going to almost almost almost always be in a situation where you can ask the five questions. You shouldn’t ask the five questions if, you know, if you’re about to get hit by a bus. You should just jump out of the way of the bus. BUT, if you are making any sort of business decision, there’s almost never a time when you don’t have the time to ask yourself these five questions. Just ask for a break in the meeting, go out of the room, ask yourself these five questions, analyze them and come back. Easy enough. If you think that the break for asking the five questions would be problematic, ask to go to the restroom. Say you need a bit of time to think about it, whatever, easy enough.

Cool, so, I want you to check out the blog on asking these five questions. I, of course, went over them. I suggest you read the blog, it has a lot of links to a number of principles, basic principles behind why these questions work, the research around these questions, as well as links to other effective decision making techniques that you can use for more important critical decision making processes. And I’ll also link one of these in the show notes in the episode. I’ll also have a link to where you can get the four-sided business cards as well as the poster.

Now, my goal as always is to provide you with outstanding value in avoiding decision disasters and making the best and most profitable decisions. I hope I’ve been successful in this episode, and I want to ask you to share your thoughts on whether I have been successful. Share your thoughts on the episode. Share where and how you might find yourself using these five questions technique. Click “like” if you like this episode. Make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet, to avoid missing content that will help you defeat cognitive biases and make the wisest decisions. You can learn much more about this in my book on this topic on how you avoid cognitive biases and make the wisest decisions called “Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters”. Now, I can also offer you a few resources which will be linked in the show notes: a signup to my Wise Decision Maker Course, which gives you the fundamental basic principles of wise decision making. I hope to see you on the next episode of “The Wise Decision Maker”, and I wish for you to have the wisest decisions, my friends.

Image credit: Disaster Avoidance Experts

Originally Published in Disaster Avoidance Experts on September 28, 2019

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut (2019), The Blindspots Between Us (2020), and The Truth Seeker’s Handbook (2017). Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training experience as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. His expertise also stems from his strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, with dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications. He lives in Columbus, OH, and to avoid disaster in his personal life makes sure to spend ample time with his wife. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

The President-Elect of the EU Commission Ursula van der Leyen, the Austrian Chancellor Brigitte Bierlein, the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Secretary Genera Elhadj As Syl, the CEO of Penguin Random House Markus Dohle, billionaire philanthropist and Chair of Bertelsmann Management Group Liz Mohn, and two dozen other high-profile global elites joined me at Trilogue Salzburg in August 2019. 

This yearly event is described by its organizers as follows:

Surrounded by the stimulating atmosphere of the Salzburg Festival, the Trilogue Salzburg convenes leading thinkers, decision-makers and renowned personalities from the arts, civil society, business and politics to engage in cross-cutting, inter-cultural and future-oriented debate.

Each year, the organizers of the conference choose a different future-oriented topic. This year, the topic was “Fragmented Realities - Regaining a Common Understanding of Truth.”

Indeed, this year did not disappoint. Full of prominent leaders - ranging from politicians and business leaders to nonprofit leaders and thought leaders - the conference featured extensive discussions of how to address misinformation and post-truth politics. 

I was invited to attend and participate in a roundtable panel there. You can see me second from left in the back in the photo above, and also at 3:17 in this video

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:

A prominent thought leader, I’m a social scientist who published substantial peer-reviewed research on how to fight misinformation, a public figure who wrote hundreds of articles and gave hundreds of interviews on this topic, and a best-selling author who wrote The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide. I’m also a civic activist as the co-founder of the Pro-Truth Pledge project, dedicated to uplifting truthfulness in all areas of public discourse, and President of the Board of Intentional Insights, the 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit that runs the pledge project. 

What surprised me most at the event was the percentage of high-profile participants who lacked research-based perspectives on this topic. Conference attendees mostly advocated old-school approaches to addressing the lack of truth and trust in society, such as more education about misinformation and critical thinking. So I found myself at odds with most of the participants.

I pointed out that if such methods worked, we wouldn’t be in the bind that we are, and we wouldn’t need a conference on how to deal with this problem! Research has found that many forms of education about misinformation actually leads to the spread of misinformation. Even the typical ways that journalists try to counteract misinformation can often backfire, causing people to hold more strongly to these myths. So do the ways health experts teach about health misinformation.

That's why simply saying "we need more education" is a very, very bad idea: the traditional and intuitive way we teach about misinformation is often exactly the wrong thing to do. We need the right education - the specific type of education that research has found to not spread misinformation - which is not what is usually taught! Global elites taking part in the conference can make a meaningful difference in improving education.

Several participants made the claim that the recent wave of misinformation resulted from economic inequality between the rich and poor. In their view, such inequality led to the poor being more willing to believe misinformation. Yet measures of inequality haven’t changed much between 2000 and today, while misinformation has become much more powerful and prevalent in the last few years. 

Instead, the key difference is the astronomically quick growth of social media as the source from which people get their news, and the prevalence of misinformation on social media, since tech companies aren’t doing much to filter out fake news. The global elites who attended the conference have the power to address the inaction of tech companies, and indeed some conference attendees are already starting to do so.

Hopefully, some of the research-based perspectives shared by myself and a couple of other participants familiar with cutting-edge research in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics on promoting ethical and truthful behavior will make some impact. I shared some of the points about education and many other topics informed by my scholarship and writing.

Another example. One of the other attendees was Dhruv Ghulati, co-founder of Factmata, who personally signed the Pro-Truth Pledge and whose organization signed it as well. He discussed the need to reward - financially and otherwise - high-quality journalism, instead of the current financial incentives rewarding click-baity journalism. Providing financial incentives for such journalism is the essence of Factmata.

Most exciting of all, Pro-Truth Pledge donors gathered sufficient funding to make an early, pre-release run of my forthcoming book co-written with Tim Ward, called Pro Truth: A Practical Plan for Putting Truth Back Into Politics, available for pre-order here.

The book describes how we can turn back the tide of post-truth politics, fake news, and misinformation that is devastating our democracy through the Pro-Truth Movement: a movement which has already begun, and is making a tangible impact. I was able to make personal, signed gifts of copies of the book to 23 out of 30 conference attendees. My hope is that it will make a real difference to the fight against misinformation to have such high-profile people read this book. My gratitude to the donors who helped make it happen!

P.S. Don’t forget to pre-order the book now!

Image Credit: Bertelsmann Stiftung

Originally published at Gleb Tsipursky on September 22, 2019.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. His expertise and passion is using pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience to develop the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (2020). Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere.

His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training experience as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. Its hundreds of clients, mid-size and large companies and nonprofits, span North America, Europe, and Australia, and include Aflac, IBM, Honda, Wells Fargo, and the World Wildlife Fund. His expertise also stems from his research background as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University. He published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

He lives in Columbus, OH, and to avoid disaster in his personal life makes sure to spend ample time with his wife. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

In order to make the best decisions, follow these decision-making process steps:

1) Identify need for decision

2) Get relevant info

3) Decide goals

4) Develop criteria

5) Generate a few viable options

6) Weigh options

7) Implement decision

8) Revise implementation and decision as needed

That’s the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Guide, which describes the 8-Step Process for Making the Best Decisions.

Videocast: “8 Key Leadership Decision-Making Process Steps to Making the Best Decisions”

Podcast: “8 Key Leadership Decision-Making Process Steps to Making the Best Decisions”

Links mentioned in the episode

• The article that forms the basis for this episode is “8-Step Leadership Decision-Making Process for Making the Best Decisions”
• Get the book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters
• You are welcome to register for the Wise Decision Maker Course and get a digital version of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace for free as part of the course.

Below are the most important pieces of content from the Wise Decision Maker Show (to be read in the following order):

• How to Evaluate Unconscious Bias Caused by Cognitive Biases at Work
• Wise Decision Maker Movement Manifesto
• How to Make Decisions Quickly
• 8-Step Leadership Decision-Making Process for Making the Best Decisions
• 8 Key Steps for Effective Leadership Decision Making to Avoid Decision Disasters
• 8 Key Steps to Prevent Failure in Implementing Decisions or in Managing Projects and Processes
• 10 Steps for Strategic Planning to Defend Your Future
• 12 Mental Skills to Defeat Cognitive Biases
• Never Go With Your Gut: Video and Audio Book Trailer (Avoid Poor Decisions

Full Transcript of the Wise Decision Maker Show Episode “8 Key Leadership Decision-Making Process Steps to Making the Best Decisions”

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Wise Decision Maker. Today, we’ll talk about everyone’s favorite topic — process. Specifically, decision-making process for leaders, current and aspiring leaders. Now, don’t click away — process may not be your favorite topic, but it’s supremely important, really, really, really important. So you’ll want to pay attention to this video in particular. Clicking away would be a bad decision. So why did you want to click away, what’s up with the process, and why should we care about process? Well, because without process, you just have your gut intuitions, you just have your intuitive desires, you have your instincts. And, actually, our gut intuitions are pretty terrible decision makers according to the research on this topic. They bring ruin, devastation to really successful companies and very highly successful leaders. Unfortunately, fire-walking gurus and others will often tell you that you can just follow your gut in making decisions as a leader. Not a good idea, really really bad idea to follow your gut. If you listen to them, good decision making is something that’s almost magical, it’s either acquired by, well, hard earned experience or something you have a really long time, have thirty years or more, and then you’re going to be a good decision maker. Or, possessed by a few select geniuses, CEOs who deserve a top notch pay package. Not the case. Actually, decision making is something that can really be learned pretty easily, if you look at the most effective decision making strategies that are out there, and that’s something we’ll talk about today.

First, I want to clarify why our gut intuitions are such a bad decision making mechanism. It turns out that we are prone to numerous, numerous judgement errors. Scholars and behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscientists like myself have discovered over 100 judgement errors that are called cognitive biases that we tend to make because of how our brain is wired. Because of our evolutionary heritage and because of other aspects of how we were and how we currently are and how our brain has evolved and what’s going on there right now. So we make a lot of mistakes when we trust our gut, follow our gut. That’s not something we want to do. Fortunately, like I mentioned there’s a lot of research that shows exactly how to overcome these problems. And that’s a strategy, I’ll share about one strategy today for enabling you to protect yourself from making bad decisions in your professional life as leaders, and you can also apply this to your personal life. I know I do.

So first, I want to share about a decision-making process that I did not make. When I was a younger person, early on in my life, when I was just in my teens choosing a career, I was thinking about what careers should I go for, and I made a pretty serious mistake when I was at that stage of my life. Now understand that at that time, I really didn’t know about cognitive biases, mental blind spots, good decision making, so I didn’t have that going for me, I just had my gut intuitions, my gut reactions. And my gut reactions were listening to my parents. My parents, you know, there’s lots of good things they did, but there are some bad things that they did. And one of the bad things that they did was they strongly encouraged me to be a medical doctor. From really early on, when I was a kid, growing up, they said, “I should be a medical doctor — I should be a medical doctor — I should be a medical doctor” and you know, I came to believe them. You know, they’re my parents, they’re someone I trust, they’re experts on this “adulting” stuff. So, OK, I’ll be a medical doctor.

So all throughout high school and college I was learning how to be a medical doctor, I was taking classes on it. Oh gosh, I remember an internship, volunteer internship I did at a hospital once — there were several internships at hospitals — but there was one particular one where I did an internship in the ER and looking at all of these things that people are rushed into the ER. The worst thing, the thing I really remember right now, was that they were trying to save someone who had, a major accident occurred and they were trying to save someone and they actually, like, in front of me — I wasn’t quite in front, I was in the back of the room — what they did essentially is cut this guy’s chest open and apply electrodes to his heart to try to shock his heart back to life. And they didn’t succeed, unfortunately this person died in front of me on the operating table, and then they asked me to hold this guy’s chest together while the doctor was sewing it back together.

So that was pretty disturbing as part of my experience. But you know what? That was not the thing that put me off being a medical doctor. I can tolerate that. I can be like, okay this is just a human being, this is who we are — whatever — you know, just biological machines, in a way, right? I’m not talking about the spiritual stuff but that’s kind of how I was thinking about it. But what really put me off being a medical doctor was when I actually started learning about cognitive biases and good decisions around that time in my last year of college. I started exploring these topics because I was always interested in how groups made their decisions and how people made their decisions, and so I studied this through a historical lens. I used to be really fascinated with history, how groups made decisions in history, how people made decisions in history. Only mid, late in my college years did I start to get into the psychology of this and realized that a lot of the stuff in history really needs a psychological approach to truly understand how people make decisions because there is so much research that has come out very recently about that decision making that is not included in history, the study of history.

So anyway, to make the longer story short, I was sitting down — I was thinking about why did I actually want to be a medical doctor? And I have to say that I realized that I didn’t really want to be a medical doctor. My parents wanted me to be a medical doctor and lots of my friends, you know, I had a very close friend at that time who was going to be a medical doctor, and we were kind of bonding around that. He wanted me to be a medical doctor, many others wanted me to be a medical doctor, but I just wasn’t resonating with that. It just wasn’t something calling me to do that, it’s not something I was passionate about. I realized I was just doing it because my parents wanted me to do it and because it was just going to be a high-status, high paying job which of course is why they wanted me to do it. And I fell into a cognitive bias called “illusion of truth.”

Now, the illusion of truth refers to the fact that when something is repeated often enough, we come to believe it is true. We come to internalize it. That’s how advertisements are so effective, whether they’re for campaigns, commercials, to get you to buy stuff, or for political campaigns or for anything else.

So, the illusion of truth — big problem! And I came to believe what my parents were telling me about being a medical doctor. So, you know, I trusted them, I came to believe that, and that was a big problem. I took a lot of expenses. I spent thousands of hours trying to be a medical doctor, taking classes, learning these topics, doing internships, all that stuff. That was time that I pretty much wasted, since I decided not to go into medical school and be a medical doctor, and that was a serious, serious mistake that I made. Spending so much time, wasting so much of my life, learning stuff, focusing on stuff, doing stuff, that I could have much more effectively channeled into my real passion which was, at that time, I decided to go and study decision making by groups and individuals in historical and contemporary settings. So that’s what was fascinating for me and that’s what I decided to study. And that’s how I came to be doing what I’m doing right now with you watching me in this video, on this episode, checking out this episode.

So then, as you can imagine, my parents weren’t very thrilled with this turn of events, and we had a number of conflicts, a number of fights. That was my first real big break with my parents, and you know, they’re still kind of upset with my choice of career. Now, the consulting, speaking, coaching, writing, it’s a boom and bust sort of business, you have a lot of clients, everything goes well, and then suddenly you have no clients and you need to work on getting clients.

And whenever things aren’t going well, my parents are still telling me like, “oh, are you sure don’t want to go to medical school, you’ll always have a job then. And we can even pay you for the medical school, whatever it is, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars.” No thank you, I appreciate it … you know, medical school, I was looking at the statistics on being a medical doctor. And it turns out that medical doctors are super stressed and not very happy people. Medical doctors actually have the highest suicide rate of any profession in the U.S. That’s another good reason I didn’t want to be a medical doctor. Sorry to any medical doctors who are checking out this episode but it is true… look at the statistics.

Anyway, so that’s one type of mistake that I made in my life by not following good process, and there’s many many others mistakes that many people that are much more prominent than me make. So think about Carlos Ghosn. He served as the Chairman and CEO of Renault, Chairman of AvtoVAZ, Chairman of Mitsubishi, and CEO and Chairman of Nissan, and later of the combined Nissan — Renault — Mitsubishi alliance. He served as a Chairman and CEO of that. Hugely prominent, I think in 2005 he was ranked as the 3rd most prominent business person in the world. So, super, super, super important, powerful person. And, he was arrested in Japan in November 2018 on charges of underreporting earnings and misusing company funds. And that information that the Japanese authorities used to arrest him, that information came out from the Nissan leadership, from the Nissan leadership team who were working under Carlos Ghosn, they were working under him, and that information came out from there. Yeah…he really misread that situation, it’s pretty clear to me if you look at the evidence that this was a result of political maneuverings within Nissan, that he was about to fire the current Nissan CEO and the Nissan CEO went behind his back, got this information, sent it to the investigators, and the investigators arrested him. So that’s what it looks like most likely happened. And Carlos Ghosn, no matter how prominent he was, he really made a bad decision by misreading the politics at Nissan. Not a good idea, you know, maybe he shouldn’t have tried that political maneuvering but we’re not going to go into that in depth. But that’s an example of a really really bad decision by a really really prominent person.

So, maybe you know someone to whom that sort of thing occurred where political maneuverings where this person wasn’t able to read the social context of a business situation correctly, and got screwed as a result. I know I have a number of clients who suffered those sorts of things in the past and I worked with them to help them reduce those sorts of problems but I mean, that still happens. And yeah, that’s not great, that’s a big problem. Now it doesn’t only happen to people, to individuals, to business leaders at all sorts of levels, low level and aspiring leaders, current leaders in smaller companies, mid-size companies, large companies, huge companies, Fortune 500 companies like Nissan and so on. It happens to companies themselves, companies themselves as a whole group make really bad decisions that lead to terrible, terrible outcomes.

So there was a study of the companies with assets of over $500 million that went bankrupt in the U.S. between 1981 and 2007. And there were 423 companies like that. Well the studies showed that in 46% of the cases, 46% of these companies, the bankruptcy could be attributed solely to bad decision making by the leadership. In other words, these bad strategic decisions, just about the bad decisions, not even about the implementation of the decisions, it wasn’t about logistics, it wasn’t about external events. 46% of the cases, it was bad, strategic, high-level decisions by the leaders that resulted in the bankruptcy. And that the bankruptcy could have been completely avoided if these decisions had been different. In many of the remaining cases, the bankruptcy may well have been avoided so we can’t have a guarantee on those. But in many of the remaining 54% remaining cases, bankruptcy likely could have been avoided if the leadership had taken different strategic, more effective strategic judgements. Yeah, so that’s a big deal, these were companies with over $500 million of assets, assets that went into bankruptcy. Now, think about what happens on a smaller level. According to statistics by the Small Business Administration in the U.S., about half of all small businesses close their doors within 5 years of opening. A lot of that comes from bad strategic decision making by their leadership. So you see it happens at the lowest levels of smaller businesses, it happens at the highest levels of huge companies, very common with decision makers.

So I want to talk right now about a strategy, a much more effective decision making process than going with your gut that you can use to make wise decisions. And I developed this technique based on research in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics about how you can fight cognitive biases effectively in making significant decisions. I call it Making the Best Decisions technique and I battle tested it with my consulting and coaching clients so worked with them, testing this technique until developing it into perfection and that’s why I’m sharing it with you now, both because I think it’s pretty done by now, it’s been battle-tested, it’s really great, and if you can’t afford to hire me you can still get the benefits of my expertise by simply applying this technique. So, don’t need to hire me, don’t need to hire anyone else. Just apply this technique.

It’s an eight-step process that you can use for any significant decisions. What do I mean by significant decisions? These are decisions that you can clearly imagine having a substantial impact on your bottom line. These aren’t “make or break” decisions. This isn’t about the company or about the career decisions. But they’re pretty, pretty significant. They can be such decisions like hiring a new employee — a significant decision — choosing a new supplier for an important part, those are company decisions. Deciding for you, for your career, to take the leap of a significant new project, or to acquire a specialization in a specific aspect of your field. So, professional development. So those are all the kinds of decisions that I’m talking about, and it’s pretty important to get these decisions right, like I said, they won’t make or break your career, they won’t make or break your organization, if you get one of them wrong. However, if you get several of them wrong in a row, or if you get several of them wrong in one area, that’s when they can bring you to ruin.

So for example, if you hire a bunch of poor employees, or if you get a bunch of suppliers who are bad in supplying your critical components, those could bring you to ruin if they are really bad decisions. So you don’t want to do that, and even if you get one of them wrong, it can still hurt you a lot. You want to prevent that. So you want to use this technique, Making the Best Decisions technique, this 8-step technique for whenever you want to get a significant decision right, and it takes about 30 to 90 minutes to apply, depending on how you do the various steps of it and what you find during the various steps of it. So I want you to block out, the first time you’re using it, block out at least 90 minutes to go through it completely. Because the first time you use it, it will take you more time. Then as you use it more, it will take you less and less time and of course each decision will be slightly different depending on the information that you find.

So what is the first step of this 8-step technique? First, you need to identify that a decision needs to be made. In some cases, it’s pretty clear, you know you want to hire a new employee. In some cases, it’s not going to be very clear, such as with Carlos Ghosn. It wasn’t clear to him that he should re-read his interpretation of Nissan internal politics. And that’s often the case when decisions are most complex, when they have — identifying that a decision needs to be made is most complex — when it has to do with people. People — I have to say — people decisions are really, really, really tough, and because they involve personalities, they involve complex dynamics, and it can be really tough to understand and realise that a decision has to be made. So, these are people decisions, but also sometimes you don’t see shifts in the market that you really should, because you’re not looking for them. You’re not trying to take the first step of this technique, and you should constantly be considering whether a decision needs to be made by scanning your environment, especially people and the external situation, the market and seeing whether a decision needs to be made.

So that’s the first step. The best decision makers, again, as part of this step, they take the initiative in evaluating whether a decision needs to be made. They don’t let their gut reactions cloud their decision making capacity on whether a decision needs to be made, especially when a decision needs to be made about people and when you might want to think about ending your relationship with someone. That’s a tough one. So that’s a really important one to notice in advance that you probably should make that decision.

So going on to Step 2, you gather relevant information from a wide variety of perspectives, informed perspectives of course about this topic. So you want to make sure to especially gather information from perspectives that don’t intuitively fit your own because you’ll run into what’s called the confirmation bias. That’s one of the over 100 cognitive biases from which we can suffer as human beings, where we tend to just go with — where we tend to look for information that confirms our current beliefs and ignore any information that we get that doesn’t confirm our beliefs. That’s why you want to deliberately, to counteract this bias, this gut reaction, you want to deliberately look for information that goes against yours current beliefs and search for it from people who have perspectives that you know are different from your own. So I tend to be super optimistic about the future — just my personality — that’s one of my cognitive biases, optimism bias. So I tend to gather information especially from the people who suffer from the opposite bias, the pessimism bias. So that’s how I use this step of this technique, Step 2, and that’s how you want to think about using this step, go to people who will help you recognize your potential mental blind spots on this question and sources of information on this question.

So, Step 3: Once you gather relevant information, you want to evaluate what was the data you got, you want to evaluate the goals that you want to reach. What are the actual goals that you want to reach as part of your decisions? What future do you want to achieve? Paint a clear vision of this future. So you want to have a very clear goal that you are going for, you know, you don’t want to say, “I want to hire a good employee”. Let’s say you’re making a hiring decision. That’s super vague and fuzzy. What do you want this employee to be like, what do you want this employee to do, what do you want this employee to achieve for you? What are your goals for this hire? So that’s what you want to highlight and make clear for yourself. Now, as part of this, I want to underscore that it’s really important to understand whether you’re dealing with a one-time decision, just to address a specific need, or whether you’re facing a systematic problem, a systematic issue. Where, your decision — then, a part of your goal should be to cure not simply the symptom of the problem, but to address the underlying problem as well. So you want to make sure to cure the underlying problem. If, let’s say, you are making decisions about changing your reporting structure, let’s say you’re finding that information that is important, let’s say negative information isn’t getting to you in a timely manner or isn’t getting to you at all. You want to — one of the things you can do is change the reporting structure, say, make sure to get this kind of information to me, let’s say, you didn’t get information about customer complaints, and you want to make sure, OK, I really want information about customer complaints. But that’s likely indicative of an underlying problem in your organization where people tend to fall into the “mum” effect. The “mum” effect is one of the cognitive biases where we tend not to convey negative information up the food chain and that usually happens because of the culture of the organization. So you want to look at the underlying culture and fix the underlying culture as part of this process. So, that’s Step 3.

Step 4: you choose decision making criteria that you will use to weigh the various options. Don’t look at the options yet, as much as you can help it, sometimes we have to have the options as we start the decision making process, but ideally, you would want to not consider the options as of yet, you want to look at the criteria. What criteria will you use to choose the options? What criteria will you use to choose what kind of information gets to you? You probably want to have the criteria of especially highlighting negative information, conveying this information in a specific format that will be applicable to you, maybe deciding which other people need information. When you’re hiring an employee, you want to look at this person’s skills, this person’s experience, this person’s fit in the organization, their personality, how well they align with the underlying values and the underlying culture that your organization has, of course their salary requirements, so all of these things, look at the criteria you will use to make the choice.

Now the reason that you don’t want to look at the options is that our intuitions will tend to bias the kind of criteria we choose based on the person we’re thinking about. Because as part of choosing the criteria, you’ll want to weigh the criteria. So let’s say you want to decide fit into your culture, you want to say, let’s say on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is least important, 10 is most important, you’ll want to say it’s an 8. For example, and let’s say you are really a company that’s well off, and you say the salary requirements are a 5, and so on. And you look at someone’s skills and skills are super important, this is a really important job to fill well, so you’re going to make it a 10, for example. Then, what you want to do is you don’t want to let your thoughts about your friend Bob who you think would be a great fit for this position to influence your hiring criteria. To influence the criteria that you created, unless you’re specifically making this position for your friend Bob, in which case this decision making process doesn’t apply. But if you really want to actually make that best hire and you don’t have your friend Bob in mind as someone who you want to create the position for, that’s what you would do.

So next, the 5th. Here’s where you generate your options. So if you want to think about what kind of reporting you want to get, you generate the options for the kind of reporting. If you want to think about the employees you want to get, here is where you send out the application and you get the employees and so on. And if you want to think about what kind of suppliers you want to get, then you send out a bid for proposals. So that’s the vendors. And we frequently fall into the trap of (I fall into this) — I was thinking about a publicist for my book the other day and I really didn’t search enough — I generated three options as my first thing I was looking for. And that wasn’t nearly enough as I discovered when I was going through those three options. Ugh — I really should have done a better job of generating options, so I had to go back to that step and re-generate options, I eventually generated about 10 acceptable options. But what you want to do is generate at least 5 acceptable options, 5 options which you’d be really happy — not happy, but satisfied, let’s say it that way, if those were some of the options chosen. And remember, this is a brainstorming step, so don’t really judge the options except say that they are acceptable. You want to also not judge the options if they seem outlandish or politically problematic, because in my experience doing consulting and coaching, some of the best options come from things that seem unacceptable at first. And then you integrate parts of them into the final decision.

So, and then you go to Step 6. This is where you use the criteria that were weighted already, you weighed the criteria, you know how important they are meaning, so you understand how important they are, you use them to choose the options. So look at the options, choose them using the criteria, be aware of going with your initial preferences, again, you know, if you are thinking, “I really click with this person really well at the interview.” And, that’s something, some people are really good at interviews, so they might be good at talking with you, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll be good at the job themselves. So you want to make sure to go against your intuitions a little bit here and use specific numerical steps to weigh the options. So separate them from your opinion. Now if you get stuck here, I have a technique that you can use called “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” which is all about Step 6, which is all about this step, it goes into it in much more depth. It’s very important to use this technique on complex options, whenever you’re — so that’s one. Another one is on critical decisions, not simply important ones, but critical, let’s say you’re hiring the CEO for your company, so that’s going to be a critical decision. If you are choosing to enter a business partnership with someone that is going to be really a critical supplier for you, let’s say a supplier of more than 30% of your parts, or someone who is a critical client, so someone who is going to be giving you more than 30% of your revenue, or if you’re going on the merger and acquisition path, this is really important. So you want to avoid a disastrous decision and this is a technique you can use, there is a blog linked in the show notes today. So that’s where you can learn about that, I won’t go into more depth here.

Then finally you go to Step 7, you implement the decision that you chose. Before and during the process of implementation, you want to make sure to consider how your decision can go wrong and guard against these failures, that’s going to be really important for you. And also, you want to make sure to think about how can this decision go most right, how can it be the best and most awesome decision implementation process that you can create. And, move toward those, integrate those into your solution. You want to ensure clear accountability and communication about the enactment of this decision so you want to know who is doing what and how. So make sure there is clear next steps. Now for projects and critical processes, if this is a decision where the implementation is a serious project in itself, whether it’s complex, long-term, major, something like that, I strongly encourage you to use my failure-proofing technique, that’s all about Step 7. So this goes in depth into Step 7, how you can protect your decision implementation process from failure and maximize success, that’s what that technique is about. It’s going to be linked in the show notes as well so you can check that out.

Now finally, Step 8. It’s the last step, I promise you. You evaluate the implementation process. “How’s it going?” “what’s going on?” “are you happy with it?” And then you revise it as needed to meet your goals. You revise the implementation to make sure that you’re actually accomplishing what you set out to do in Step 3 which is the goals that you want. Is the employee doing what you thought the employee’s doing? Is the supplier doing really well? Is the new reporting structure doing what you wanted it to do? Now something that I want to highlight here, a number of people ask me this, it that you’ll often find yourself going back and forth between the steps. Let me be super clear, that’s not a problem. So it’s very natural to jump back and forth between the steps as you do them because sometimes later onward in the steps, you’ll discover new information that’s really quite relevant for the earlier stage of the steps. For example, say you are at the option generating stage, and you discover important new information about how the current options you have are just not meeting your goals that you outlined in Step 3. So then you go from Step 5 back to Step 3 and say OK, let me revise the goals to make sure that I can achieve my goals, that I can have the right goals given the limited amount of options I have available. So that’s an example.

Alright, so I want you to check out the blog for this technique for this 8-step decision making process technique that is really important and critical for you to get your decisions right, substantial, substantial, moderately important decisions right. It’s linked in the show notes, and it has a lot of links out to other both fundamental principles behind this technique, and also all the other techniques that I mentioned as well as much other information that you’re going to find really helpful to implement this technique effectively. My goal, always, is to provide you with excellent, excellent value that you can apply immediately once you get back to the office, to avoid cognitive biases and solve them and defeat them and make the wisest decisions possible that will help you protect your bottom line and maximize your success. I hope this episode has proven itself to help you do so and I want to hear back from you. Do you think it will help you achieve these goals that I set out for every episode? What you do think of this 8-step technique — making the best decisions? Where might this information be useful for you in your own work? I want you to click “Like” if you liked this episode, and subscribe to avoid missing Wise Decision Maker content. Make sure to follow me on social media, to not only get this Wise Decision Maker, the content of this show, but also to get a lot of other information, I curate information from other folks — not only my own information — on good decision making and avoiding dangerous judgement errors. Now, much more about avoiding dangerous judgement errors and making the best possible decisions is in my book, “Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters.” Now the best free resource I can offer you is to sign up for my Wise Decision Maker course, it’s going to be linked in the show notes, and of course the information about the book will be linked in the show notes as well. I will see you on the next episode of Wise Decision Maker and I wish for you to have the wisest decisions, my friends. Thank you.

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. His expertise and passion is using pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience to develop the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (2020). Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere.

His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training experience as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. Its hundreds of clients, mid-size and large companies and nonprofits, span North America, Europe, and Australia, and include Aflac, IBM, Honda, Wells Fargo, and the World Wildlife Fund. His expertise also stems from his research background as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University. He published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

He lives in Columbus, OH, and to avoid disaster in his personal life makes sure to spend ample time with his wife. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on September 24, 2019.

Avoiding disastrous decisions and maximizing success through effective leadership decision making involves:

1) Deciding the decision criteria

2) Weighing the importance of criteria

3) Grading your options using the criteria

4) Checking with your head and gut

5) Sticking to your choice

This is the key takeaway message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes the technique for Avoiding Disastrous Decisions.

Videocast: “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions via Effective Leadership Decision Making”

Podcast: “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions via Effective Leadership Decision Making”

Relevant Links

• Here’s the in-depth article on “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions”
• If you’d like case studies with in-depth guidelines of how you can apply the “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” strategy as an individual or a team, see the Manual on Avoiding Disastrous Decisions.
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here.
• You are welcome to register for the Wise Decision Maker Course and get a digital version of the assessment for free as part of the course.
• Article on the assessment to evaluate dangerous judgment errors in your workplace.
• Article on a quick technique to making the right day-to-day decisions at work
• Article on a thorough technique for making important decisions
• Article on an in-depth technique for making critically important decisions
• Article on a thorough technique to prevent failure and maximize success when implementing decisions
• Article on a thorough technique to make wise strategic plans
• Article on mental skills and habits to defeat dangerous judgment errors

Full Transcript

Welcome to another episode of the “Wise Decision Maker” guide. Have you ever heard the phrase “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”? Well, when the going gets tough for wise decision makers, wise decision makers get “mathing”. Don’t worry, you don’t need to know any calculus or advanced math to do this. Simple algebra, stuff you use on profit and loss statement works fine for you to make really complex and hard decisions relatively clear and simple.

Today, we’ll discuss a pragmatic and effective strategy that you can use to do that. That you can apply to the most critical, the most important, the most complex decisions that you are facing, and make them in a clear and transparent manner that will help you and your team make the best decisions possible, maximize your success and avoid threats and problems on these critically tough choices.

Now, why do you need to do math anyway, right? Many people like to ask me that. Well, because our brains are not really very good with intuitions and gut reactions. They are really bad, especially the tough, tough decisions that you have to make that are really complex, really big, and really challenging. Bet the company decisions, like hiring a new CEO, launching a major new product, choosing a major new company strategy, deciding to enter a huge new market. These are really tough decisions and that matter a lot and our brains are really bad at dealing with them.

Or let’s say, bet your career decisions like leaving your cushy corporate job to start a new non-profit or joining the leadership team of a failing company that you’re really hoping to turn around, or perhaps really important personal decisions like deciding to move to a new city or buying a house. These are huge decisions and we need in those cases to get as far away from our intuitions as possible and numbers using math help us do so.

Now, If you’ve been following the Wise Decision Maker guide for a while, you know that our gut is adapted for the ancient savannah not the modern world. So our gut reactions are really bad indicators for making wise decisions in situations that don’t involve savannah-like saber-tooth tiger fight or flight reflexes like getting out of the way of a moving bus. Yeah, go with your gut in that state, but if you are making a decision about which house to buy, don’t go with your gut. If you are making a decision on which new job to accept, don’t go with your gut. Think about these things, if you are deciding about a new product to launch, don’t go with your gut. And our instincts are really terrible at numbers and in-depth analysis and numbers and in-depth analysis are exactly what you need to use for those really complex, tough decisions, matter a great deal to your success.

Now, unfortunately, you’ll very often hear business gurus, self-help gurus, and fire-walking gurus telling you that especially at the most critical decisions, you need to go with your gut. Really terrible, terrible advice. And it’s not like they’re evil, it’s not like they’re wanting you to fail, but they’re just telling you what’s comfortable and going with your gut is always the most comfortable thing. That’s the nature of going with your gut, it’s comfortable, it feels good. Going with our gut feels good but it’s really bad for us, especially in those critical decisions. They do what gets them paid: telling you to do what’s comfortable for you and that’s really unfortunate for your success. It’s very bad for your success on those really critically important decisions.

So, our emotions are especially going to steer us away from the right path on those really bet the company, bet the career, bet your personal finance decisions and they will cause us to fall into the dangerous judgment errors that result from how our brains are wired, from our evolutionary heritage, that scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics, people like myself call “cognitive biases”.

So those critically important choices, you need to work especially hard to go against your intuitions and you need to work especially hard to use your head and not your gut, to not use your primitive instincts and instead focus on being as civilized as possible and using the learned complex behaviors of mathematics and analysis to have the best chance of making the right call on those tough job decisions.

I’ll share an easy-to-use strategy that you can use for this called “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” that I developed to use with my clients. So in addition to my scholarship, I’ve been doing a scholarship for over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at Ohio State, I was also doing and am doing speaking, consulting, coaching and training for business leaders. And with them, I have been applying this strategy called “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” and we’ve perfected it now and so I’m sharing it with you for folks who may not be able to hire me to actually help you make those tough, tough choices. But you can still take advantage of this research-based expertise, that has been tested on the front lines of business reality.

So, before I go into the strategy itself, let me share a story of how I used this strategy and I used this strategy when I was looking at my personal financial life to buy a house. In fact, it’s exactly this house where I’m living right now. You can see the house right around me — that’s my office.

So, let me tell you a story. My wife and business partner, Agnes, and I were doing house shopping and that was in… I believe in 2016, we were doing house shopping, looking for a house in the summer of 2016, and I remember entering the backyard of this house that we were in — it was an intense day of house searching, and it was beautiful, it was like entering a lush grove. It was just gorgeous, there were shady trees, they protected us from the summer heat. It was amazing and I was just thinking “oh, what will this backyard be like in the fall, all those gorgeous colors? I love fall colors, I just go watching the trees in fall colors so, it would have been amazing to have that in the back yard so I was thinking. So, it would have been kind of a magical experience and I imagined myself lying in the hammock under the trees in the early fall and watching the leaves fall, so I had a really great experience and Agnes, my wife and business partner, also had a great experience. She loved the house, it was great, the backyard, we were both in love with the back yard, she really liked the kitchen and it was great. So, we didn’t realize at that time that the backyard was kind of a trap. Yeah, it was a trap. It was essentially something that really couldn’t deliver on the emotional promise that it made when we entered that back yard.

But we didn’t realize it at the moment, so we were really excited and we asked our realtor to bid on the house. We were just motivated by the attachment to the one aspect of the house, the backyard, that was really great for us. And that’s a cognitive bias. That’s an error. It’s called “attentional bias,” where we are focusing on what is most emotionally appealing to us about the situation, as opposed to the whole situation, making a thorough, very effective and very considered judgment on such a hugely important decision.

So Agnes and I made that bad decision on the day of the house search, we were kind of exhausted. But we slept on it and we were more clear minded the next morning so we applied the “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique to try to map our decision by comparing that house with the backyard to our second-choice house. And I took a photo of our calculations, actually. It’s in the book that I made, one of my first self-published books called “The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide.” Here you can see the photo of this calculation. It was kind of a back of the napkin calculation (not back of a napkin but you know what I mean). It was kind of on paper because we weren’t using a spreadsheet, we were just kind of writing it out together.

So we compared that house and that was the first-choice house that’s labeled 170 here, and that’s the second choice house labelled 450. So 170 and 450. Now, to avoid excessive attachment to any part of the house, we wrote out the various parts of the house, which is in the first column, and then we gave each a quality rating from one to three. And then, to account for the actual usage of the house, we again gave a similar rating for expected usage. So there is quality rating and usage rating. And next, we multiplied the quality by the usage to give an overall weighted rating. And of course we separated them individually. So, this was A for Agnes and this was G for Gleb for both the houses. So A for Agnes for house 170, which was our first choice. G for house 170, which was our first choice. And again, same thing for the second choice, for 450, A and G.

And finally, we added them all up at the bottom. And both of us were really surprised by the result, it’s kind of hard to see here, but basically, our second-choice house beat our first-choice house, by a lot. It was 95 to 67.5. That’s a huge difference, that’s — 95 to 67.5, that’s almost a 50% difference. So very big difference. Huge difference. We tried to jiggle the numbers, we played around with them and no, it was still a huge difference.

So, what was the nature of the difference? Well partially, we realized that we’d use the backyard for only a part of the year. Maybe half the year at most, we’d really get enjoyment out of the backyard. So the usage was lower for the backyard. So the house we live in right now, 450, it has a much less fun, fancy backyard but we are not going to use it nearly as much. However, 450, where we live right now, has a very nice screened-in heated porch, so Florida room, which we can just sit in year-round and we use that, and we check out the outside even when it’s snowing. Whereas the other house, 170, which used to be our first choice didn’t have anything like that. Also it had a kind of a poor arrangement for the furniture we wanted to bring, so that was not great. The kitchen was nicer in our original first-choice house, but I don’t use the kitchen much, so I rated it lower. And the first-choice house had less bathrooms, and that was going to be kind of inconvenient. It’s nice to live in the house that we currently live where Agnes and I both have a bathroom of our own. So, we realized we made a serious error. But fortunately, it wasn’t like something that cost us money yet, so we called our realtor, we asked her to change the bid from 170 quickly to 450 and, it wasn’t a problem and we didn’t put down any deposit money or anything like that. And we were very excited when our bid on 450, the house where we live in right now, was accepted. It was very exciting. So it was really awesome. We moved in and haven’t looked back since. We are very happy with this current house. And the backyard works out fine, although it doesn’t have the beautiful trees that the other one would have had.

So, I really shudder to think what would have happened if we got that other house, would have been really inconvenient, kind of crammed, with the layout of the house and it would have been really annoying to share the bathrooms. So that wouldn’t have been great. We’d have spent the long winter looking out the windows, whereas here, we still have the Florida room and we can see stuff around us — it’s very nice. Also, here there’s a pine tree in the front of the house, and we got evergreen right in front of the house all year round. It’s great.

So, what — I want to ask you — what problems attentional bias might cause you like it caused us for that house? When, perhaps you’d be too drawn in by an aspect of a new position that’s offered to you and forget to look at all other aspects of this position, think about and consideration. Perhaps you’d be very attracted by a certain aspect of a merger, perhaps a company has really great technology that you want, but then you’re not thinking about its internal culture and how that might very seriously clash with your internal culture. Or you could have the same sort of mistake when, let’s say, you are looking to buy a car and you’re not thinking about all aspects of the car. You’re just attracted by how you feel when you drive it. For example.

And remember, attentional bias is one of over a hundred cognitive biases that could pose a serious problem for you when you are making really, really important decisions. Now, by applying the “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique, you can address a lot of these cognitive biases automatically. And that’s what helped Agnes and I make the wise decision on buying a house and can help you make a wise decision in critically important situations. So, use this technique when it’s worth it to spend some serious time on the calculation. It should take you probably about an hour or so to go through the whole technique and if you’re doing it together with a team, probably closer to 2 hours.

Now, why does it take that long? Partially because I suggest you use it together with the technique called “Making The Best Decisions” and that’s a more broad technique that applies to all aspects of the decision making process from start to finish, whereas “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique simply applies to the step where you make a choice between 2 or more options rather than other aspects of the decision process. So I tell all of my clients to use the “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique together with “Making the Best Decisions” technique. And that is much better, much more effective when you use those two techniques together for your really serious, critically important decisions. And the blog to “Making The Best Decisions” technique will be linked in the show notes of the episode.

So, let’s go on to the “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique, which is what we’re talking about today. It has 8 steps.

So first, you want to list your decision-making criteria. Write down all the important and relevant attributes of the decision that you will be making. So what kind of criteria do you want to use to make the decisions? You want to stick to no more than 10 criteria if at all possible and don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis trying to list all the possible things. Aim for 10. If it’s less that’s great, really don’t go for more, it really won’t help unless it’s a super super critically important decision.

Now, for making a key hire, let’s say you’re hiring the CEO or the COO. Think about using criteria such as “salary requirements,” “fit into organizational culture,” “ability to perform job,” “connections outside the organization”, “contribution to diversity,” and so on. So these are the kind of criteria that you are rating. If you’re going through this process as a team, brainstorm the categories and then vote which ones should make it into the top 10 and then put them into a web app for easy calculation. Now, the nice thing about “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique is that to make mathing easier for you, we created a web app to help guide you through this process and that’s linked in the blog that is linked in the show notes about “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique so you can easily find it and put the information into the web app.

Step 2: Weigh the attributes. Decide which ones are most important to you. So, use a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is the lowest importance and 10 is the highest importance. When Agnes and I used the technique for the house we made 1 to 3. I later did some more research and revised that technique because it seems like that’s not a large enough interval to make meaningful differentiation, significantly important differentiation. That’s why I raised it to 10 based on subsequent research that has come out. Now, make sure to use this step honestly. Evaluate really truly what criteria are the most important to you. So for example, let’s say you have a great budget and you can say that “salary requirements” are not that important to you. So, you can put salary requirements at 4, but let’s say it’s critical that somebody matches your organizational culture, so you make “fit into the organizational culture” at 9, meaning again, it’s a critical factor for success in the hire that you make. And if you’re doing this with a team, come up with weights independently and anonymously and then just average them out together.

Alright, step 3. This is where you rank the options on the criteria. Rank each option on the criteria that you are choosing using all the attributes that you wrote up earlier. Use a decision matrix table, rank each option from 1–10. So, for example, 1 would be lowest, 10 would be highest. So again, let’s say you are preparing Mary, John, and Ella for this CEO job. You say that, for some requirements John doesn’t have very high salary requirements so he is an 8. So he’s quite good on that. Then Ella has high salary requirements so she would be a 5 on the salary requirements. And then Mary has really high salary requirements so then she would be a 2. So that’s how you would rank the options on each of the criteria that you choose. And if, again, if you are doing this as a team, brainstorm rankings together and then average them out.

Alright, step 4. You math it. The web app does that automatically for you. What you do, essentially you multiply the weight of the criteria by the ranking. I’m not going to go through it in detail. It’s all lined out in the blog and the web app does it automatically for you.

Now Step 5. Step 5. You might be surprised by this one. But I’m going to recommend that you check with your gut. Now the gut causes you to make many mistakes so you don’t want to rely on it too much; however, it can be quite helpful in certain situations where your intuitions might catch something that your rational logical analysis would not. So, you want to check with your gut. Think about whether you’d be surprised by the outcome. Think about, would you look back and wish you had a different decision? You made a different decision. So think about these things. Play around a little bit with the numbers, with the weighting and ranking — try not to fit them to your preferred option but play around with them a little bit and align them. See what would happen if you rejiggle them to align with your gut intuitions.

Now, the next step is when you check with your head. You want to make sure to always check with your head while consulting your gut. Always check with your head. Never trust your gut, simply by itself, always check with your head. So, here is where you check for potentially dangerous judgment errors. I mentioned there are over 100 potential dangerous judgment errors. I made a list of 30 that are most, most applicable to business settings and I made an assessment for you to evaluate whether they’re present in your organization, in your team, in your decision-making process. And that’s a blog that will be linked in the show notes to this episode. So, pay particular attention to cognitive biases which you know you are vulnerable to. So, I, for example, I know I’m vulnerable to optimism bias. I tend to think that the grass is greener on the other side of the hill. So, I know I need to really watch out for that. I tend to be risk-blind and not think about the negatives sufficiently. So, pay particular attention to those things and again, focus specifically on dangerous judgment errors that might come from looking at your gut and consulting it too much because you just did it from the previous step. So again, play around with the numbers by compensating for some of the dangerous judgment errors and see what kind of numbers you get this time.

Okay, so, you did that. Now, get to step 7: set red flags. Decide what kind of red flags you want to make for evaluating whether your decision is not going well. So if relevant new evidence emerges to influence the rankings, what kind of evidence would it be? So, for example, let’s say you are very close to hiring Ella. And then you are consulting the references and one of the references has something pretty negative about Ella. Then you want to be able to integrate that into the rankings and consider how the rankings would be impacted by this information. So that’s important so that you are not swayed by short-term emotions when any new information bubbles up because what this reference says about Ella, compared to all the other evidence you have, it might not be that relevant. So you want to be able to compare it effectively and not have attentional bias on this one thing that this reference said. And you also don’t want to deal with simmering disagreements within the team if you have different thoughts about what option should have been chosen. And then when anything goes wrong about the decision, when any problems come up, people say, “oh, I told you so. You shouldn’t have gone with that.” You decide on the red flags in advance and you say, “if this happens, we will reconsider the decision or we will play around with the rankings.”

Alright, at that step, the web app automatically allows you to math things, to multiply things out, and see what is the best option for you and what you want to do is make that choice and stick to it. Commit to it and go forward with the choice unless one of the red flags situations happens. Now, making a commitment has been shown by extensive research to make you personally much more likely to be happy with your choice and significantly, significantly decrease conflict in the team setting. So, you made that choice and that is the “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique.

Check out, again, the blog. I mention a number of blogs. There’s the blog on “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique itself that’s linked in the show episode notes. The blog on the 30 most dangerous judgment errors is linked there and the blog on the “Making the Best Decisions” technique.

Now, my goal with the Wise Decision Maker Guide episodes is to provide you with the utmost, best value possible in avoiding the mental blind spots, cognitive biases that’s caused us to make terrible decisions and really hurt us going down the road, going into the future and I hope that learning about the “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique has helped you do so. Please share your thoughts about it. Has it helped you? Where do you think you might use it? In your personal life, in your professional life, in your organization? How do you think it might be helpful to you? Please share your thoughts in the comments to the episode.

Now, I would like you to click “like” if you liked this episode and to make sure to subscribe if you haven’t yet, to continue getting the “Wise Decision Maker” guide. Make sure to share this episode with other folks who you want to avoid disastrous decisions by using the “Avoiding Disastrous Decisions” technique. And follow me on social media, you’ll see some links to it, to get not simply, the new content on the Wise Decision Maker guide, but also all other content that I create on avoiding disastrous decisions and making the wisest decisions by addressing cognitive biases. And also content that I curate from other folk who make similar insights on how to address dangerous judgment errors. You can learn much more about this topic in my book on avoiding dangerous judgment errors in business settings and making the best decisions called “Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters”. Now the best free resource I can offer on this topic is to sign up for the Wise Decision Maker Course which is linked in the show notes to this episode. And I hope to see you on the next episode of the “Wise Decision Maker” guide. Wishing you the wisest decisions, my friends.

Image credit: Disaster Avoidance Experts

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. His expertise and passion is using pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience to develop the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (2020). Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere.

His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training experience as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. Its hundreds of clients, mid-size and large companies and nonprofits, span North America, Europe, and Australia, and include Aflac, IBM, Honda, Wells Fargo, and the World Wildlife Fund. His expertise also stems from his research background as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University. He published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

He lives in Columbus, OH, and to avoid disaster in his personal life makes sure to spend ample time with his wife. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on October 8, 2019.

You probably heard the business advice of “failing to plan is planning to fail.” That phrase is a misleading myth at best and actively dangerous at worst. Making plans is important, but our gut reaction is to plan for the best-case outcomes, ignoring the high likelihood that things will go wrong.

A much better phrase is “failing to plan for problems is planning to fail.” To address the very high likelihood that problems will crop up, you need to plan for contingencies.

When was the last time you saw a major planned project suffer from a cost overrun? It’s not as common as you might think for a project with a clear plan to come in at or under budget.

For instance, a 2002 study of major construction projects found that 86% went over budget. In turn, a 2014 study of large IT projects found that only 16.2% succeeded in meeting the original planned resource expenditure. Of the 83.8% of projects that did not, the average IT project suffered from a cost overrun of 189%.

Such cost overruns can seriously damage your bottom line. Imagine if a serious IT project such as implementing a new database at your organization goes even 50% over budget, which is much less than the average cost overrun. You might be facing many thousands or even millions of dollars in unplanned expenses, causing you to draw on funds assigned for other purposes.

Moreover, cost overruns often spiral out of control, resulting in even bigger disasters. Let’s say you draw the extra money from your cybersecurity budget. As a result, you’ve left yourself open to hackers, who successfully stole customer data, resulting in both bad PR and loss of customer trust.

What explains cost overruns? They largely stem from the planning fallacy, our intuitive belief that everything will go according to plan, whether in IT projects or in other areas of business and life. The planning fallacy is one of many dangerous judgment errors, which are mental blindspots resulting from how our brain is wired that scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases. We make these mistakes not only in work, but also in other life areas, for example in our shopping choices, as revealed by a series of studies done by a shopping comparison website.

Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these dangerous judgment errors, whether in your professional life, your relationships, your shopping choices, or other life areas.

You need to evaluate where cognitive biases are hurting you and others in your team and organization. Then, you can use structured decision-making methods to make “good enough” daily decisions quickly; more thorough ones for moderately important choices; and an in-depth one for truly major decisions.

Such techniques will also help you implement your decisions well, and formulate truly effective long-term strategic plans. In addition, you can develop mental habits and skills to notice cognitive biases and prevent yourself from slipping into them.

For instance, we can address the planning fallacy by planning around it. Such planning involves anticipating what problems might come up and addressing them in advance by using the research-based technique of prospective hindsight, by envisioning yourself in the future looking back at potential challenges in the present. It also involves recognizing that you can’t anticipate all problems, and building in a buffer of at least 40% of the project’s budget in additional funds. If things go better than anticipated, you can always use the money for a different purpose later.

Besides this broad approach, my consulting clients have found three specific research-based techniques effective for addressing the planning fallacy.

First, break down each project into component parts. An IT firm struggled with a pattern of taking on projects that ended up losing money for the company. We evaluated the specific component parts of the projects that had cost overruns and found that the biggest unanticipated money drain came from permitting the client to make too many changes at the final stages of the project. As a result, the IT firm changed their process to minimize any changes at the tail end of the project.

Second, use your past experience with similar projects to inform your estimates for future projects. A heavy equipment manufacturer had a systemic struggle with underestimating project costs. In one example, a project that was estimated to cost $2 million ended up costing $3 million. We suggested making it a requirement for project managers to use past project costs to inform future projections. Doing so resulted in much more accurate project cost estimates.

Third, for projects with which you have little past experience, use an external perspective from a trusted and objective source. A financial services firm whose CEO I coached wanted to move its headquarters after it outgrew its current building. I connected the CEO with a couple of other CEO clients who recently moved and expressed a willingness to share their experience. This experience helped the financial services CEO anticipate contingencies he didn’t previously consider, ranging from additional marketing expenses to print new collateral with the updated address to lost employee productivity due to changing schedules as a result of a different commute.

If you take away one message from this article, remember that the key to addressing cost overruns is to remember that “failing to plan for problems is planning to fail.” Use this phrase as your guide to prevent cost overruns and avoid falling prey to the dangerous judgment error of planning fallacy.

Key Takeaway

Questions to Consider (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• Do you agree that “failing to plan is planning to fail” is misleading? If not, why not?
• Where have you seen the planning fallacy lead to problems for your team and organization?
• How might you help your team and organization address the planning fallacy? What are some next you can take to do so?

Image credit: Pixabay/Rawpixel

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. His expertise and passion is using pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience to develop the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (2020). Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere.

His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training experience as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. Its hundreds of clients, mid-size and large companies and nonprofits, span North America, Europe, and Australia, and include Aflac, IBM, Honda, Wells Fargo, and the World Wildlife Fund. His expertise also stems from his research background as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University. He published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

He lives in Columbus, OH, and to avoid disaster in his personal life makes sure to spend ample time with his wife. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on October 27, 2019.

Isn’t it wonderful to have certainty, confidence, and clarity about what you’re going to do going forward? In the context of our increasingly disrupted, globalizing, and multicultural world, business leaders greatly appreciate the security and comfort of clear-cut strategic plans for the future. After all, following our in-the-moment intuitions frequently leads to business disasters, and strategic plans help prevent such problems.

Tragically, popular business strategic analyses meant to address the weaknesses of human thinking through structures and planning are deeply flawed. They give a false sense of comfort and security to business leaders who use them, leading these leaders into the exact business disasters that they seek to avoid.

Take the most popular of them, the SWOT analysis, where you try to figure out the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats facing your business. SWOT doesn’t account for the dangerous judgment errors revealed by recent research in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience.

These mental blindspots — what scholars call cognitive biases — turn a SWOT analysis from a potentially valuable tool into a dangerous handicap. Relying on SWOT to inform your strategic plans without accounting for cognitive biases results in appalling oversights that ruin profitable businesses and bring down high-flying careers.

Fortunately, recent research shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these dangerous judgment errors, whether in your professional life, your relationships, your shopping choices, or other life areas.

In order to succeed, you need to evaluate where cognitive biases are hurting you and others in your team and organization. Then, you can use structured decision-making methods to make “good enough” daily decisions quickly; more thorough ones for moderately important choices; and an in-depth one for truly major decisions.

Such techniques will also help you implement your decisions well, and formulate truly effective long-term strategic plans. In addition, you can develop mental habits and skills to notice cognitive biases and prevent yourself from slipping into them.

Mental Blindspots in Business Leadership

How do cognitive biases apply to business leaders? One of the most dangerous mental blindspots for business leaders is overconfidence bias. Scholars have found that business leaders at all levels — upper, middle, and lower management — tend to be overconfident, and make bad decisions as a result.

You might not be surprised that those who were most successful in the past are the ones who grow most overconfident. In fact, such people tend to believe themselves to not be prone to dangerous judgment errors, which is itself a mental blindspot called bias blind spot. To quote Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

A related problem is the optimism bias, our tendency to look at life through rose-colored glasses. Research shows that top leaders — whether CEOs or entrepreneur-founders — are especially likely to be excessively optimistic about their success, which harms their ability to make effective strategic plans. They tend to overvalue their skills, knowledge, and ability. Such optimism results in problems ranging from too-high earnings forecasts to paying too much when acquiring companies to bad corporate investments.

Cognitive Biases and SWOT

How does this play out in relation to SWOT? When taking on new coaching and consulting clients, I always ask whether they have strategic plans. Of the approximately 70% of my clients who have done some kind of strategic planning, whether for their business or their personal careers, a little over half have done a SWOT analysis.

You know what I find? They invariably — and I mean always, in every case that I’ve seen — list too many opportunities and strengths, and too few weaknesses and threats. Their overconfidence and optimism biases lead them to disregard risks and overestimate rewards. Such problems apply not only to SWOT, but also to other popular strategic assessments, such as scenario planning.

For example, consider Saraj, a technology startup founder. His venture capital investors encouraged him to turn to me for coaching as his company passed the $10 million mark in equity.

Saraj showed me the SWOT he did himself several months earlier for his own role as a leader. I was surprised that he didn’t list effective delegation as an area of weakness, since some of the investors who directed him to me expressed that as a topic of concern.

Asking him about it, I heard an immediate defensive tone. Clearly, I hit on a sore spot. He felt strong ownership of what he perceived as the core activities in the startup, flinching away from the possibility of delegating these tasks.

Indeed, SWOT allows business leaders to sweep under the rug those areas of weakness and threats about which they feel defensive. Their optimism and overconfidence serve to justify failure to address these problems. With Saraj, a research-based technique of effective communication enabled me to persuade him that effective delegation makes him a stronger leader, one capable of best serving the startup in the long term.

It’s particularly problematic when SWOT is performed in a group setting, since cognitive biases are often exponentially increased in such environments. One particularly big problem is known as groupthink, where groups tend to coalesce around the opinions of a powerful leader.

Martha, the CEO of a Midwestern healthcare company that runs several hospitals for whom I started consulting in early 2016, showed me her SWOT analysis from mid-2015. I was surprised to see that her analysis failed to include any discussion of political threats to Obamacare, despite her company’s growing reliance on patients covered under that program.

We discussed the matter, and she told me that she didn’t see much probability of a threat to Obamacare and neither did other leaders in the healthcare company. To me, it was a clear example of groupthink, ignoring the elephant in the room (and on the ballot).

I eventually convinced her otherwise, and we developed some plans in the event of problems arising in this area. She was very glad we had done so when political headwinds threatened Obamacare from 2017 onward.

So next time you’re thinking about doing strategic planning, take some time to consider the dangers of the excessive confidence and optimism that you and your team very likely experience, at least if you’re successful. Watch out for these dangerous judgment errors by focusing much more than you intuitively feel is appropriate on risks, threats, and dangers, rather than achievements, hopes, and rewards. If you notice yourself or anyone else flinching away from an uncomfortable topic, double down your commitment to explore it thoroughly. Only through vigilance and discipline will you ensure that you can avoid the pride that goeth before a fall.

Key Takeaway

Questions to Consider (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• Where have typical business strategic analyses caused problems for you and why?
• What benefits can you gain from addressing cognitive biases as part of doing strategic analyses?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image Credit: Pxhere/Mohamad Hassan

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. His expertise and passion is using pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience to develop the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (2020). Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere.

His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training experience as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. Its hundreds of clients, mid-size and large companies and nonprofits, span North America, Europe, and Australia, and include Aflac, IBM, Honda, Wells Fargo, and the World Wildlife Fund. His expertise also stems from his research background as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University. He published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

He lives in Columbus, OH, and to avoid disaster in his personal life makes sure to spend ample time with his wife. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on November 7, 2019.

Negotiators, even professional ones, make surprisingly many wrong decisions that doom negotiations that should have succeeded. Many of these mistakes relate to overestimating how well they can read the feelings and thoughts of other parties in the negotiation, as well as the extent to which the other party can read their feelings and thoughts.

For instance, research shows that negotiators who sought to conceal their desires did a better job than they thought they did. In turn, those who tried to convey information to those they negotiated with about their preferences overestimated their abilities to communicate such knowledge. Other scholarship shows that negotiators with less power are more prone to such mistakes than those with more power.

Scholars call this erroneous mental pattern the illusion of transparency, referring to us overestimating the extent to which others understand us and how well we grasp others. This mental blindspot is one of many dangerous judgment errors — what scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioural economics call cognitive biases — that we make due to how our brains are wired. We make these mistakes not only in work but also in other life areas, for example in our shopping decisions.

Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these dangerous judgment errors, whether in your professional life, your relationships, your financial choices, or other life areas.

You need to evaluate where cognitive biases are hurting you and others in your team and organization. Then, you can use structured decision-making methods to make “good enough” daily decisions quickly; more thorough ones for moderately important choices; and an in-depth one for truly major decisions.

Such techniques will also help you implement your decisions well, and formulate truly effective long-term strategic plans. In addition, you can develop mental habits and skills to notice cognitive biases and prevent yourself from slipping into them.

I observed a clear instance of illusion of transparency when an electric company brought me in as a consultant to mediate in failing contract negotiations between the management and the union. Both sides believed the other party to be unwilling to negotiate in good faith, asking too much and giving too little. The union demanded substantial wage hikes, strong job protection, and better retirement benefits, and the management pushed back strongly on each request.

Quickly, I noticed that the illusion of transparency gravely inhibited progress. My private conversations with representatives from both sides showed that all felt they communicated their positions effectively, both the areas where they wanted to stand firm and where they felt willing to compromise. Yet these same conversations showed many areas of agreement and flexibility that neither side recognized.

Why didn’t both sides explicitly outline their positions thoroughly and clearly, so that the other side understood exactly where they stood? Because they were afraid that the other party would take advantage of them if they explicitly stated their true positions, including the minimum they’d be willing to accept.

So both sides tried to convey what was most important to them by arguing more strongly for certain points and less strongly for others. They believed that the other side would “get the hint.” Unfortunately, neither side “got the hint” of the true priorities of the other side.

What I asked each side to do was use the decision-making strategy of weighing their priorities. After deploying this strategy, the union negotiators assigned first priority to increased job protection, second to better retirement benefits, and third to a large wage increase. The management negotiators used the same strategy and assigned first priority to no wage increase, second to decreased retirement benefits, and last to weaker job protection.

By clarifying these priorities, the parties were able to find room for negotiation. The final contract included much-strengthened job protection, a moderate boost to retirement, and a small wage hike at just below inflation.

The management appreciated the outcome since it didn’t have to spend as much money on labour; the union membership liked the peace of mind that came with job protection, even if they didn’t get the wage hike they would have liked.

In any negotiation situation, remember that you’re very likely to be overestimating the extent to which you explained your position to the other party and how well you understand the other party’s perspective. The other party is most likely making the same mistakes regarding you.

An easy way to address these problems is to use the decision-making strategy of weighing your priorities and having the other party do the same. Then, trade off your lowest priorities against their highest ones and vice versa. You can come to a win-win agreement where both parties realized the biggest gains and experience the least losses.

Key Takeaway

We intuitively overestimate how well others read us and how well we read others, a dangerous judgment error called the illusion of transparency. This mental blindspot leads to disastrous results in negotiations and communications. Click To Tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• How might the illusion of transparency have tripped up your personal or your organization’s negotiations in the past? Where might it trip them up in the future?
• What value can you and your organization gain, in negotiations and other areas, from solving the illusion of transparency?
• Which next steps might prove most effective for helping yourself and your organization address the illusion of transparency?

Image credit: Pxhere/Rawpixel

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. His expertise and passion is using pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience to develop the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (2020). Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere.

His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training experience as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. Its hundreds of clients, mid-size and large companies and nonprofits, span North America, Europe, and Australia, and include Aflac, IBM, Honda, Wells Fargo, and the World Wildlife Fund. His expertise also stems from his research background as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University. He published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

He lives in Columbus, OH, and to avoid disaster in his personal life makes sure to spend ample time with his wife. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on November 15, 2019.

Guest Post on Making Better Decisions By Mark Faust

What is the process you should use for making better decisions?

Agree first on the process of making the decision

1. Who owns the decision

2. Who are the stakeholders

3. What is the objective

4. What are the alternatives

5. What are the risks

6. How will we decide

Making Better Decisions Faster

Are there decisions you have put off that could potentially be of great benefit to the company? Do you sometimes feel like you agonize over decisions? Here are a few tools that can help any leader deftly make better decisions quickly.

If the decision is between alternatives you should put the options before you through a decision funnel consisting of your 1. Musts 2. Wants and 3. Potential Risks. First, you should list out the Musts that you need to meet. This will sometimes sift out options that just won’t cut it. Next, rank your Wants and see which options will most likely meet the most Wants. Finally, list potential Risks behind each remaining option. At this point, many decisions become obvious if not at least much clearer. You are looking for the best-balanced decision, which equates to the maximum benefit within the acceptable risk.

On larger decisions, a more detailed Risk/Reward Analysis may be in order. If this is the case put your decision on the Decision Balancing Scale. I set these up by drawing a balance point that is like the center of a see-saw and it represents the status quo. This will become a center point on a scale from a negative 5 on the left to a positive 5 on the right.

For each option, you will want to evaluate the significance of tilt that it will make toward either the negative or positive sides based on a scale of Risk vs. Reward. First, let’s give some ranking to the 1 through 5 ratings for reward. 1 would equal some minor improvement that only you would know about. 2 would equal a nice improvement that people around you could benefit from. 3 would equal benefit that is company-wide and people are talking about on a regular basis. 4 would equal customers flocking to your company. 5 could equal a game-changer for the company, industry or more.

After rating the reward potential, do the same with the risks considering the following ratings. A -1 would be a minor annoyance. A -2 would be a problem you could solve. A -3 would be a problem for which you would have to get help and it would be made public in the company. A -4 would be a huge embarrassment. A -5 could be a problem so bad that it could be in the press.

To make changes, the rewards must be a 2 or more or you might as well consider other potentials. On the negative side if the potential downsides are nearly a 4 or more then you may want to forget about taking such a risk.

The problem for most leaders making decisions is that they aren’t using ANY objective criteria or tools like the above to evaluate the options available or the option of a go or no-go decision. Instead, far too many of us are languishing in thoughts and making decisions based on intuition when a much more helpful and objective approach could be applied. For all the truth and value behind listening to your gut and following your instincts which are often fueled by years of experience and data that is too vast to list out, the fact is that you could improve your decision making success by using more and more tools like the above to evaluate your options. This is also why bringing in an outsider who can bring an objective set of eyes to a set of decisions can also help you to increase your odds of success. Someone not burdened with the fears and concerns around the decision can bring unique wisdom that can accelerate success.

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More techniques on making better decisions:

• For quick everyday decisions
• For moderately significant decisions
• For critically important and/or highly complex decisions
• For preventing problems and maximizing success in implementing decisions

Image Credit: PxHere/Rawpixel.com/3353 Images

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Author Bio:

Since 1990 Mark Faust has run www.EchelonManagement.com a growth and turnaround consultancy, providing facilitators and speakers who’ve worked with clients from the c-level of the Fortune 500 as well as owners of multi-generational family-owned companies.

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Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on August 23, 2019.

Guest Post By Brent N. Hunter

Knowledge Management (KM) is the art and science of leveraging individual and collective knowledge for the benefit of all stakeholders. Psychology is the very foundation of KM because KM is all about people.  

To best understand how to leverage individual and collective knowledge, we must utilize a common definition of knowledge. According to the Knowledge Management Institute (KMI), knowledge is understanding gained through experience, either ones’ own direct experience or the experience of others.  

It is common knowledge that people who go through the same experience sometimes have different interpretations of the experience itself, and what they learned; what they understand. The reason for this is because everyone perceives the world through their own eyes and perspective.  

It is because of this dynamic that it is important to understand how we can utilize the field of Knowledge Management specifically to gain deeper self-understanding for the benefit of ourselves and others. When we apply Knowledge Management principles to gain greater knowledge and understanding of ourselves and to increase our personal success and well-being, it is called Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). A greater understanding of ourselves allows us to optimize our success in applying KM to other environments, such as the places we work and in organizations in which we belong. The importance of the inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Temet Nosce (Know Thyself in Latin), cannot be overstated.  

Personal KM can be used to help us achieve a successful, prosperous and fulfilling career and it can also be used in our friendships and relationships, including love and romance. The basic goal is to leverage all of the knowledge available to us to live happier, healthier and more productive lives.  

After working as a psychotherapist with many different types of clients, I developed a holistic synthesis of the major schools of psychology. This led to the creation of a 7-piece “Pieces of Our Puzzle” model that allows us to understand the various aspects of ourselves as pieces of a puzzle to be put together, which is a holistic framework for Personal KM. Each piece represents knowledge about the self, is a puzzle unto itself, and all of these pieces together represent the puzzle of our own lives. Understanding each of the individual components and all of them together leads to greater personal success and well-being. The following diagram illustrates these 7 key pieces:

The “Pieces of Our Puzzle” model explains that who we are today is shaped based on a complex combination of the following seven components, similar to the pieces of a puzzle:

1. Past Environment/Experiences

2. Current Environment/Experiences

3. Thoughts/Beliefs/Attitudes

4. Emotions/Feelings

5. Behaviors/Actions

6. The Physical Body

7. Sense of Intuition

Based on whatever is happening in the present moment, it is important to look at each of the above pieces to understand how each one fits into our lives today. We can ask ourselves a series of questions and think about the experiences we’ve had to shed light onto and understand each of these seven different pieces. As a result of increasing knowledge and awareness of the relative importance and significance of the various pieces — which can change dramatically over time — we gain personal knowledge, self-mastery, productivity, and greater success in our lives.  

Psychologically speaking, we know that there are things that can take place in life that slow our individual and collective progress, cause harm and create problems. When we experience these challenges, they are like kryptonite (an alien mineral that has the property of depriving the American superhero Superman of his powers) to our soul since we are left feeling depleted, weakened and discouraged. Since we have this common knowledge, we can leverage this understanding to take steps to minimize the kryptonite in our lives through the use of Personal Knowledge Management.  

Now that we have a basic understanding of Personal KM, let us explore how KM can help in every area of our lives individually and collectively. It is beyond the scope of this article to fully describe the full suite of powerful KM strategies, tools and techniques available to us but here are a few key practices:  

• Identifying, Leveraging and Sharing Best Practices
• Implementing Lessons Learned Management Processes and Systems
• On-Boarding and Off-Boarding
• Knowledge Transfer/Sharing Through Knowledge Cafes, Brown Bag Sessions, Training, Buddy and Mentor Programs, etc.
• Innovation Award Programs to Stimulate, Recognize and Reward Innovative and Creative Ideas
• The Wisdom Aspect of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) Pyramid to Help Ensure Optimal Decisions and Outcomes
• Management of Risks and Threats to KM
• Implementing Information/Knowledge Repositories
• Communities of Practice
• A Globally-Linked Network of Communities of Practice to Help Address The Most Pressing Issues of Our Time  

The heart of KM is people, and one of the most powerful KM practices to harness the collective power of people is through the use of a Community of Practice (CoP). In a nutshell, a CoP is a group of people who share a similar concern or passion, such as Psychology, Engineering, Software Development, Knowledge Management, Program Management, etc., enabled by the power of technology to easily share, communicate and collaborate. A CoP allows us to come together, share our knowledge and experience, and create even more powerful outcomes as we work together collaboratively. An organization can have many different Communities of Practice, all of which can be integrated together by utilizing the power of modern technologies. Individually and collectively, we can consciously decrease the kryptonite in our lives. To use another superhero metaphor, we can also increase the spinach in our lives to increase our energy, vitality, progress, and success in our lives individually and collectively.  

Psychology is the science of behavior and mind, and a primary goal of psychologists is to increase the quality of life for people. KM and psychology are similar because Knowledge Management can be used not only for improving the lives of individuals; it can also help improve the communities in which we live.  

Toward this end, by creating a globally-linked network of Communities of Practice, we can come together with a common desire and intention to help address the most pressing issues of our time through calm, logical, level-headed Knowledge Management, conversation, dialogue and diplomacy. The psychology of Knowledge Management is about finding and living the superhero nature within us, coming together, sharing knowledge and wisdom, and working through our mutual challenges.  

As Fritz Perls suggested, let us “ lose our heads and come to our senses “ and harness all of the history, knowledge, and experience we have to address the multiple simultaneous global crises in which we face. Those of us who are near the top of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs recognize that with opportunity comes responsibility. We share a responsibility as The Majority to rise up, stand together and speak as a united people. We stand at the precipice of an incredible and priceless opportunity, will you join us?  

As Victor Hugo stated, “ there is indeed one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”  

Image Credit: www.PublicDomainVectors.com

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About The Author: Brent Hunter is a Master Certified Knowledge Manager and is a Project, Program, Portfolio and Knowledge Management Executive Consultant. Brent has multiple advanced degrees, is a graduate of General Electric’s fast-track Information Systems Management Program and holds twelve active professional certifications. Brent is an entrepreneur, producer, executive producer, former psychotherapist, National Certified Counselor and is an award-winning author of five books regarding the subjects of Knowledge Management, psychology and universal wisdom. The services Brent offers through his company Intelligent KM Services represent Hunter’s unique and groundbreaking interpretation of Knowledge Management and is based on his book titled The Power of KM: Harnessing the Extraordinary Value of Knowledge Management. Another of Hunter’s books is about universal wisdom which has received 22 literary awards ( The Rainbow Bridge: Bridge to Inner Peace and to World Peace). The connection between this book and Knowledge Management is important because wisdom is the apex of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Pyramid, an important conceptual framework in Knowledge Management.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on November 29, 2019.

The choice that feels most comfortable to your gut is often the worst decision for your bottom line. To be a truly wise decision maker, you have to adopt counterintuitive, uncomfortable, but highly profitable techniques to avoid business disasters by making the best decisions. That’s the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes the Wise Decision Maker Movement Manifesto.

Videocast: “Wise Decision Maker Movement Manifesto”

Podcast: “Wise Decision Maker Movement Manifesto”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article on the Wise Decision Maker Movement Manifesto
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• You are welcome to register for the Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hey everyone! Welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker. Today we’ll talk about the underlying principles of what I do. We’ll talk about the Wise Decision Maker Manifesto. That’ll be the topic for today, so it’s going to be a little bit longer than usual because these are the underlying principles, it’s a manifesto, right? We’ll be talking about why, what are the essentials behind making good decisions and the key take away message that I want to share with you is that honestly, the biggest falsehood in advice literature on decision making, whether it’s in business, whether it’s in relationships, communication, personal life, whatever, is “go with your gut”. You’ve probably heard this often. Be authentic, or some version of it. Like, be authentic, go with your gut, follow your instincts, trust your heart, something like that. You’ve probably heard that, right? The problem is it’s really really really bad advice. This super common advice is really bad. I’m going to tell you to never go with your gut. Never, never, never go with your gut, always check with your head first before making a decision. Even if it aligns with your gut or not, you want to make sure to check with your head — analyze your decision before making the decision.

Now, I really have to say, I’m really sad, I’m frustrated, I’m angered when I see business leaders with whom I work often, usually these are not the people with whom I work. But when I see business leaders in the news and just around me, folks I know, who make really bad decisions and bring down their careers and even bring down profitable companies because they choose to go with their gut. It’s really sad, it’s really frustrating. They trust some fire-walking guru seminar where they went, and then they came back and they start going with their gut and they make really bad decisions. Or they trust their intuitions from earlier in their careers when their intuitions were a little bit more aligned with reality, we’ll talk about why they were more aligned with reality earlier in their careers but not later. So this is a big problem, people going with their gut, and I want to tell you to never go with your gut.

This might seem a little bit extreme to you that I tell you this but stick with me. I think you’ll hear what I am saying. I think you will understand why I am telling you to never go with your gut by the end of the video or so my gut tells me.

Alright, so, let’s talk about why we shouldn’t go with your gut. Why you shouldn’t and why I shouldn’t either. Well, let me tell you that when I was a kid, when I was a child, my parents told me to go with my gut, follow my heart, trust my intuitions. That was something really important and that’s something I internalized. So, when I went to school, I internalized this behavior and I behaved with other kids, in a way that was authentic to me, that I felt good about, that I felt was true to who I was. I told them about stuff I was really fascinated with, at that time it was military history and intellectual conversations. So naturally that made me the most popular kid in school. Not! I was kind of marginalized. I was a little bit of an outcast. But I kept behaving that way because I thought this was the right thing to do, my parents told me, they probably know what they are talking about. And as a kid it’s kind of hard to think about, well, with your parents — are they telling you the wrong things, right?

When I was a teenager, a little bit more in my rebellious phase, I was kind of rethinking a lot of things, including that piece of advice and that led me to my interest in decision making. Why do people — that was one of the things that led to my interest in decision making — why do people behave the way they do, including towards me? And why do I behave the way I do? Why does following my intuitions really result in this bad advice, in this bad outcome? What I learned about this topic, I did the research on this topic, started reading some scholarship, I learned that following your own gut is actually really bad advice. It really leads you into the wrong direction. If you’re not naturally inclined to do what other people enjoy and appreciate, it causes you to have bad social interactions — not a good idea. So, unless you just happen to like what the majority of people like, you will not have good outcomes from going with your gut in your relationships.

So, I started changing my behavior. I didn’t behave in an authentic manner. I behaved in a way that would appeal to other people. And really, I pretty quickly became part of the “in” crowd. You know, I remember someone saying to me, “hey, you know, you used to not be cool but, you know, but you’re cool now”. And those words really struck me. I remember them — I still remember them. I mean, the person who told me these words probably has no idea that they are striking but they’re still in me. I feel a strong sense of connection to those words and I feel kind of proud that I was able to change myself and behave in an inauthentic way but one that got me to my goals.

And here is the research behind this. Recent research shows that we’re not evolved for the modern world. Whether in business, whether in school, whether in any other social interactions, the large majority of what we do doesn’t look like that ancient savannah. But our gut intuitions, our emotions, our feelings, our instincts — that’s what they are evolved for.

And, for the sake of our bottom lines, for the sake of our relationships, for the sake of effective good personal mental and physical health, it’s very important to avoid trusting those primitive, primal, intuitive instincts and instead, be civilized. Choose to follow learned behavior ,which is the essence of civilization, right? Learned behaviors. Learned behaviors that lead you to your goal in making good decisions and having good outcomes for yourself. And that way you’ll entrust the dangerous judgment errors that scholars and cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists like myself and many others call cognitive biases.

Cognitive biases are systematic and predictable errors. There are over 100 of them that we all tend to make because of the way that our brain is wired, because of our evolutionary heritage, because of the savannah and so on. This is a big problem. So, if our intuitions are such a bad match for the current world, why do so many people, so many gurus tell us to follow our gut, follow our intuitions? Because trusting our instincts feels very comfortable to us and to them. And more importantly for them and for us, we tend to choose what’s comfortable for us. So not only does it feel good to us but we choose what’s comfortable, what feels good. Because, if it feels good, it feels right. The good feeling, “this feels good”, it also is the same thing as “it feels right”, regardless of the fact that it may not be the right choice for you at all. Just like it wasn’t the right choice for me as a kid to behave in an authentic way if I wanted actual social relationships with people in my school. So that was a big problem.

So, unfortunately, you get this advice partially because gurus who tell you advice, literature that tells you to do what’s comfortable for you, they get the big bucks. People don’t want to hear that they should do what’s uncomfortable for them. People who speak uncomfortable truths usually get ignored, rather people who say, “do what you want to” and you know, they are the ones who get support and get popular and get paid.

Now, let me give you an example. What would you rather hear about? Someone describing some delicious, delightful, delectable dozen donuts or someone telling you how to maintain your physical health? Can’t you just imagine that box filled with those donuts, mmm, they’re so delicious, that Boston Cream Pie — that’s my favorite actually, chocolate glazed donuts, I like those too, strawberry jelly, custard, chocolate sprinkles, lemon cream — ooh that’s nice, that’s a nice one there. So delicious, I’m making myself hungry. Now you might be getting hungry as well hearing this and you would really, rather your gut would really rather listen to that than someone telling you uncomfortable truths about how to maintain your health, if perhaps you’re not maintaining your health as well as you could be, which sure describes most of us, you know, I’m not perfect in that regard either.

“Go with your gut.” That advice to “go with your gut” is the equivalent of the dozen donuts dessert of business advice, of relationship advice, of any other advice. That’s the equivalent. The box of donuts contains more calories than we should eat in a day. However, our gut wants the donuts. It doesn’t want the healthy but much, much less intuitively appealing dessert of having a fruit platter. So, too often we choose a dessert that’s really not good for us and we know in the back of our head it’s not really good for us. And the same thing with a business option. We choose a business option, relationship decision or someone that’s really not good for us, but we regret it later but we choose it because it’s really comfortable and appealing to us in the moment.

In that ancient savannah, why is this important? Well, why do we choose to get the dozen donuts? In the ancient savannah, which is where the gut is adapted for, it was crucial, crucial, crucial to eat as much sugar as possible. That’s what enabled us to survive. Our gut reactions still push us to eat as much sugar as possible, regardless of the fact that it’s not very good for us. So, regardless of this harm in the modern world. And at the core, making a business decision based on gut reactions is like eating a dozen donuts instead of the fruit platter. Unfortunately, many business decisions that are like this, going with your gut are actually much worse than eating a dozen donuts instead of a fruit platter.

So at this point, you might be hesitant about what I’m saying. You might tell yourself, “hey, I have a lot of advice in my business, my relationships, my personal life, following my gut intuitions”. So, great for you. Now unfortunately, the term “gut reactions” is a very fuzzy concept. It’s not clear. It describes both very useful and very trustworthy behaviors that we’ve developed and quite, quite harmful tribal primal reactions.

So, for example, there are a lot of terms for intuitive behaviors that you might have learned. You might have learned to how to delegate effectively without micromanaging. That’s a really, really hard behavior to learn. It’s very unintuitive to us. But you learned it. You might have learned how to manage your time effectively. That’s a really hard behavior to learn. Can you think about it? It’s not intuitive at all to manage our time effectively. Maybe you learned how to do your sales pitch and immediately recognize whether it’s good for you or not. That’s a hard behavior. It’s not intuitive at all. Maybe you learned to not interrupt your spouse when they’re speaking. That’s a very unintuitive behavior for us as well.

So, all of these unintuitive behaviors are behaviors that you have learned over time. And your decisions in these areas might be very quick, might very intuitive and very active. You might feel in your intuitions that you’re going with your gut. But what you are essentially doing is following a pattern of learned behaviors that you’ve internalized. And you’ve turned them into the equivalent of instincts. Just like you learned how to drive a car, right now you are not thinking about how to drive a car, you are just driving it, you’re driving it automatically. And that’s good, you know, it’s bad to think about all the ways there are of driving a car. So those instincts are quite trust-worthy. Now, think about it, you wouldn’t let someone drive a car without taking a driving course, would you? Of course, you wouldn’t.

But business leaders don’t go for a decision-making course and get a decision-making license in order to go up in their positions of authority and become decision makers. Decision-makers from the basic level to a position of authority and then from that position of authority into an even higher, and higher, and higher, and higher authority. They simply observe other leaders, do what they do and they internalize the behaviors of those leaders, both bad behaviors and good behaviors. Unfortunately what happens in our minds is that we can’t tell the difference emotionally. We can’t tell the difference between tribal behaviors, ones that are instinctive and have come from the savannah and behaviors that result from healthy learned patterns where we make very quick and very accurate and very effective decisions. It can feel just as intuitive to grab another donut as it can feel to delegate your decisions effectively, to delegate effectively to a subordinate or to not interrupt your spouse while you are talking to your spouse. That’s why you should never go with your instincts and you should never go with your gut.

Instead you should evaluate whether each internal impulse you get is coming from a place of accurate learned effective knowledge, or if it’s coming from a new area where you don’t have a history of making quick effective, critically important decisions or even not critically important, but just quick and effective decisions. If you don’t have a history of making those decisions or, if you don’t have a history of making necessarily accurate decisions, then you don’t want to trust that instinct. You know, we often feel, “this feels right”, or “this just doesn’t feel right”. Don’t trust that instinct. It’s often going to be based on the savannah environment. It might well be one of the over 100 dangerous judgement errors that we call cognitive biases that we tend to make as human beings.

So, what we want to do is verify with your head, analyze the situation rather than going with your gut. Even in cases where you think you can rely on your intuition, it’s best to just slow down, and take the time to check with your head, to analyze the situation and make sure you are making the best decision for each situation. And of course, if it’s a minor decision, you don’t take much time to think about it. If it’s more of a major decision, you want to take more time to think this.

Now I’ll give you and example where it feel that you know a lot about a situation, and you can trust your instincts. But it might seem surprising that you actually can’t. So, let’s say you know someone for a while, and you know them pretty well. You have an accurate read on them. And you get together with them, let’s say a business collaborator, and you get together with them one day and they seem really weird. They seem really hesitant. They are shifty. They are uncomfortable, they seem stressed. And the usual response to that according to extensive literature on deception lying and so on is to simply not trust that person and say, “okay, I’m not trusting what this person is saying, that’s just bad”.

What actually happens in reality is that this person might have just gotten some bad news. You know, their spouse could have been in a car accident and they’re worried about what is happening in that situation. Or they might have got some bad business news, their critical supplier might have fallen down and they are worried about what to do. They are still having the meeting with you. So you shouldn’t pre-judge in those situations, In fact, there is extensive research, and you will be surprised by this, showing that the CIA, the FBI, various police agencies, and the NSA, the security officers, the officers who work there can’t tell if somebody is lying or not. They score about as well as dart throwing chimpanzees of determining whether someone is lying or not. The only agency, actually, in the United States whose officers can really determine whether someone is lying or not, statistically significant probability is the Secret Service. So, FYI. So, if the CIA can’t do it, you probably aren’t going to be that great at doing it either. So, you want to decrease your confidence in knowing whether someone is lying.

I will give you another example, think about market changes. This is one of the biggest causes that brings down successful companies. Failing to notice important shifts in the market contexts, in those cases your extensive experience in the markets, your success, right? Your successful career, your successful business is actually causing you to make wrong decisions. You are kind of like a fish out of water. You are making decisions based on a context that’s not true anymore. So, it will cause you to miss crucial new threats and new opportunities. It will be really bad for you, you don’t want to do that. It may bring you to, in fact, it has brought many people to ruin, because more nimble competitors, younger people who haven’t been in your business for as long, but who can observe the shifting market, or newer companies are more nimble than your existing large business are able to adapt to the market much more carefully, much more quickly than you can. So that’s one more example. One from relationships, and one from broader strategy.

I’m going to tell you something that might make you feel uncomfortable. Even more uncomfortable is traditional business strategic advice meant to address these things is really.. it doesn’t work very well, let’s just say it that way, because it doesn’t take into account the judgment errors that we tend to make as human beings. The most prominent example here is SWOT, where a group of business leaders tries to figure out the Strengths, the Weaknesses, the Opportunities, and the Threats facing their organization or their project. Now the problem with SWOT assessments is they really by and large fail to account for the cognitive biases we tend to suffer from. So that group that gets together and thinks about these things, they tend to very often suffer from problems like “groupthink” where they align on the opinions of the most prominent leader in that group, the most prominent, powerful person. And as a result, their assessments of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats just happens to be the same as that person’s as opposed to getting their various opinions together and figuring out the actual strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. That’s just one of the many problems with SWOT and I can name many others.

Unfortunately, SWOT and similar assessments provide a false sense of comfort and security. I’ve seen this really often. People do the SWOT and they think “we are safe, we did the SWOT, we’re okay”, and they result in very bad oversights that often lead to business disasters and career disasters. You don’t want to do that.

So, I want to get back to my story growing up because this is important for how I learned and decided to focus on this stuff and why making judgment errors in business and addressing judgment errors in business is really important to me and I think to you.

So, I had that idea that “going with your gut” is already pretty bad when I was in my early teens. Then I came of age. So I was born in 1981 and around the time the dot com boom and bust happened in the 90s, early 2000s, I was becoming an adult essentially. And so I started following, really seriously following what was happening in the world and it was pretty shocking to me when I was looking at this that smart business people invested many many many millions, billions of dollars into companies that really didn’t have a profitable scheme of business. It was unclear to me how webvan or pet.com of these other companies would make a business. Many of them, they would say that they are ahead of their time, but that means that they are not profitable. And they wouldn’t be profitable for another two decades. Or something like that.

It was a really bad situation and so, when the bust happened a lot of people lost millions and billions of dollars. That was very sad for me to see. What was even more frustrating was the accounting scandals that were happening. Oh, God, Oh that was incredibly frustrating, the accounting scandals with Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom. That was really terrible. Where prominent top of the line business leaders were engaging in scamming investors through fraudulent market practices. Reporting false profits. They used illegal accounting practices in order to cover-up their losses from the dot com boom and bust.

So that was what was happening. Now, this was far from all business leaders. The large majority of business leaders at that time were quite ethical. They honestly reported their losses. But unfortunately, these huge top companies, WorldCom, Tyco, Enron, they used fraudulent accounting practices to cover up their losses.

Now, these leaders, the leaders of these companies, they must have known that their crimes would be discovered eventually. They must have known that they would receive huge financial penalties and go to jail, as many of them did for their crimes. But they still kept committing their crimes. It seems irrational on the face of it. Why would they do that? Why would they risk their reputations and their lives, you know, the jail sentences to do so? Well the best explanation for this seemly irrational behavior comes from them following their gut. It comes from them choosing the dozen donuts instead of the fruit platter.

It’s not like they.. just to be clear, it’s not like they needed the money. You know, they got one more year of the huge salaries, right? They didn’t need the money, they had plenty of money already, they had plenty of money in their bank accounts. They still do. What happened based on later investigations into it, into the machinations, into their motivations, is that their desperate, increasingly desperate lies and scamming of many, many investors including people, largely people who were working in these companies whose retirement accounts were destroyed, it came from them not wanting to be seen as failures. They didn’t want to be seen as failures in the eyes of fellow peer business leaders. That was the biggest, biggest motivation, not wanting to be seen as failures. Wanting to be seen as winners as opposed to losers. Now, I coach and consult with a lot of business leaders and I have conversations with them and this fear of failure is one of the biggest, biggest drivers of business leaders. One of their biggest things that causes them to function, that causes them to wake up, go to work in the morning. They do not want to be seen as losers, they want to be seen as winners. And money is just a measure of comparing of who is a bigger winner and who is not. They have way more than enough money to live on. Money is just a means of keeping score of who is the winner and who is not. You know, their identity, their ego is very often tied into being seen as a winner and not being seen as a loser, their social status is tied to it. If they were losers, if they became losers as opposed to winners, for many of them, it would be an intolerable blow to their sense of identity, to their self, to their sense of who they are.

Have your ever felt that way? Can you empathize with them? Now, think about it. Regardless of your social station, what would it be like for you if your peers saw you as a loser? Imagine their side-glances when they think you’re not looking. Imagine what they would say about you behind your back. Imagine when they are thinking about you that they’re shaking their head, they’re thinking, “how far that person fell from what a high position”. Can you imagine yourself doing something that you otherwise wouldn’t to prevent that situation? I think some of you can. I think some of you can.

This is a drive to win. It’s one of our primary primal instincts, it stems from the savannah instinct to climb to the top of the social tribal hierarchy because that guaranteed survival and procreation for us. Survival and for our children to survive. So that was really important. It remains one of our most important motivators, most powerful motivators. Far from all of us but for people who tend to become business leaders, it really is. For people who tend to get ahead, this ambition, drive to win, it becomes a very potent motivator. It does a lot of good, when harnessed to good social outcomes, it does a lot of good. I have to say, it does a great deal. I’m ambitious, I want to win, I am sure many of you do as well. But unfortunately, it can also lead to a lot of damage, a lot of evil as it did with Enron and Tyco and Worldcom and, you know, the Ponzi schemes, you know, Bernie Madoff, all of that. It can lead to terrible outcomes with a great deal of suffering.

Now, why do I care about suffering? Well my ethical moral code is utilitarian. So, I care a great deal about doing the most good for the most number, that’s what being utilitarian means, Utilitarianism, that’s what it’s about. So being a utilitarian, I want to prevent suffering, I really, really, really, want to prevent suffering. And I saw that and with my existing knowledge of decision making already from being an early teen and studying this stuff and people were behaving in not very nice ways toward me. I decided to continue my study. I decided to become a coach, consultant, speaker, and trainer for mainly business leaders and their organizations. And this was something I wanted to do because of how much business leaders impacted the people around them. Think about it. They run huge companies, or small companies, or mid-size companies but they still impact a great deal of people. If they make the right decisions, unlike the leaders of Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco, their employees and other people around them, their communities will be in a much better shape and will have much reduced suffering. So that’s why I decided to do what I do to help them fight cognitive biases and make the best decisions. For the sake of, again, of themselves, their organizations and society and community as a whole.

Unfortunately, the biggest disasters happen to people who are often the most successful. And here, I’m coming to something I mentioned in the beginning, why these disasters happen to people who are most successful like the business leaders I work with, I consult with, I coach with, I train. They usually occur for a couple of reasons. One is that these successful people tend to use what has worked for them in the past. I mentioned this as a problem when you are working with a specific market and the market shifts around you. It also happens when your context shifts without you. Without the market shifting but your context shifts. Let’s say you go from one company to another, and you tend to do, you know, you go from being the CEO of one company to the CEO of another or the COO or the CFO of one company to the COO or the CFO of another company and you keep doing what you have been doing because you know that worked. But in the new company it doesn’t work for some reason. And you don’t, intuitively understand that what you are doing is not working because you have a strong sense of confidence that you know what the right thing is to do which is what worked in the past. Or if you get promoted from a lower-level position to a higher-level position. Let’s say you were a lower-level manager and you were promoted to a higher-level managerial position. That’s another context shift, so, many people, you might have heard of the Peter principle where people get promoted to the level of their incompetence. Basically where they are not given sufficient training and they are promoted because of seniority, their ability to do the previous job not their new job. So that’s one problem, they get put in a new context without sufficient training, they don’t succeed.

Another problem of that promotion higher-level is that they get cut off, increasingly get cut off from sources of information on which they could rely and which they could trust. The higher up in the organization you go, the less reliable information becomes. It’s just the case, unless you really fight this hard in your organization, it’s just going to be the case that reports that go up are going to be less reliable — they’re gonna look better than they are. Because people don’t want to share negative information and pass it up the chain, the hierarchy chain because you have the “shoot the messenger effect”, which is one of the cognitive biases also called the “Mum effect” where people who send negative information up the chain of command are punished for it, so the problem happens very often. And this tendency explains why people who are successful at a lower-level fail when they get promoted to a higher-level. Or people are successful in one company fail when they go to another company. And that’s something to really watch out for.

And so, if you learn about these dangerous judgment errors, however successful you are right now, you’re going to be head and shoulders above others who have not learned about these dangerous judgment errors. And especially if you learn about the specific steps you need to address them. Learning about these dangerous judgment errors, to use the previous metaphor is like learning that you should eat healthy things. Well Gee Whiz, right! Who cares that you should eat healthy things? Now, it’s important knowledge to have. It’s important knowledge to have that you should eat healthy things, that you will get fat and you will get obese and you will have various health problems if you eat unhealthy things. But if you don’t have the specific healthy things that you need to eat and what to avoid, then you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. You’re actually not going to be able to accomplish your goal of eating healthy things.

And learning about the specific techniques that I talk about in the Wise Decision Maker Manifesto and many other places in my content to address cognitive biases is what you’ll need to do in order to take the steps to address these dangerous judgement errors.

Now I will also strongly encourage you to spread this information into your workplace. You know, other people you work with might not intuitively appreciate immediately, the information that you share because many of them will trust the advice to go with their gut. They’ve heard it often. You know, it will take a lot of time, a lot of exposure to the information to change their ways, but keep at it. They will really appreciate it and the end and you can forward them the Wise Decision Maker Manifesto and other content that I create to help them understand why it’s important to change their behavior and go with strategies that are not intuitive, that are uncomfortable. Now this is something that my personal code of ethics, utilitarianism tells me to spread, and I hope you will find other people who you care about avoid suffering the consequences of dangerous judgment errors as well and I hope you will spread this information.

Here is the key take away from all of this: the choice that feels most comfortable to your gut is often the worst, worst decision for your bottom line. Far from always, but often. That’s why you should never, never, never simply go with your gut, you should always check with your head. And there are lots of effective strategies that you can adopt. Effective, effective strategies, but they’re counter-intuitive, they’re uncomfortable, but they’re highly profitable. Highly profitable for your bottom line, for your relationships, for your health. That’s what will help you avoid disasters and maximize your success by making the best decisions possible.

Alright, so, I want to again encourage you to check out the Wise Decision Maker Manifesto — it goes into much more depth in a lot of links that you can check it out, it’s linked in the notes to this episode. My goal as always is to provide you with extremely high value in helping you avoid threat and seize opportunities and solve various problems that you might be experiencing to make the best decisions. I hope I’ve been able to do that by talking about the underlying principles of why you should never simply go with your gut and you should always check with your head.

And, I want to ask you, now that you have watched this, what did you think about the dangers of going with your gut? Share about this in the comments section. And if you liked this episode, please click “like” and share it with others who you want to help avoid decision disasters. Make sure to click “subscribe” so you don’t miss any content on these effective, counter-intuitive, uncomfortable but highly profitable strategies to avoid decision disasters. And you can learn much more in my book on this topic. Unsurprisingly it’s titled “Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Business Leaders Avoid Disasters and Make the Best Decisions”. The best free I can offer on this topic, if you are not able to get my book at this time is to sign up for my Wise Decision Maker Course. It’s, again, linked in the show notes.

I hope to see you on the next episode of Wise Decision Maker and wise decisions to you my friends.

 — -

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. His expertise and passion is using pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience to develop the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (2020). Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere.

His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training experience as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. Its hundreds of clients, mid-size and large companies and nonprofits, span North America, Europe, and Australia, and include Aflac, IBM, Honda, Wells Fargo, and the World Wildlife Fund. His expertise also stems from his research background as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University. He published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

He lives in Columbus, OH, and to avoid disaster in his personal life makes sure to spend ample time with his wife. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on November 30, 2019.

When’s the last time you heard a colleague say something so ridiculous that it made your jaw drop? Such denial of reality happens surprising often.

Perhaps it’s something political — like, George Bush is behind 9/11. Maybe they express science denial, insisting that the Earth is flat. Or is their delusion related to your business, something that makes you realize that they’re seeing the profit and loss statements through rose-colored glasses?

Being in Denial is More Frequent Than You Think

Your colleagues being in denial happens more often than you might think. A four-year study by LeadershipIQ.com, an organization providing online leadership seminars, interviewed 1,087 board members from 286 organizations of all sorts that had forced out their Chief Executive Officers. It found that 23 percent of CEOs were fired for denying reality, meaning refusing to recognize negative facts about his or her organization’s performance.

Other research strongly suggests that such behaviors, expressed by CEOs, “are felt throughout the organization by impacting the norms that sanction or discourage member behavior and decision making, and the patterns of behavior and interaction among members.” Together, these findings suggest that organizations where CEOs deny negative facts will have a culture of denying reality throughout its hierarchy.

Of course, people may hold false beliefs in any type of organization. Professionals at all levels suffer from the tendency to deny uncomfortable facts. Scholars term this thinking error the ostrich effect, after the (mythical) notion that ostriches stick their heads into the sand when they encounter threats.

The ostrich effect is one of over 100 dangerous judgment errors that result from how our brains are wired, what scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases. We make these mistakes not only in work, but also in other life areas, for example in our shopping choices, as revealed by a series of studies done by a shopping comparison website.

Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these dangerous judgment errors, whether in your professional life, your relationships, or other life areas. You need to evaluate where cognitive biases are hurting you and others in your team and organization. Then, you can use structured decision-making methods to make “good enough” daily decisions quickly; more thorough ones for moderately important choices; and an in-depth one for truly major decisions.

Such techniques will also help you implement your decisions well, and formulate truly effective long-term strategic plans. In addition, you can develop mental habits and skills to notice cognitive biases and prevent yourself from slipping into them.

How do you deal with colleagues suffering from the ostrich effect in particular? I regularly give keynotes and trainings, as well as do consulting and coaching, on dealing with truth denialism — in business, politics, and other life areas. My best-selling book, The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide, provides thorough guidance on how to address truth denialism.

This piece provides you with a research-based, peer-reviewed process you can take to address business colleagues who deny the facts.

To Help Colleagues in Denial, Do Not Lead With Facts or Logic

Our intuition is to confront people with the facts, but research — and common sense, if the individual is, say, your supervisor — suggests that’s usually exactly the wrong thing to do. When we talk to someone who believes something we are confident is false, we need to suspect some emotional block is at play. Unfortunately, despite extensive research about its importance in professional settings, too many organizations still fail to provide training in emotional intelligence, including how to deal with colleagues whose emotions lead them to deny reality.

A number of factors explain why people may hold false beliefs. For example, research on the confirmation bias shows that we tend to look for and interpret information in ways that conform to our beliefs. So even if sales are far below expectations, CEOs might reject that information while projecting good financial forecasts, if they believe their actions should lead the company to do well. Thus, a CEO might say that the sales will definitely go up in the near future, more than making up for the shortfall.

Here’s an example from my own experience. I consulted for a company where a manager who made a hire refused to acknowledge the new employee’s bad fit, despite everyone else in the department telling me that the employee was holding back the team. The manager’s behavior likely resulted from what scholars term the sunk cost fallacy — our tendency to double down on our past decisions, even when an objective assessment shows that doing so would waste resources.

In these types of cases, facing the facts would cause an individual to feel bad about themselves. Unfortunately, we often prefer to stick our heads into the sand than acknowledge fault, because of our reluctance to experience negative emotions. Research on a cognitive bias called the backfire effect shows that when we are presented with facts that cause us to feel bad about our identity, self-worth, worldview, or group belonging, we tend to dig in our heels and refuse to accept them.

In some cases, presenting the facts to people actually backfires, causing them to develop a stronger attachment to their incorrect beliefs, as scholarship shows. Moreover, we express anger at the person bringing us the message, a phenomenon researchers term shoot the messenger. There are many other mental errors that inhibit professionals from seeing reality clearly and making good decisions.

To Deal With Those in Denial, Use EGRIP (Emotions, Goals, Rapport, Information, Positive Reinforcement)

To help you deal with colleagues in denial effective, I developed a 5-step technique that can be summarized under the acronym EGRIP (Emotions, Goals, Rapport, Information, Positive Reinforcement).

Step 1: Model Their Emotions

Some might ask: if emotions are the problem, shouldn’t the solution be to suppress them? After all, we’ve all heard that emotions have no place in business.

Let me be clear that emotions are not the inherent problem. They are fundamentally important to the human experience. We need both reason and emotions to achieve our goals, according to the research.

Instead, your goal should be to show emotional leadership and try to figure out what are the emotional blocks inhibiting colleagues from seeing reality clearly. Use curiosity and subtle questioning to figure out their values and goals, and how these tie in to their perception of self-identity. During a discussion, focus on deploying the emotional intelligence skill of empathy — understanding other people’s emotions — as a way to determine what emotional blocks might cause them to stick their heads into the sand of reality.

Step 2: Figure Out Their Goals

Next, you’ll want to figure out the goals motivating their emotions. What goals does the false belief inhibit for them? The goals might be personal or professional; the person might or might not realize these goals. You want to continue using curious questioning to understand, at least in broad strokes, their aspirations.

For example, for the CEO, you might want to inquire gently about their goals for the company and for themselves. You might find out that he wants to be seen as a strong leader.

With the manager, I asked about her goals for her department’s future. She shared her aspiration for the department to grow and prosper.

Step 3: Put Yourself on the Same Side By Building Rapport

Next, you’ll want to communicate to them that you have shared goals and are on the same side, building rapport. Doing so is crucial, as scholarship shows, for effective knowledge sharing in professional environments.

Practice mirroring, or rephrasing in your own words the points made by the other person, which helps build trust. Use empathetic listening, a vital skill, to echo their emotions and show you understand how they feel.

With the CEO discussed above, you might talk about how both of you share a desire for him or her to be a truly strong leader. Try to connect the traits and emotions identified by the CEO to specific examples of their behavior.

With the manager, I steered the conversation to how she saw her current and potential future employees playing a role in the long-term future of her department. I echoed her anxiety about the company’s performance and concerns about getting funding for future hires, which gave me an additional clue into why she might be protecting the incompetent employee.

Step 4: Lead Them Away From False Beliefs Through Sharing Information

After placing yourself on the same side, building up rapport, and establishing an emotional connection, move to the problem at hand — their emotional block. The key is to show them, without arousing a defensive or aggressive response, how their truth denialism will lead to them undermining their own long-term goals, a research-driven approach to addressing thinking errors.

In the case of the CEO, you might discuss how research shows that strong leaders welcome learning negative information and updating their beliefs toward reality, so that they can fix the problem effectively; in turn, failing to identify negative facts is a sign of a weak leader. Encourage him to consider what aspects of the company’s performance might be problematic, and how they might be addressed. Offer to collaborate on addressing problems. Emphasize how only weak leaders turn away from reality, if the CEO proves stubborn; the key to their emotional block could be a self-identity as an effective leader. Share about how top CEOs, such as Alan Mullaly at Ford, succeeded due to multiple course corrections. Your goal is to help the individual incorporate a new character trait into their perception of what makes a good leader.

I asked the manager I spoke with to identify which of her employees contributed most to her goals for the department’s long-term performance, which the least, and why. I also had her consider who contributed the most to the team spirit and unit cohesion, and who dragged down morale and performance.

As part of the conversation, I brought up research on why we sometimes make mistakes in evaluating colleagues and how to avoid them. She acknowledged the employee in question as being a poor performer and a drag on the group. Together, we collaborated on a plan of proactive development for the employee; if he did not meet agreed-upon benchmarks, he would be let go.

Step 5: Help Them Associate Good Feelings With Changing Their Minds Via Positive Reinforcement

Conclude your conversations with positive reinforcement for colleagues accepting the facts, an effective research-based tactic. The more positive emotions the person associates with the ability to accept negative facts as an invaluable skill, the less likely anyone will need to have the same conversation with them in the future.

Conclusion

Our typical methods of dealing with the frequent occurrence of a colleague in denial are wrong. Don’t lead with facts, reason, and logic. Focus on their emotions above all, as it’s their emotional block that inhibits them from acknowledging reality. Use the 5-step research-based strategy called EGRIP to 1) discover their emotions; 2) then their goals; 3) build up rapport; 4) provide information to change their mind; 5) finally, offer positive reinforcement for them updating their beliefs to match reality. It’s not as easy as trying to argue, but it’s much, much more likely both to change their mind and to preserve and even strengthen your relationships. To remind yourself to use this technique, you can use this decision aid .

Key Takeaway

To get colleagues in denial to believe the truth, use EGRIP: 1) discover their emotions; 2) then their goals; 3) build up rapport; 4) provide info to change their mind; 5) offer positive reinforcement for them updating their beliefs. ---> Click to Tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• What kind of issues have you seen cause colleagues to be in denial?
• What are some situations in the past when EGRIP might have been useful for you?
• Where do you plan to use EGRIP in your professional life? What about your personal life?
• What next steps will you take to use EGRIP?

Image Credit: Max Pixel/Canon EOS 400d Digital

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. His expertise and passion is using pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience to develop the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (2020). Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere.

His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training experience as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. Its hundreds of clients, mid-size and large companies and nonprofits, span North America, Europe, and Australia, and include Aflac, IBM, Honda, Wells Fargo, and the World Wildlife Fund. His expertise also stems from his research background as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University. He published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

He lives in Columbus, OH, and to avoid disaster in his personal life makes sure to spend ample time with his wife. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on November 21, 2019.

Did you know that the typical five-year strategic planning forecasts perform about as well as dart-throwing chimpanzees? Cognitive science and behavioral economics scholars have conducted research on people who are the most skilled forecasters among us. Apparently, they perform no better than chance on economic predictions more than three to five years out. Given that gloomy information, you might be asking why I wrote an article about strategic planning at all.

You’re in the same boat with my consulting client Beth, the CEO of a mid-size medical management company, when I told her about this same research finding in our conversation about strategic planning in the spring of 2019. Based on her personal experience, she resonated with the accuracy of this statement.

Beth told me that about seven years before she and I had that conversation, her company went through a five-year strategic planning process. Well, the plan didn’t go according to plan. The roiling controversy surrounding Obamacare after Donald Trump’s election and Republicans’ taking both houses of Congress caused a great deal of uncertainty and resulting problems for her company.

Other predicted trends happened faster than expected. One problem was lower occupancy in her company’s nursing homes due to shifts to using alternative nursing care services such as home health care and retirement communities. Another problem stemmed from a decrease in the more lucrative Medicare Part A patients.

The assumptions built into her strategic plan, and the resulting projects and financial commitments, failed to pan out. The strategic plan, she felt, cost her some serious money. She invested into more facilities and staff than was needed, so that the company’s supply of medical services outpaced demand from customers.

She had to cut costs to compete. Beth even ended up canceling some planned projects and lost the initial investments. She also had to lay off long-time staff to maintain the company’s financial viability.

Not a pretty picture; no wonder she wasn’t optimistic about strategic planning. Wouldn’t you be if you had her experience?

The Problems With Beth’s Strategic Planning

After taking a look at her previous strategic planning process, it became clear that it suffered from a number of dangerous judgment errors that result from the biological structure of our brain, what scholars term cognitive biases. While we as human beings suffer from over 100 such mental blindspots, not all are relevant for business and leadership. You’ll find the 30 cognitive biases that cause the biggest problems in these areas, and discover where and how these judgment errors are plaguing your organization, in the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace.

We know from studies that cognitive biases pose a high threat to strategic planning. Beth’s plan, in particular, suffered from the planning fallacy, our tendency to assume that everything will go according to plan. That dangerous judgment error leads to our failure to build in enough resources and flexibility for various contingencies. Indeed, Beth’s company didn’t account nearly enough potential for problems with Obamacare and other issues.

Her plan also exhibited the mental blind spot known as the optimism bias. It’s like it sounds: the optimism bias causes us to perceive a more bright and hopeful vision of the future than is the case in reality. We then underestimate threats and risks, such as the risk of one political party taking both the presidency and both houses of Congress. Beth’s plan mistakenly anticipated that due to the overwhelming commitment among Democrats to Obamacare, there would be no effective challenge to it from Republicans.

Finally, the plan proved highly vulnerable to sunken costs. This cognitive bias makes us reluctant to terminate projects after we already sunk some money into them. Due to the strategic plan’s structure, Beth’s company continued to throw good money after bad long after many red flags suggested it might be time to sink the projects. As a result, Beth suffered substantially more losses than needed, making the required financial corrections significantly more painful than needed.

As I went through each of these problems, Beth found herself both nodding her head and clenching her fists. How she wished she knew about these problems when she worked with the consulting company that helped her leadership team create that plan, she told me. She wouldn’t have fallen for those traps!

Gut-Based Strategic Planning

Beth’s experience is pretty common, due to the widespread failure to address cognitive biases in business strategic planning and decision making. Instead, business advice encourages leaders to trust their gut when planning and deciding.

“Go with your gut” may be both the most repeated business advice and the most wrong-headed one. Our gut reactions have evolved for the ancestral tribal environment, not the modern business one. Many of the cognitive biases that cause us to make decision disasters in today’s workplace worked perfectly well for our ancestors.

For instance, it was highly beneficial for our ancestors to eat as much sugar as possible, such as when they found an abandoned beehive. Those who ate the most sugar survived and passed on their genes; unfortunately, this instinct today harms us greatly, as the obesity epidemic in the US makes clear. We have inherited the sugar-eating instinct and other unhealthy behaviors in our decision making, and tend to rely on these gut reactions without realizing that they don’t serve us well in modernity.

Tragically, even business strategic assessments meant to address the weaknesses of human thinking through structures and planning are deeply flawed if they don’t specifically account for cognitive biases. Take the most popular of them, SWOT, where you try to figure out the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats facing your business.

SWOT assessments usually fail to account for our mental blind spots. It’s particularly problematic that SWOT is almost always performed in a group setting, and cognitive biases are often exponentially increased in group settings. One particularly large problem is known as groupthink, where groups tend to coalesce around the opinions of a powerful leader.

SWOT and similar strategic assessments give a false sense of comfort and security to business leaders who use them. These comforting techniques result in appalling oversights that ruin profitable businesses.

By now, you — like Beth — might feel pretty down on strategic planning. She certainly did, when we discussed these typical problems with strategic planning and strategic assessments.

Defend Your Future Through Effective Strategic Planning

Fortunately, there’s a much more effective way to approach strategic planning and assessment.

Rather than making a simple strategic plan, you focus on assessing potential threats and opportunities and building them into your plan. You emphasize making your plan flexible and resilient, able to handle unanticipated developments that you didn’t consider when you made the original plan. You also work to counteract the typical cognitive biases that cause your plans to go astray.

An easy way to do so involves using a technique I developed called “Defend Your Future.” This technique allows you to get the benefits of strategic planning — confidence, clarity, certainty — without the failures, risks, and problems accompanying typical strategic planning and assessments.

It’s informed by extensive cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics research on defeating cognitive biases and making the most profitable decisions. I refined it in over two decades of consulting and coaching for leaders at mid-size and large companies and nonprofits. By using this method, you can tap into both my business expertise and my knowledge of groundbreaking scholarship, without straining your budget to hire me.

The benefits from this technique don’t come from a perfect forecast of the future; beyond a couple of years, such forecasting is like relying on a dart-throwing chimpanzee, as I mentioned earlier. They stem instead from knowing you’ve done your best to make yourself and your organization as safe, secure, and stable as you reasonably could with the information and resources you have available. No one could ask for more.

Beth perked up as we talked about the “Defend Your Future” technique. She definitely wanted to protect her organization from threats and position it to seize opportunities in a flexible and resilient manner. As we talked further and I shared the details of this approach, she grew more and more excited, realizing it would have addressed the vast majority of the problems with her old strategic plan.

She still had some skepticism about strategic planning due to her bad experience in the past; as the saying goes, “once bitten, twice shy.” Nonetheless, she had confidence in my ability due to a successful culture shift I oversaw to improve collaboration between doctors and nurses in a hospital her company managed.

While I provide guidance to my coaching and consulting clients when I support them in doing this technique, you may not have anyone on hand with the expertise needed to help you through this technique. If you don’t, I recommend you learn about research-based techniques to perceive clearly cognitive biases and to understand the principles behind them. Then, you’ll need to assess the ones most strongly impacting your workplace, and learn methods to defeat these mental blindspots most powerfully impacting your career and business, as well as your relationships, professional and personal alike.

Likewise, you will gain from integrating structured decision-making techniques into your toolkit, whether for quick everyday decisions, for moderately important choices that substantially impact your bottom line, and for decisions that are either critically important or highly complex or both. You’ll also need to know how to avoid failure and maximize success in implementing decisions and managing projects and processes. Finally, apart from structured techniques, you’ll find invaluable gaining habits and skills of mind to notice when cognitive biases are about to ruin your day and prevent this outcome.

Given that the “Defend Your Future” technique is meant to shape your overarching strategy, you’ll find yourself using these more targeted techniques and mental skills for components of the strategic plan you’ll eventually develop. “Defend Your Future” is a good fit either for a team or an individual. You can use it to develop a strategy for your personal career, your business or other organization, your department in a larger organization, your physical and/or mental health, your civic engagement, your relationships, and other areas of personal and professional growth

10 Steps to Truly Effective Strategic Planning

Step 1: Scope and Strategic Goals

Decide on the scope and the strategic goals of the activity that you will evaluate, as well as the timeline, anywhere from 6 months to 5 years. Remember that your forecasting will deteriorate the further out you go as you make longer-term plans, so add extra resources, flexibility, and resilience if you have a longer projected timeline. For the same reason, make your strategic goals less specific and concrete if you have a longer time horizon.

Step 2: Gather

Gather the people relevant to the activity that is being evaluated in the room, or, if there are too many to have in a group, representatives of the stakeholders (a good number is six, and not more than ten people to ensure a manageable discussion). Make sure the people in the room have the most expertise in the activity being evaluated, rather than simply gathering the higher-ups. The goal is to give input on various attributes of a vision of the future and then address any potential problems and opportunities uncovered.

At the same time, have some people with the power to make and commit to the decisions that will be reached during the exercise. Consider recruiting an independent facilitator who is not part of the team to help guide the exercise.

If you are making the decision by yourself as a business professional (for example, a solopreneur deciding on your marketing strategy for the next year), write out a list of various stakeholders who are relevant to the project. This may reflect competing goals within your own project if you are a sole decision-maker.

Step 3: Explain

Explain the exercise to everyone by describing all the steps, so that all participants are on the same page about the process.

Step 4: Your Anticipated Future

Consider what the future would look like if everything goes as you intuitively anticipate and how many resources it would require.

As I discussed this step with Beth, she recognized that her leadership team and the other consulting firm seven years ago only went up to this step, skipping the rest of the critical steps.

Step 5: Potential Internal Problems

Now, consider what the future would look like if there were unanticipated problems internal to the business activity that seriously undermined the expected vision of the future. Write out what kind of possible problems might arise, including low-probability ones. Also lay out the kind and amount of resources (money, time, social capital) that might be needed to address these problems in alternative visions of the future.

Evaluate the likelihood of each problem in percentage terms and multiply the likelihood by the number of resources needed to address the problem. Try to convert the resources into money if possible in order to have a single unit of measurement.

Next, consider what you can do to address the internal problems in advance, and write out how much you anticipate these steps might cost. Finally, add up all the extra resources that may be needed due to the various possible internal problems and all the steps you committed to taking to address them in advance.

If you are planning this out as a group, first have everyone suggest problems ANONYMOUSLY, then discuss each scenario as a group, come up with resource amounts ANONYMOUSLY, and finally average out the differences between amounts.

Beth asked me about the anonymity; I explained that the purpose stemmed both from the goals of addressing groupthink, and also of permitting people to share potentially unpopular and even politically dangerous points of view. She recalled how she heard some rumors in her company’s grapevine that some people weren’t thrilled about the optimism of the strategic plan; she dismissed the rumors because no one brought up these points publicly. With this in mind, she conceded the usefulness of anonymity.

Step 6: Potential External Problems

Complete the previous step for potential problems external to the business activity.

Beth really wished that the strategic plan seven years ago had this section, as it would have greatly increased the likelihood of a more realistic assessment.

Step 7: Potential Opportunities, Internal and External

Go on to consider what your anticipated plan would look like if unexpected opportunities opened up; most will be external, but consider internal ones as well. Next, consider the likelihood of each scenario and the number of resources you would need to take advantage of this opportunity. Try to convert the resources into money if possible, for the benefit of a single unit of measurement.

Consider what steps you can take in advance to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and write out how much you anticipate these steps might cost. In the end, add up all the extra resources that may be needed due to unexpected opportunities and all the steps you committed to budgeting to take advantage of these potential opportunities.

If you are planning this out as a group, first have everyone suggest opportunities ANONYMOUSLY, discuss each scenario as a group, come up with resource amounts ANONYMOUSLY, then average out the differences.

Beth really wished her team had considered this in the original plan. Due to some of the same pressures faced by her company, the nation’s second-largest nursing home chain went bankrupt in 2018, resulting in sales of many facilities and other valuable assets, along with great opportunities to hire top-notch staff. If Beth’s company had reserved some resources instead of investing them into trying to build new facilities of its own — a number of which had to be canceled — they could have gotten valuable properties and human resources at fire-sale prices.

Step 8: Check for Cognitive Biases

Check for potential cognitive biases that are relevant to you personally or to the organization as a whole and adjust the resources and plans to address such errors. I recommend you check for all of the 30 most dangerous mental blindspots in professional settings found in the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace. If you don’t have the opportunity to do so, make sure to at least check for loss aversion, status quo bias, confirmation bias, attentional bias, overconfidence, optimism bias, pessimism bias, and halo and horns effects.

If you are planning this out as a team, discuss the cognitive biases, then come up with resource amount adjustments ANONYMOUSLY, then average out the differences.

Step 9: Account for Unknown Unknowns (Black Swans)

To account for unknown unknowns — also called black swans — add 40 percent to the resources you anticipate. Also, consider ways to make your plans more flexible and secure than you intuitively feel is needed.

Initially surprised by the 40 percent figure, Beth realized the value of this step when we discussed the collapse of the 2008 housing bubble and the Great Recession, and prior to that, the dotcom boom and bust. Given the political turbulence surrounding healthcare, reserving 40 percent made sense to her.

Step 10: Communicate and Take Next Steps

Communicate effectively to organizational stakeholders about the additional resources needed. Then, take the next steps that were decided on during this exercise to address unanticipated problems and take advantage of opportunities by improving your plans and reserving resources.

Conclusion

By the end of our discussion, Beth determined that she and her leadership team needed to do this exercise for the next three years; she didn’t want to do a longer plan, due to the political instability associated with healthcare at the time we had the discussion in the spring of 2019. She was very happy with the outcome after it was completed during a weekend strategic retreat in early summer 2019. She felt confident it would be critical to addressing the threats and seizing the opportunities for her company, along with boosting resilience and flexibility.

You should use the “Defend Your Future” technique for any medium or long-term planning you do for your organization or your career. To help you remember the technique, you can use this decision aid.

Key Takeaway

Questions to Consider (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• What problems did you experience in the past with strategic planning that the “Defend Your Future” technique might address? How might it address them?
• In what areas might the “Defend Your Future” technique most benefit your organization? What about your career?
• What next steps can you take to bring it most effectively to your team and integrate it into your organization’s processes? What about into your personal career plans?

Image Credit: Max Pixel/Nikon D7100

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. His expertise and passion is using pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience to develop the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (2020). Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere.

His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training experience as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. Its hundreds of clients, mid-size and large companies and nonprofits, span North America, Europe, and Australia, and include Aflac, IBM, Honda, Wells Fargo, and the World Wildlife Fund. His expertise also stems from his research background as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University. He published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

He lives in Columbus, OH, and to avoid disaster in his personal life makes sure to spend ample time with his wife. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on August 7, 2019.

You Shouldn’t Trust Your Gut as a Decision Maker: Here’s Why

The biggest falsehood in business leadership and career advice may also be the most repeated: “go with your gut.” Surely you heard this advice often, as well as some variations of that phrase, such as “trust your instincts,” “be authentic,” “listen to your heart,” or “follow your intuition” as a decision maker.

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:

And if you like audio, here’s a podcast based on the blog:

Or simply read onward!

I’m deeply frustrated, saddened, and angered when I see highly profitable companies, top-notch careers, and great business relationships devastated because someone bought into the toxic advice of going with their gut. When someone returns home from some guru’s fire-walking seminar and starts to behave like their “authentic self” they are simply shooting themselves — and their business — in the foot.

Our authentic selves are adapted for the ancient savanna, not the modern business world. Following our intuitions can lead to terrible decisions in today’s professional environment. For the sake of our bottom lines, we need to avoid following our primitive instincts and instead be civilized about how we address the inherently flawed nature of our minds.

Think about these questions:

• What percent of projects in your company suffer from cost overruns?
• When was the last time a leader in your company resisted needed changes?
• How often are people in your team overconfident about the quality of their decisions?
• What proportion of plans in your workplace overemphasizes smaller short-term gains over larger long-term ones?
• How frequently do your people express reluctance to have difficult conversations over potentially serious issues?

All of these and many other problems come from following our gut reactions.

Any of these mistakes, if repeated frequently enough, can and do result in disasters for successful companies and bring down high-flying careers, especially when facing smart competitors who educate themselves on how to avoid such problems. By contrast, if you’re the one to learn about and defend yourself from these errors, you can take advantage of rivals who go with their guts and make devastating mistakes, enabling you to gain a serious competitive edge.

Business Strategic Assessments Are Deeply Flawed

Tragically, current business strategic assessments meant to address the weaknesses of human nature through structures and planning are themselves deeply flawed. Take the most popular of them, SWOT, where a group of business leaders tries to figure out the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats facing their business. SWOT assessments usually fail to account for the dangerous judgment errors we make due to how our brains are wired.

It’s particularly problematic that SWOT is almost always performed in a group setting, and mental blindspots are often exponentially increased in group settings. One particularly large problem is known as groupthink, where groups tend to coalesce around the opinions of a powerful leader.

SWOT and similar strategic assessments give a false sense of comfort and security to business leaders who use them. These comforting techniques result in appalling oversights that ruin profitable businesses.

Sports is Ahead of Business

Surprisingly, sports such as baseball have pulled ahead of the vast majority of business in recognizing the value of avoiding gut reactions, as popularized by the 2011 film Moneyball. The movie shows the 2002 season of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, which had a very limited budget for players that year. Its general manager, Billy Beane, adopted a very unorthodox approach. He relied on quantitative data and statistics to choose players, rather than the traditional method of trusting the intuitions of the team’s scouts.

In other words, he used his head rather than his gut. He hired a series of players undervalued by all other teams that were using old-school evaluation methods. As a result, the Oakland Athletics won a record-breaking 20 games in a row.

Other teams have since adopted the same approach. Statistics are increasingly dominant over gut reactions in decision-making on players, as well as what plays to make. Reliance on quantitative data has been growing in popularity in baseball and other sports as well. For example, punting in football is increasingly going out of style because of evidence-based approaches showing that statistically speaking, punting is a bad idea, despite gut reactions suggesting that punting works well.

How much would you give to introduce a similarly revolutionary innovation in your business that rewards you with record-breaking growth 20 quarters in a row? You’ll score a home run by avoiding trusting your gut and going with your head instead.

Why Do You Always Hear “Follow Your Gut”?

If our intuitions are such a bad match for the modern world, why is the advice to “go with your gut” so widespread? Because trusting our instincts feels naturally comfortable to us. We tend to choose what’s comfortable rather than what’s true or good for us, even in the face of very strong evidence suggesting otherwise.

Sadly, gurus who tell people what they want to hear and what makes them comfortable get paid the big bucks, while experts who speak uncomfortable truths usually get ignored. What would you intuitively rather hear: someone describing delicious, delightful, delectable dozen donuts or someone sharing about how to maintain your physical fitness?

Can’t you just imagine those dozen donuts: chocolate glazed, Boston Creme, strawberry jelly, custard, chocolate sprinkles, lemon creme? Yum! I’m making myself hungry. Better get some donuts.

Ok, I’m done. Back to the manifesto.

“Go with your gut” is the equivalent of the dozen donuts dessert of business advice.

Sure, the box of dozen donuts contain more calories than we should eat in a whole day. However, our gut wants the donuts instead of the healthy but less intuitively appealing fruit platter of not going with our intuitions. The choice that is most appealing to your gut is often the worst decision for your bottom line, just like the donuts are much more intuitively desirable than a fruit tray, but are the worst choice for your waistline.

Too often, we choose an attractive dessert (or a business option) that we later regret (myself included).

In the ancient savanna, it was critical for us to eat as much sugar as possible to survive. Our gut reactions still pull us to do so, despite the harm caused by eating too many donuts in our modern environment.

Simply knowing about it is unfortunately insufficient protection. I’ll honestly admit that, although I’ve definitely gotten much better at making wiser decisions — in my eating, business, and other life areas — using science-based decision-making strategies, cheesecake is still my Achilles heel.

At its core, making a business decision based on gut reactions comes from the same impulse as eating donuts instead of fruit. Unfortunately, bad business decisions might have much more devastating consequences than eating a donut.

Fortunately, we have extensive research-based public messages about the need to restrain our instincts around eating for the sake of our personal health. Yet we have only recently begun discovering and popularizing research on managing our intuitions around business decision-making to ensure the health of our businesses and our careers.

But I Make Good Gut Decisions!

At this point you might be telling yourself that you’ve had a lot of success following your gut in making good decisions. Unfortunately, the term “gut reaction” is used very broadly in business contexts to refer to all sorts of internal impulses. This excessively fuzzy concept spans both very useful and trustworthy habits you’ve developed for making quality decisions on the job, as well as those dangerous intuitions and instincts from our ancestral savanna heritage.

For example, you might have learned the counterintuitive behaviors of delegating tasks effectively and avoiding micromanaging as a leader. Perhaps you can glance quickly at a department’s profit and loss statement and recognize what needs to be addressed. Maybe you can hear a sales pitch and immediately evaluate whether it’s a good fit for your needs.

Your decisions in these areas might be quick, intuitive, and very accurate. You may feel like you’re going with your gut. However, all of these correct choices come from acquired skills. You had to learn to do the right thing rather than simply trust your instincts, just like you learned to drive a car. You can now do so automatically, making good decisions on the road.

You wouldn’t let someone drive without taking a course and passing a license exam, would you? Yet business leaders don’t go through a decision-making course to get a “decision-making license” before gaining positions of authority as decision makers. They simply observe other leaders making decisions and learn on the job, following both good and bad examples and relying on their instincts.

Sadly, our minds can’t tell the difference between our natural, primitive, and often dangerous instincts and our learned, civilized, and effective decision-making impulses. It can feel just as intuitive and comfortable to grab another donut as to decide which sales pitch to consider and which to ignore.

That’s why business leaders should never simply trust their instincts and intuitions and go with their gut. Instead, you should evaluate whether this internal impulse comes from a place of extensive experience where you learned to make decisions that turned out to be correct the large majority of the time; if so, trust that instinct. If it comes from elsewhere — such as “this just doesn’t feel right” or “this just feels right” — the gut reaction might be one of the many dangerous judgment errors we all make as human beings. Verify with your head whether this gut reaction points to an actual business threat or opportunity, instead of simply going with your heart and following your instincts on a business decision.

Even in cases where you think you can rely on your intuition, it’s best to use your instincts as just a warning sign of potential danger and evaluate the situation analytically. For example, the person with whom you have a long business relationship might have just gotten some bad news about their family, and their demeanor caused your instincts to misread the situation.

What about market changes? One of the biggest problems that brings down successful companies and careers is failing to notice important shifts in market conditions. In those cases, your extensive experience in the market is actually really, really bad. You’ll find yourself applying old, trusted intuitions in a different environment, like a fish out of water. It will cause you to miss crucial new threats and profitable opportunities and may bring you ruin as more nimble competitors — either other companies or younger professionals — adapt to the changes much quicker.

How We Really Think (and Feel)

Researchers have discovered that we have, roughly speaking, two systems that determine our mental processes. It’s not the old Freudian model of the id, the ego, and the superego, which studies show to be outdated. These two systems have various names: System 1 and 2, fast thinking and slow thinking, the low road and the high road. For my money, “autopilot system” and “intentional system” describe them most clearly.

The autopilot system corresponds to our emotions and intuitions. This system evolved to help us survive in the ancestral savanna environment and mostly relies on the amygdala, the older part of the brain. It guides our daily habits, helps us make snap decisions, and reacts instantly to dangerous life-and-death situations.

The snap judgments resulting from intuitions and emotions usually feel “true” and “right” precisely because they are fast and powerful. We feel very comfortable when we go with them. Decisions arising from our gut reactions are indeed often right in those situations that resemble the ancient savanna.

Unfortunately, in too many cases they’re wrong. Our modern environment — in business and other life areas — have many elements that are unlike the savanna. With growing technological disruption, ranging from teleconferences to social media, the office of the future will look even less like our ancestral environment. The autopilot system will therefore increasingly lead us to make disastrous decisions, in systematic and predictable ways.

The intentional system, by contrast, reflects rational and analytical thinking. It centers around the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that evolved more recently. This thinking system helps us handle more complex mental activities, such as managing individual and group relationships, logical reasoning, abstract thinking, evaluating probabilities, and learning new information, skills, and habits.

While the automatic system requires no conscious effort to function, using the intentional system requires a deliberate effort to and is mentally tiring. Fortunately, with enough motivation and appropriate training, you can learn to turn on the intentional system in situations where the autopilot system is prone to make systematic and predictable errors.

Here’s a quick visual comparison of the two systems:

We tend to think of ourselves as rational thinkers, usually using the intentional system. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

The autopilot system is by far the more powerful of the two systems, determining 80–90 percent of what we do, think, feel, and decide.

Our emotions often overwhelm our reason. Moreover, our intuition and habits dominate the majority of our lives. We’re usually in autopilot mode.

That’s not a bad thing at all, as it would be mentally exhausting to think through our every action and decision. However, it’s bad when this system makes the same errors, again and again.

Fortunately, you can use your intentional system to interrupt these errors. You can change your automatic thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns to avoid mental blindspots.

It’s crucial to recognize that these two systems of thinking are counterintuitive. They don’t align with our conscious self-perception.

Your mind feels like a cohesive whole. Unfortunately, this self-perception is simply a comfortable myth that helps you make it through the day. There is no actual “there” there; your sense of self is a construct that results from multiple complex mental processes within the autopilot and intentional system.

When I first found that out, it blew my mind (every part of it). It takes a bit of time to incorporate this realization into your mental model of yourself and others, in other words how you perceive your mind to work. Bottom-line is that you’re not who you think you are.

The Art and Science of Avoiding Dangerous Judgment Errors

Studies from behavioral economics, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and related fields reveal the many types of dangerous judgment errors — what scholars term cognitive biases — that we make in business and other areas.

Many of these systematic and predictable judgment errors come from our evolutionary heritage. They helped us survive in the savanna environment, such as overreacting to the presence of a perceived threat. It proved more helpful for our survival to jump at 100 shadows than fail to jump at one saber-toothed tiger.

We are the descendants of those people evolutionarily selected for jumping at shadows. Of course, most cognitive biases do not serve us well in our modern environment, just like many mental habits we learned as children don’t serve us well as adults. Yet, we still retain many of these comforting habits, even if they harm us now.

Other reasons for cognitive biases result from inherent limitations in our mental processing capacities, such as our difficulty keeping track of many varied data points. This challenge results in formulas usually outperforming experts in typical situations, such as evaluating the credit worthiness of loan applicants. The best systems combine formulas for typical situations with expert analysis of outliers.

Most cognitive biases result from mistakes made by going with our gut reactions, meaning autopilot system errors. More rarely, cognitive biases are associated with intentional system errors.

Do you know someone who believes they don’t make errors? That belief is in itself one of the most dangerous cognitive biases, called the bias blind spot, which tends to impact successful people the most. As the Bible says in Proverbs 16:18, “pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

Most importantly, the last few years have witnessed cutting-edge findings in debiasing — the practice of reducing or eliminating cognitive biases — that provide us with many new techniques to address dangerous judgment errors in our professional lives.

However, popularizing this research is very difficult, at least in business contexts.

Unscrupulous actors in the food industry are trying to feed us as many empty calories as they can for the sake of profit despite the tragic consequences to our health, and oppose health research showing the dangers of eating such unhealthy food. Similarly, some very powerful business gurus have built their careers out of claims that we should follow our gut regardless of the catastrophic consequences to our profits. Fearing for their own livelihoods, they rail against any hint of hard-nosed research-based business advice about distrusting our intuitions.

I hope you’d fire your personal trainer if they told you to eat a box of donuts instead of fruit. Sadly, no business consultant, coach, speaker, author, or other expert is currently afraid of being fired for telling you to follow your gut.

Research shows that in 46 percent of the 423 US companies with assets of over $500 million that filed for bankruptcy between 1981 and 2007, the causes of the bankruptcy could have been completely avoided if the leaders had made wiser judgments (read: where the leaders did not follow their guts). In many of the remaining 53 percent, better decisions would have substantially reduced the problems and likely prevented bankruptcy.

That applies even more so to small and mid-size businesses, which have fewer resources and thus less room for errors and whose leadership teams have less experience. Indeed, about half of all new businesses close their doors in five years. Such closures stem largely from judgment errors by their founders. Isn’t it terrible that poor strategic leadership decision-making is responsible for so many business disasters, yet neither these leaders nor their followers received professional development in making decisions, despite the abundance of evidence that it’s easy to improve one’s judgment skills?

That’s why I wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. The book provides extensive evidence for all the points I made above, combining cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics with pragmatic business case studies drawn from my experience of over 20 years consulting, coaching, speaking, and training leaders on avoiding disasters and maximizing success by making the best decisions. I researched this topic for over 15 years in academia, including as a professor in Ohio State University’s Decision Sciences Collaborative, and before that as a Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Eventually, I shifted away from academia to devote my full-time efforts to empowering business leaders to avoid disasters as a best-selling author and CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts.

Besides my concern with the disastrous impact of cognitive biases in business, I also seek to help people address cognitive biases in other aspects of their lives. Thus, I wrote The Truth-Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide, on defeating dangerous judgment errors in all life areas. In addition, I authored The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships, specifically focusing on addressing these mental blindspots in professional and personal relationships.

Why I Care

My deep passion about this topic, as well as a streak of determination (some might say stubbornness) makes me willing to be a maverick and take on entrenched interests in pushing for a counterintuitive, research-based, data-driven paradigm shift to improve business health. This passion is personal.

As a kid, my dad told me with utmost conviction and absolutely no reservation to “go with your gut.” I ended up making some really bad decisions in my professional activities, for instance wasting several years of my life pursuing a medical career. I also watched him make some terrible choices that gravely harmed my family as he followed his gut, such as hiding some of his salary from my mom for several years. After she discovered this and several other financial secrets he kept, her trust in him was broken, which was one of the major factors leading to their later prolonged separation; fortunately, they eventually reconciled, but the lack of trust can never be fully repaired.

My conviction that the omnipresent advice to “follow your gut” was hollow grew only stronger as I came of age during the dotcom boom and bust and the fraudulent accounting scandals around the turn of the millennium. Seeing prominent business leaders blow through hundreds of millions in online-based businesses without effective revenue streams — Webvan, Boo.com, Pets.com — was sobering, especially as I saw the hype that convinced investors to follow their intuitions and put all that money into dotcoms.

Likewise, it seemed almost unreal to learn at around the same time of how the top executives of Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom used illegal accounting practices to scam investors after their companies lost a lot of money as part of the dotcom bust. Most business leaders behaved ethically and admitted their losses honestly, but these leaders chose the path of lies.

They surely knew that their crimes would inevitably be discovered eventually, leading to ruined reputations and long jail sentences. The best explanation for their seemingly irrational behavior comes from their willingness to follow their gut, to forgo rational thinking for short-term but ultimately hollow rewards — the box of donuts.

It’s not like they needed the money, they had plenty already. They used money mainly to keep score and improve their social status. Their increasingly-desperate lies and corrupt financial machinations stemmed from their fear of being seen as failures in the eyes of their peers.

From my intimate conversations with business leaders who I coached and for whom I consulted, I know that this fear is one of their most powerful drivers. Many of them have their identity and sense of social status deeply invested into being winners in the world of business. Being seen as losers — even if they retained a very comfortable sum of money in their bank account — would be an intolerable blow to their sense of self.

Have you ever felt that way? Can you empathize with them? What would it be like for you if your peers saw you as a loser?

Imagine their side glances when they think you’re not looking, what they would say about you behind your back, how they are shaking their head when they think about how great you used to be and how far you fell. Can you imagine yourself doing something you wouldn’t otherwise do to prevent that situation?

This drive to win stems from the ancestral savanna instinct to climb to the top of the tribal social hierarchy and remains one of our most potent motivators. It does much good when harnessed to positive social outcomes, but has the potential to cause a great deal of damage, as with the case of the accounting scandals and consequent bankruptcies.

It was really depressing for me to read the accounts of employees, stockholders, and communities devastated by these events. I was particularly upset by cases such as Enron, where the corporate leaders encouraged their employees to buy stocks while themselves selling shares as the company danced on the brink of disaster.

As someone with an ethical code of utilitarianism — desiring the most good for the greatest number — I felt a calling to reduce suffering and improve well-being through helping leaders avoid dangerous judgment errors. I recognized that by reaching leaders, I bring a great deal of value through the impact these leaders make on others. That’s why I decided to dedicate my life to empowering leaders to fight mental blindspots and make the best decisions possible, for the sake of themselves, their organizations, and our society as a whole.

How to Prevent Business Disasters in the Workplace

So how do you defeat these dangerous judgment errors?

First, you need to evaluate where and how they may be harming you, your team, and your organization. By seeing the pain they are causing you, and getting others to see this pain, you will both know what specific problem areas to focus on and how many resources to invest into fighting cognitive biases.

The next easy step is to adapt structured decision-making processes for making quick day-to-day choices, for moderately important ones, and for major and/or complex decisions. You’ll also benefit greatly from using a structured process to avoid failure and maximize success when you implement significant decisions. Another technique you’ll need is an effective method of planning your strategy for the next several months or years that doesn’t suffer from the typical problems of SWOT and other strategic assessment and planning tools. It’s very simple to make a decision — by yourself, together with your team, or on an organizational level — to integrate these methods into all of your decisions.

These structured decision-making and decision-implementing methods are critical to protecting you and your team from decision disasters when you have time to use them and recognize their necessity. However, you — and they — also need to develop mastery in the 12 mental skills of defeating cognitive biases. These abilities will enable you to:

• Predict when you or someone else might fall for cognitive biases and prevent that problem from happening
• Recognize immediately when dangerous judgment errors are undermining the situation at hand, even if you didn’t predict it beforehand
• Take effective steps in the moment, even when you don’t have time to use even the most brief structured decision-making process, to protect yourself or others from these biases
• Teach others how to protect themselves from mental blindspots

By combining the assessment, the structured decision-making and implementation, and the 12 mental skills, you’ll optimize your ability to win over dangerous judgment errors in business. For over twenty years, my consulting and coaching clients — from Fortune 500 companies to midsize businesses and nonprofits — benefited greatly from these and other strategies described in this book. Now, you can do so as well, and join the wise decision maker movement.

Conclusion: Join the Wise Decision Maker Movement

Many high-flying professionals — including top business leaders — flinch away from learning about dangerous judgment errors because doing so can be hard and unpleasant. It’s counterintuitive and takes them outside the comfort zone of going with their gut. It goes against the typical structures and incentives in teams and organizations that usually favor trusting intuition and being authentic.

Moreover, many — not all — of the most successful leaders and professionals believe themselves to be perfect decision makers. After all, they’ve succeeded so far!

Unfortunately, the greatest disasters happen to those who have previously been most successful. Such tragedies usually occur because these successful people continue to use what worked for them in the past in new contexts where previous methods no longer apply.

Another common problem for them involves getting cut off from previous trusted sources of key information as they advance in their careers, resulting in more and more distortions that result in worse and worse judgments. This tendency helps explain the many examples of highly competent and successful business leaders who steered their companies and careers into destruction.

If you learn about these judgment errors, and especially take the necessary steps to address them, you’re in a vastly privileged position compared to these business leaders and any other professionals not aware of the dangers of typical judgment errors in the workplace. If you and your organization can avoid even a fraction of the dangerous judgment errors which cause us decision disasters because we’re adapted for the ancient savanna and not the modern businesses environment, you’ve set yourself on the path to success.

You’ll greatly reduce suffering not only for yourself, but also those around you if you choose to share these strategies with those professional colleagues you care about. So please spread this paradigm shift to your team and professional contact network, at least those you don’t want to see suffer from business disasters.

My personal code of ethics — minimizing suffering and improving well-being — impels me to spread this message as widely as possible. I invite you to join me in doing so, in a movement of fellow decision makers who aspire to make the wisest possible decisions and help others who matter to them do so as well. That’s what the wise decision maker movement is all about.

You’ll find that some of those you try to help are resistant at first, due to the unfortunate advice of prominent business gurus who encourage their followers to trust their guts. Keep at it, demonstrating why savanna-adapted intuitions are a horrible guide for the modern business environment. You can be confident they will thank you for your persistence eventually.

Let me be clear: like a broken clock that’s right twice a day, gut reactions will sometimes be right. However, you should never go with your gut, due to the overwhelming number of scenarios where it misfires in the current business environment.

If you feel uncomfortable with a situation, don’t just rely on your instincts and go with your autopilot system. Instead, turn on the intentional system to analyze what’s going on. Evaluate whether any cognitive biases might be impacting you and use one or more science-based strategies that have proven effective to address judgment errors.

It’s easy to read this article and the linked pieces. The harder task is the challenging reflection required to protect yourself and your business from judgment errors. Even more difficult: integrating what you’ve learned into your day-to-day work, where the rubber meets the road, and empowering others to do so as part of the wise decision maker movement.

So what kind of story do you want to tell about yourself three months from now? Do you want to be the person that reads a paradigm-shifting manifesto and linked articles, but regrets that work got away from you and you let these strategies slip away, with you and those you care about suffering the disasters that followed? Alternatively, do you want to tell the story that you read these paradigm-shifting pieces, did all the hard work needed to adapt the critically important new information into your professional toolbox, and invested the effort to integrate these strategies into your work to take your and your team’s performance to the next level and leave the competition in the dust?

Which of these stories reflects the kind of leader you want to be and the future in which you want to live? The choice is yours.

If you’re the second type of leader, I can promise you’ll see three major benefits.

• First, you’ll stand head and shoulders above the competition by defending yourself from numerous potential threats and being optimally prepared to take advantage of unexpected opportunities, thus maximizing your bottom line.
• Second, you can feel safe and confident, sleeping soundly at night knowing that by avoiding dangerous decisions you will automatically exceed expectations for your clients, colleagues, vendors, investors, and any other internal and external stakeholders.
• Third, you’ll have much less frustration, stress, and anxiety in your day-to-day work because of your ability to have outstanding business relationships inside and outside your organization.

Those you care about, to whom you spread this information as part of the wise decision maker movement, will get similar benefits.

If you remember only one thing from reading this piece, please recall that the option that feels most comfortable to your gut is often the worst decision for your bottom line.

In our technologically disrupted environment, the future is never going to be like today. We have to adapt constantly to an increasingly-changing environment to ensure the success of our business and our careers. That ever-intensifying pace of change means our gut reactions will be less and less applicable in the future. Relying on our autopilot system will lead us to crash and burn.

The ones who survive and flourish in the world of tomorrow will recognize this paradigm shift. They will adopt counterintuitive, uncomfortable, and highly profitable techniques to avoid business disasters and make the best decisions by relying on their intentional system to address the systematic and predictable errors we all tend to make. It is my fervent hope that you join us, minimizing suffering and maximizing wellbeing for you, your team, and everyone with whom you share about this paradigm shift as part of the broader wise decision maker movement.

I wish you the wisest decisions, my friends!

Key Takeaway

The choice that feels most comfortable to your gut is often the worst decision for your bottom line. To be a truly wise decision maker, you have to adopt counterintuitive, uncomfortable, but highly profitable techniques to avoid business disasters by making the best decisions. ---> Click to Tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• Where has going with your gut caused you or others in your professional network or organization problems in the past?
• What obstacles do you foresee with adopting the counterintuitive, uncomfortable, and highly profitable approach of making the best decisions by not going with your gut?
• What are the next steps you can take to integrate this information into your own work, into your team, and into your organization?

Image Credit: Disaster Avoidance Experts and Public Domain Pictures/Petr Kratochvil

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. His expertise and passion is using pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience to develop the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (2020). Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles and 350 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere.

His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training experience as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. Its hundreds of clients, mid-size and large companies and nonprofits, span North America, Europe, and Australia, and include Aflac, IBM, Honda, Wells Fargo, and the World Wildlife Fund. His expertise also stems from his research background as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University. He published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

He lives in Columbus, OH, and to avoid disaster in his personal life makes sure to spend ample time with his wife. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Facebook, YouTube, RSS, and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on July 26, 2019.

Women and men around the country will be choosing a gift for their sweetheart for this Valentine’s Day. Yet their shopping decisions will be driven by gendered decision-making imperatives that powerfully influence their buying choices. They will both make bad decisions unless they take proactive steps to address problematic gender-based decision-making styles.  

How We Make Our Buying Decisions.

Neither men nor women will realize how their own gender drives their shopping decisions. We tend to think that we’re rational decision makers and are always capable of making the wisest choice. However, research shows that decisions stem primarily from our feelings: our gut reactions and intuitions.

After deciding with our emotions, we then backtrack and rationalize our decisions. We justify the decision to ourselves after the fact. Even worse, our gut reactions are not adapted for the modern world, but for the savanna environment. Scholars use the term “cognitive biases” for the faulty wiring in our minds that causes us to make poor decisions. Research has found more than 100 cognitive biases that cause us to make poor decisions. These mental blindspots will cause both men and women to make bad decisions in their Valentine’s Day shopping, but in different ways.

Sexed Buying Decisions

You probably won’t find it surprising that research shows men are more risk blind than women. It’s also intriguing that according to research, moderate stressors cause men to become worse at assessing risks. However, the same levels of stress have been found to boost women’s abilities to assess risk and rewards. Similar findings have  been found to be relevant to anxiety, where a moderate level of anxiety caused men, but not women, to take bad risks. That’s why many whose significant other identifies as a man might find themselves unpleasantly surprised on Valentine’s day.

Gut reactions help explain why females take fewer risks compared to males: women expect less enjoyment and have a greater expectation of an unfavorable outcome. So if your significant other identifies as a woman, don’t be surprised if you get a safer, more conservative gift.

In a different but related aspect of decision making, studies have shown that, on average, men feel less concerned about ethical behavior compared to women. For example, a woman is less likely to regard behavior in grey areas of information privacy as ethical than a man would. Women have  stronger intentions to act ethically than men. A woman is more likely to act more ethically than a man in relationships, which is part of a broader tendency of women to care more about relationships than men. That’s part of why women are more likely to remember about Valentine’s Day, anniversaries, and birthdays than men.

These different approaches explain why male shoppers have a tendency to look for a product that is “good enough.” By contrast, women would rather look for the perfect product, making that extra effort to ensure they are getting the best. So women’s Valentine’s Day gifts will tend to be more thoughtful and appropriate than men’s gifts.

It's intriguing that research has shown similar patterns of shopping behavior in other cultures. Keeping the said similarities in mind, we can be confident that our genes, rather than our cultural upbringing, are in large part responsible for gender differences in shopping styles.

Optimizing Buying Decisions for Men and Women

Due to particular decision-making styles, both men and women can make poor shopping decisions. For example, men take too many risks and purchase the first thing they perceive as good enough, even if it does not turn out to be so. Women make bad shopping decisions as well, as they take too long hunting for bargains, wasting their time.

Fortunately we can use research-based strategies to notice cognitive biases and overcome these mental blindspots.

This Valentine’s Day, it would be beneficial to women to act a bit more like men when shopping, by taking less time even when they feel driven to go the extra mile and looking for a “good enough” present instead of the perfect one. And live a little by taking a risk with a risque gift.

Men would make wiser decisions if they worked more to emulate women, by going beyong what their gut reactions tell them. Try harder to look for a better gift rather than settling on the first thing you find that seems like it won’t result in you sleeping on the couch. Tone down the risque nature of your impulses and make it less surprising than you feel you should.

Research has been done about resisting gender preferences when shopping. People who have a more egalitarian gender attitude can behave like the other gender while making shopping decisions.

The important thing is to know when you’re probably going to make a bad decision. Train yourself to notice when your gut reactions are about to push you into making those poor decisions. Then, go against your intuition so that you can adapt the pattern of the other gender, to avoid cognitive biases common to yours. Train yourself so that you can recognize when you’re about to make a bad shopping decision, then shop smarter despite what your gut is telling you, to make the best decisions this Valentine’s Day.

Key Takeaway

When it comes to shopping, men tend to take more risks, while women prefer to take their time to get the best possible deal. Both genders are prone to mistakes. However, you can train your mind to make the wisest shopping decisions this Valentine’s Day. --> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your thoughts in the comments section)  

• When was the last time you made a bad shopping decision?
• Is there anything in the article that will help you make better shopping choices?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: Pixabay/StockSnap —

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (Intentional Insights, 2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioural economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky.  and LinkedIn. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on February 13, 2020.

Care about your bottom line? Then you should preferably hire women rather than men.

This is true regardless of whether you factor in diversity considerations. Separately from the beneficial financial, social, and cultural impact of having a diverse workforce, hiring women over men makes dollars and sense. 

You might be surprised to hear someone who is a man say that. Well, don’t be. I always go with research-based findings from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics, even if the conclusions of these studies go against my own identity. 

And the research is clear. There’s no doubt that women - just because of their sex - are held back from career advancement compared to men. 

For instance, a study that examined managers working in 20 Fortune 500 companies found that men experienced faster career progress and received better salaries than women. That’s despite women doing all the right things needed for advancement: having an education similar to men, working in the same industries, not moving in and out of the workforce, and so on. 

Another study evaluated 69 female and 69 male executives in similar positions in their career.In comparison to men, women reported having to work harder to overcome a variety of barriers, such as being excluded from informal networks and getting less mentoring than men.

A third study looked at over 1000 MBA graduates from the same university to evaluate their career progress and salaries. Women reported experiencing discrimination much more frequently than men, and in fact, when controlling for work experience, women earned less than men.

I can go on, but you get the point. The glass ceiling is real: women face gender-based discrimination that prevents them from advancing as quickly as men, despite similar career experience, skills, and education.

When I give keynotes or trainings, I usually share such findings. What usually happens then is that male audience members frequently respond by coming up with explanations that do not involve any possibility of discrimination. As an example, they speak about women taking time off to take care of their families. I respond by noting that studies I cite that control for work experience – meaning time worked and the kind of positions held – still find that women earn less than men and make slower career progress. 

After highlighting this discrimination, I go into a broader discussion of implicit bias. That term refers to the unconscious - and unwarranted - associations and assumptions we make due to our gut reactions, intuitions, and instincts around people we perceive to belong or not belong to our group. 

Some of these are unduly positive. They result in a dangerous judgment error called the halo effect, where if we like one characteristic of an individual, usually because it’s something we share with that person, we make a too-positive evaluation of other aspects of that individual.

Other assumptions are excessively negative. They result in a mental blindspot called the horns effect. It’s the opposite of the halo effect: if we don’t like one aspect of another person, our intuition is to downgrade all of their other characteristics. 

The halo effect and horns effect are two out of over a hundred systematic patterns of mistakes that we make due to how our brains are wired. Researchers in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call them cognitive biases. Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these dangerous judgment errors, in your professional life, your relationships, or other life areas.

The first step to addressing these errors is to evaluate their consequences. Regarding gender differences in the workplace, it’s clear that men unconsciously prefer to mentor, network with, promote, and pay more to other males. 

To be fair, it’s important to acknowledge that women also do the same with other women. However, given that men dominate the positions of power in almost all organizations, the result of this natural and intuitive tendency in our society is for men to get ahead at the expense of equally or even better-qualified women. 

In my speeches, I always highlight that there’s no shame or blame in falling into these dangerous judgment errors if we’re unaware of them. After all, we’re only being human. This no-shame, no-blame approach decreases the intuitive defensiveness on the part of males and helps them hear the essence of the message.

So what should you do if you’re in a position to influence hiring and promotion? Recognize that, objectively speaking, women at the same career position, work experience, and salary levels as men needed to work harder to get to where they are to overcome the gender discrimination stemming from the halo and horns effects. Thus, female candidates are likely to be substantially better workers than they appear on paper, in comparison to their male counterparts. And especially if you’re a man, you need to give women more credit than you feel they’re due to overcome horns effect, while decreasing your evaluation of males due to halo effect. 

Consequently – and without any reference to diversity and inclusion initiatives, simply for the sake of your bottom line – you should always give preference to women. 

Seem counterintuitive? Perhaps a little unfair, especially if you’re a male? Well, I’m a man, and I can tell you that I would prefer to hire women over men, and recommend other males do the same. You’re simply doing what’s in the best interests of the organization. In fact, if you work in a publicly-traded company, you are obliged to serve the best interests of the shareholders. That means you need to go out of your way to promote, hire, mentor and include in networks those people who are most likely to serve the best interests of your company. Those people are women, this stands apart from any diversity issues. Doing so will create the biggest profit. 

Research supports this conclusion. A study of companies using the 1996 to 1997 National Organizations Survey found that greater gender diversity is associated with more customers, greater sales revenue, and higher profits. Another study showed that having women occupy at least 30 percent of a company’s Board of Directors positions correlates with increased profit. Gender-balanced business teams had better sales and profits, compared to the typical male-dominated teams, in a third study.

So the smart money is on hiring women over men, at least for those who care about making a profit. 

Key Takeaway

If you care about your bottom line, hire women over men. Due to gender discrimination, women had to work harder to get the same career position as men, and you will on average get a better worker if you hire a woman. ---> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• What has your experience been with observing gender discrimination?
• How does your workplace treat the hiring of men and women?
• What will you do differently in your hiring practices as a result of this article?

Image credit: Pxhere.com/Tejipta

Originally published by Disaster Avoidance Experts.

---

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (Intentional Insights, 2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the COVID-19 coronavirus will definitely develop into a widespread pandemic: it’s more a question of when, not if, it will happen. With growing outbreaks of diagnosed cases in 12 states, and vastly larger numbers of undiagnosed cases, there’s serious cause for concern.

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:

And if you like audio, here’s a podcast based on the blog:

Or simply read onward!

Current COVID-19 Pandemic Preparation Guidance

With this in mind, mainstream media and official health organizations such as the CDC have published tons of articles on how to prepare for the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. 

The advice for individuals seems reasonable and makes common sense: 

• Double-down on washing your hands
• Prepare for being out of commission for a couple of weeks if you get sick
• Stock up on daily consumables, such as food, medications, and cleaning supplies, for a couple of weeks in case you get sick
• Have contingencies in place in case you get sick
• Prepare for possibly working from home and/or that schools might temporarily close
• Coordinate with your neighbors to help each other
• Get ready for the psychological impact of the situation

So does the advice for companies:

• Cross-train employees in case some get sick
• Prepare for event cancellations
• Encourage sick employees to stay home
• Perform additional cleaning
• Make a disease outbreak response plan in case there’s an outbreak in your area

Overall, the essential take-away from all of these is epitomized by the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said that you “don't need to do anything different today than you did yesterday,” except emergency preparation. In other words, all of these preparations are for disruptions that might last for a couple of weeks at most resulting from a local outbreak.

COVID-19: The Facts and Possibilities

While it seems reasonable and fits our intuitions, is it really good advice? Let’s consider the facts about COVID-19.

With that in mind, let’s reassess the COVID-19 preparation guidance, for individuals and companies alike. 

The current guidance for both assumes a highly optimistic scenario, where we get very lucky. It assumes you might at worst face a one-time, short-term disruption of a couple of weeks due to an outbreak in your area. 

So, do you feel lucky? Well, do ya?

Let’s be real: regardless of whether or not you feel lucky, you shouldn’t anticipate such an optimistic scenario. Instead of half-assing it, you need to prepare for a moderately unlucky scenario and be a realistic pessimist.

Why Our Brain Causes Us to Be Underprepared for Major Disruptions

Before exploring what that means, it’s important to understand why doing so doesn’t feel intuitive and why the advice you keep hearing on how to prepare for COVID-19 is so badly mistaken. 

We suffer from many dangerous judgment errors that researchers in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics like myself call cognitive biases. These mental blindspots result from a combination of our evolutionary background and specific structural features in how our brains are wired. 

Our primary threat response, which stems from the ancient savanna environment, is the fight-or-flight response, also known as the saber-tooth tiger response. A great fit for the kind of short-term intense risks we faced as hunter-gatherers, the fight-or-flight response results in terrible decisions in the modern environment. It’s particularly bad for defending us from major disruptions caused by the slow-moving train wrecks we face in the modern environment, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

More specifically, you need to watch out for three cognitive biases. 

The normalcy bias causes our brains to assume things will keep going as they have been - normally - and evaluate the near-term future based on our short-term past experience. As a result, we underestimate drastically both the likelihood of a serious disruption occurring and the impact of one if it does occur.

When we make plans, we naturally believe that the future will go according to plan. That wrong-headed mental blindspot, the planning fallacy, results in us not preparing for contingencies and problems, both predictable ones and unknown unknowns. 

Last but not least, we suffer from the tendency to prioritize the short term, and undercount the importance of medium and long-term outcomes. Known as hyperbolic discounting, this cognitive bias is especially bad for evaluating the potential long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Realistic Pessimistic Pandemic Preparation

It’s inherently uncomfortable to prepare for the realistic pessimistic scenario. That feeling of discomfort is you going against your gut reactions, which is what research shows is needed for you to defeat these mental blindspots, whether in your business and career, in your relationships, or in other life areas. 

What does it mean to prepare for being moderately unlucky? Envision a future where COVID-19 isn’t eradicated, but keeps on going. 

Let’s say it becomes like the flu, a seasonal affliction that comes every September and lasts through March. In about 5 years, we’ll develop and make widely available a weak vaccine, one that decreases the likelihood of infection by 50% and lasts for a few months. 

How should you prepare in that case?

Individuals need to make long-term changes to their plans:

• Instead of a couple of weeks, you should have sufficient supplies of consumables, medications, and disinfectants for a couple of months, in case of ongoing outbreaks and lack of supplies in your area. If you get sick, you don’t want to go to the store, and neither do you want to go there in the midst of a major local outbreak.
• You might also keep in mind preparing extra supplies for your more happy-go-lucky neighbors and friends who follow the misguided advice of the CDC.
• If you plan to get groceries and other consumables delivered during an outbreak, get extra disinfectant to clean the outside of the box. The virus can survive on surfaces for a few days, and those working in delivery may come into work when sick.
• If you are elderly yourself, you need to make especially extreme changes to address the possibility of an outbreak in your area, since the threat is so high for the elderly. Can you secure a residence away from a densely-populated area in case your locality suffers an outbreak, or guarantee isolation in your home away from the outside world?
• If you have elderly relatives, now is the time to change your plans for supporting them. Set up major contingencies to prepare for an outbreak in their area.
• If you’re not currently in a job that allows work from home, or one that demands intense social contact, start investing in a career transition to one that permits social distancing.
• Prepare for much less in-person social contact with friends, family, and especially acquaintances in the months and years to come, and start now to switching more of your physical interactions to virtual ones.
• Similarly, prepare for the cancellations of major social events, ranging from sports to cultural events, and for the widespread closing of bars and restaurants.
• Start developing hobbies that don’t rely on other people being in close proximity.
• Start now to shift your entertainment consumption from activities that require social contact to those that don’t require it.
• Be ready to deal with other people panicking and making poor decisions, and take whatever steps you need to address such problems.
• Assume at least some others will not follow quarantine guidelines and behave accordingly.
• Prepare psychologically not simply for short-term disruptions, but for major social changes in the upcoming months and years. The list I outlined above is quite challenging and first and foremost, requires major mental shifts.

Companies also need to make major changes to the way they do business - not emergency plans, but fundamental underlying transformations:

• The most important changes will be in human-to-human contact. Does your business model rely on it? Explore creative ways of changing your business model to be more virtual in serving your customers, and where virtual interactions aren’t possible, create as much social distancing as you can.
• Can your employees work from home? Forward-looking companies are already encouraging their workers to do so as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. You should, too. That includes financing a wide variety of secure work-from-home services for your employees.
• So much business relies on relationships and networking. How can you switch your relationship cultivation and management to virtual venues? Perhaps you can focus more on LinkedIn and other means of networking and relationship maintenance, and less on face-to-face networking events.
• Can you shift your team meetings and even bigger corporate events to virtual forums? Instead of in-person conferences, consider doing virtual ones. Sure, you don’t get the intra-company networking benefits that you would get through face-to-face contact, and you’ll need to figure out ways to replace that bonding and relationship-building.
• Prepare for major disruptions to your supply chains, and especially to your service providers. Professional services, which depend a great deal on in-person contact, will be severely disrupted, and you need to be ready for it.
• Anticipate a variety of travel disruptions and event cancellations.
• Society will undergo a wide variety of social norm changes. Evaluate the extent to which your business model and staff will be impacted by such changes.
• Help your employees prepare much better at home than the current guidelines from the CDC and other health organizations suggest.
• Be ready for unknown unknowns, also known as black swans, by reserving extra capital and other resources for unanticipated threats and disruptions associated with COVID-19.
• By taking all of these steps early, you will have a major competitive advantage. Be ready to use the consequences of this competitive advantage to seize market share from your competitors who are inadequately prepared for these transitions.
• Some will be hobbled, while others go bankrupt. Be ready to hire highly-qualified employees who will be let go by those companies that trust too much the highly optimistic official preparedness guidelines. Anticipate buying the material resources of companies that are undergoing a fire sale.

Conclusion

Of course, you’ll want to adapt these broad guidelines to your own needs. Right now, you need to sit down and revise your strategic plans in a way that accounts for the cognitive biases associated with COVID-19. Do the same revision with major project plans. 

That’s the advice I’m giving to all of my consulting and coaching clients, and I hope you also choose to follow this guidance. By taking these steps, you’ll protect yourself, your loved ones, your career, and your business from the way-too-optimistic preparedness guidelines of our official health organizations and from our deeply inadequate gut reactions in the face of such slow-moving train wrecks. 

Key Takeaway  

Questions to Consider

• How can you prepare yourself as an individual for the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic?
• How can you prepare your business for the pandemic?
• What steps will you take based on this article?

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Originally Published  at Disaster Avoidance Experts on March 7, 2020.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (Intentional Insights, 2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Stakeholder engagement is one of the more critical aspects of leadership. Stakeholders can be anyone from your front line employees to suppliers to business partners, and your organization’s relationship with them is dynamic and can change over time.  

There are many advantages to identifying and getting to know your stakeholders, and even more disadvantages to not engaging with them. A failure to understand their needs can lead to blindspots for managers and executives, which can have disastrous effects, such as low employee morale or a dismal bottom line.  

On the other hand, effective engagement can result in increased productivity and stronger financials. We can also use research-based strategies to notice such blindspots so we can overcome them.  

Identifying Your Key Influencers

While you might be inclined to start engaging with all the stakeholders in your organization immediately, it would be more practical to focus on the relationships that matter the most. This means sitting down with your team, coming up with a list of all stakeholders, and then whittling down this list to the people who have the most impact to your organization — these are your key influencers. Even though it might be tempting to address the concerns of all your stakeholders, limited time and resources mean that you will accomplish more by addressing a targeted list.  

When determining who your key influencers are, look for these three attributes:

1. The stakeholder has a significant impact on your company’s growth. This means that the long-term success of your company hinges in large part to a continued relationship with this individual or group.  

2. The stakeholder cannot easily be replaced: from a top-performing department or a time-tested supplier, you can identify who this stakeholder is by assessing past performance.  

3. The relationship is mutual: you can clearly identify what you need from the stakeholder and vice versa. Your organization’s goals and desired results are aligned with those of this individual/organization.  

Just recently, I sat down with Bill, my coaching client and healthcare entrepreneur leader. He and his senior management team had been trying to get support from patient’s groups to encourage the widespread adoption of their innovative medical equipment.

However, it had been a year since they launched this initiative and they had not gained sufficient traction. Bill suspected that it might be due to the higher cost of their medical equipment. His first instinct was to do one-on-one outreach to key influencers in patient’s groups to explain that while his organization’s products had a higher price tag, it used a more advanced technology that yielded better results. It also came with a more comprehensive and longer warranty period compared with competing products.

Bill approached me after preparing a list of more than 40 key influencers. He was having a difficult time making a strategy on how to address them and was feeling pressured because he needed to present his findings and results in an upcoming meeting with investors.

When I checked Bill’s list, I noticed that he had included a wide variety of influencers, including many who did not have a key decision-making role in shaping the advocacy efforts of patient’s groups. We pared his list to just 8 key leaders of patient’s groups, and because they had many similar concerns and priorities, Bill was much better able to come up with a plan to engage with them.

Be Prepared by Doing a Pre-Engagement Assessment Using These 8 Questions

Regardless of the urgency, do a pre-engagement check before you engage with your key influencers directly. This will prepare you for the meetings and lead to productive discourse.

Otherwise, you might fall into the dangerous judgment error known as the false consensus effect, where you assume other people are more similar to you and more inclined to do what you want them to do than is really the case. The false consensus effect is just one out of over 100 mental blindspots that scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases.

The questions below are informed by cutting-edge neuroscience research on how to address these cognitive biases, along with my own experience of over two decades coaching and training leaders on stakeholder engagement.

1. What are their feelings, values, goals, and incentives around this issue? Bill’s key influencers — the 8 leaders of patient’s groups — were willing to try a better product. However, they were wary of endorsing more expensive equipment without being able to justify the higher price point to their respective patient’s groups.  

2. What is their story around this issue? The key influencers wanted to find the best equipment to endorse to their patient’s groups but were cautious due to several substandard products they have tried in the past.  

3. What are their identity and sense of self as tied to the issue? The leaders of the patient’s groups take their responsibilities very seriously by keeping up to date with the latest research and equipment available.  

4. How are they the hero in their own story? Bill’s key influencers know that they are in the frontlines when it comes to pushing for a better quality of life for the patients. Most of them have been directly or indirectly affected by the medical condition the equipment seeks to address and want to be part of the solution.  

5. Why should they want to listen to your message and do what you want? The leaders of the patient’s groups will benefit from hearing Bill’s take on the product’s efficiency. As the head of his organization, his message comes with a high degree of credibility, and the key influencers can share his message with confidence.  

6. What obstacles would prevent them from listening to your message and doing what you want? If Bill confirms that the medical equipment’s higher cost is, indeed, the main point of contention, he needs to address this issue. Otherwise, the key influencers will not listen to anything else he has to say.  

7. How can you remove the obstacles to and increase the rewards for them listening to you and doing what you want? Bill decided that he will immediately address the price issue in his meeting with the key influencers. His plan was to discuss in detail how his organization’s innovative medical equipment was the best choice in terms of quality and warranty.  

8. Who do you know that can give you useful feedback on your answers to the previous pre-engagement assessment questions? I connected Bill with Jolinda, the leader of a well-organized patient’s group for over a decade. Although her group represented the interests of patients with a different medical condition not relevant to the equipment made by Bill, she was willing to share her perspective as a key influencer.

Conclusion

Your organization’s relationship with your stakeholders will change over time and you will face different issues at varying difficulty levels. However, by learning how to identify your key influencers and doing pre-assessment checks before engaging with them, you will be able to have productive discussions and grow deeper relationships.

Key Takeaway

Asking the 8 Powerful Questions during a pre-engagement stakeholder assessment will lead to better engagement and stronger relationships with your stakeholders. → Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• When was the last time you had difficulty engaging with your stakeholders?
• Is there anything in the article that will help you identify your key influencers?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: Pixabay  

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (Intentional Insights, 2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Your relationships will be undermined or even destroyed by the coronavirus, unless you take proactive steps right now to save them. 

Don’t believe me? Consider the facts.

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has led to extensive measures for social distancing, figuratively and literally. We’re asked to keep at 6 to 10 feet apart from other people, and not have any gatherings over 50 people. Schools, colleges, day cares, restaurants, bars, and other public gathering venues are shut down until further notice across the US. Entertainment venues, such as stadiums, theaters, and museums, closed their doors. More and more companies ask all employees who can work from home to do so. Those over 60 or whose health is compromised are asked to stay home unless absolutely necessary, and you shouldn’t visit them if you don’t want to kill grandma.

Think it’s going to blow over in a couple of weeks? Think again.

The pandemic is only gaining steam instead of stopping and will very likely be around for years, not weeks. All of these changes are not emergency measures. They’re the new normal.

What will that do to your relationships? 

• How will you maintain your romantic life at 6 to 10 feet apart, with no restaurants, cafes, or bars as a place to hang out and no entertainment venues to attend?
• How about the same question for friendships?
• How will you support older adults you care about in this epidemic? 
• What will you do about your friends and family who are waving off concerns about the coronavirus, and will end up in a tight spot in a few weeks or months when things get really bad? 
• When working from home, what’s your plan for maintaining your professional collaborations and work relationships without seeing your co-workers face-to-face and working out challenges over the watercooler or in a staff meeting? 
• What are you going to do with kids and young adults who are home instead of in school or college? 
• Given that the whole family is at home, how will you avoid the little daily annoyances that can tear families apart?
• How will you make sure that you cope with the strain of the situation and avoid letting the natural feelings of fear, frustration, sadness, anxiety, and anger lead you to lash out at those closest to you? 

That list may feel overwhelming, and you may feel anxious over not having answers to any of these questions. Yet before rushing into figuring out your answers, take a breather. Reflect on why you didn’t realize that you should think about these questions in the first place.

It’s because we all suffer from mental blindspots that scholars in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics like myself call cognitive biases. They result from a combination of our evolutionary background and specific structural features in how our brains are wired.

Our primary threat response, which stems from the ancient savanna environment, is the fight-or-flight response, also known as the saber-tooth tiger response. A great fit for the kind of short-term intense risks we faced as hunter-gatherers, the fight-or-flight response results in terrible decisions in the modern environment. It’s particularly bad for defending our relationships from major disruptions caused by the slow-moving train wrecks we face in the modern environment, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

More specifically, you need to watch out for three cognitive biases.

The normalcy bias causes our brains to assume things will keep going as they have been – normally – and evaluate the near-term future based on our short-term past experience. As a result, we underestimate drastically both the likelihood of a serious disruption occurring and the impact of one if it does occur for our relationships and other life areas.

When we make plans, we naturally believe that the future will go according to plan. That wrong-headed mental blindspot, the planning fallacy, results in us not preparing for contingencies and problems, both predictable ones and unknown unknowns.

Last but not least, we suffer from the tendency to prioritize the short term, and undercount the importance of medium and long-term outcomes. Known as hyperbolic discounting, this cognitive bias is especially bad for evaluating the potential long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To protect yourself and those you care about from the devastating impact of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, you need to learn about these cognitive biases, and the effective tools informed by cognitive-behavioral therapy to defeat such mental blindspots. Only by doing so will you be able to answer the questions above effectively. That’s how you’ll not only save your relationships in these turbulent times, but also forge even stronger, healthier, and more meaningful relationships!

Image Credit: Flickr/Rawpixel

Key Takeaway

Your relationships will be undermined or even destroyed by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, unless you take proactive steps right now to save them by treating our current conditions as the new normal. --> Click to tweet.

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• What are some of the areas where you anticipate having relationship strains?

• How might the questions posed in the article help you save your relationships?

• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article? 

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (Intentional Insights, 2017), and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Using empathy to establish a good relationship with your organization’s stakeholders can pave the way to increased productivity and a stronger bottom line. By identifying your organization’s key influencers, you will be able to address a group of stakeholders whose decisions will have the most impact on your organization. 

Learning the truth about your key influencers is critical to strengthening your relationships with them. One important thing that leaders need to keep in mind prior to engaging with their key influencers is that each relationship is dynamic and every meeting will have its share of high and low points. The key is to navigate through these points and have a productive discourse that will enable all parties to resolve issues and reach common ground.

Unfortunately, our instincts on such conversations often lead us astray due to dangerous judgment errors that result from how our brains are wired, what scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases. Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these dangerous judgment errors, whether in your professional life, your relationships, or other life areas. 

Learn the Truth About Your Stakeholders Using 3 Key Social Intelligence Methods

To facilitate a better exchange of thoughts and ideas, you can employ specific, tried-and-tested methods whenever you engage with your key influencers informed by social intelligence. Social intelligence refers to the strategic capacity to evaluate and influence other people’s emotions and relationships. Social intelligence-based methods will allow you to break the ice as well as strengthen the trust between your organization and your stakeholders. 

A few months ago, I met with James, a coaching client of mine who is a VP of Sales of a B2B SaaS company. James learned that the CEO of a long-term, major client was thinking of potentially switching to their competitor. He was planning to meet with the CEO to learn why. 

James approached me for advice because while he genuinely wanted to learn why the CEO was unsatisfied with their offering, he was unsure of how best to approach the CEO without coming off as too pushy or probing. I shared the following methods with James so that he can foster an open and sincere environment while meeting with the CEO – one of his key influencers – face to face:  

1. Empathetic Listening

Go beyond the surface level when trying to understand your key influencers. This means that when they are communicating with you, you should listen to what they mean and not just what they say. Your goal is empathy, the skill of understanding what other people feel. Focus not only on their message’s content, but also on their tone and body language. By doing so, you will be able to figure out what they mean and what explains their feelings. 

One of the best ways to demonstrate empathy while engaging with your key influencers is to show them that you are paying full attention to them and nothing else, through:

(a.) Nonverbal signals of attention, which includes:

• Constant eye contact (casual, not intense)
• Keeping your feet and shoulders pointed to them
• Keeping your arms open, if you are sitting
• Standing straight and not slouching, if you are standing
• Smiling, nodding, and using hand gestures at appropriate times
• Duchenne smile, not fake smile (includes eyes in smiling)

(b.) Non-interruptive verbal signals of attention – includes saying “uh-huh”, “ok”, “go on”, etc., at appropriate times

 James decided to go ahead and meet with the CEO, Lisa, to discuss why their company was planning to switch to the competitor. Initially, Lisa wore a guarded expression and mostly gave terse answers to James’ initial questions. However, by maintaining eye contact and using non-interruptive verbal signals of attention, James was able to express to Lisa that he was sincerely interested in finding out why Lisa wanted to switch. Gradually, Lisa started to open up. James eventually learned that Lisa was unsatisfied with some of the price points for upgrading the product.

2. Echoing and Mirroring

Another way of showing that you are paying full attention is through echoing and mirroring, which includes:

(a.) Rephrasing the essence of what your key influencer is saying with your own words every one to three minutes. For example:

• “So what I’m hearing you say is ________. Is that right?”
• “You’re saying that _________. Do I have it correct and complete?”

If you have it right, the person you are talking to will be grateful that you were paying attention. If you don’t, they will be grateful that you checked and will correct it.

(b.) Using their jargon – Notice specific words that your key influencer is using relevant to the issue, and integrate them into your echoing.

(c.) Mirror in broad terms their tone and posture. For example, if they’re speaking formally, do so as well. If they’re leaning towards you, do so as well. Just pay attention to their body language and tone and try to match it, but don’t try to mirror everything quickly. When done correctly, this will help your key influencers feel connected to you and build trust.

Circling back to James’ meeting with Lisa, James had some flexibility regarding the price points and decided to offer it as a solution. By this time, the ice had already been broken and Lisa was already conversing with him in a less formal manner. James decided to mirror her tone and posture and offered the solution in a more relaxed manner as well. 

3. Curious Questioning

Finally, injecting some genuine curiosity into your questioning will go a long way in expressing your sincere interest in your key influencer’s needs and concerns. It will help facilitate effective knowledge sharing and further refine your understanding of them. 

The best way to do this is to envision what they would want you to ask them and to express curiosity in your questions without coming off as probing or provocative. Keep in mind that many people may not want to reveal their emotions directly, so an effective approach would be to ask them indirectly. For example:

(a.) “If I was in this situation, I would feel _______. How about you?”

(b.) You can also share a story about someone who felt an emotion you think they’re feeling in a similar situation, and see how they respond.

You should already have some basic ideas based on a pre-engagement assessment, empathetic listening, and echoing to check for understanding. Remember that the goal is to further refine your understanding of their emotions, goals, incentives, values, and obstacles. 

A week after he consulted me, James e-mailed me with great news: Lisa had accepted the solution he offered. A crisis was averted and their business relationship was more amiable compared to how stilted it was before their meeting. 

Conclusion

The best way to form lasting relationships with your stakeholders is to find out their needs and problems and address them. You can learn the truth by using the 3 social intelligence methods of empathetic listening, echoing and mirroring, and curious questioning. By doing so, you will be able to get to the root of problems, provide solid solutions, and strengthen relationships. 

Key Takeaway

Using the three social intelligence methods during a stakeholder meeting will help you learn the truth about your stakeholders’ needs, which will empower you to solve their problems and foster stronger relationships with them.---> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• When was the last time you had difficulty learning the truth about your stakeholders’ needs and problems?

• Is there anything in the article that will help you to get your stakeholders to open up to you?

• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article? 

Image credit: Pixabay

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Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

How do you defeat unconscious bias? First, you need to know what it is.

Unconscious bias (also known as implicit bias) refers to unconscious forms of discrimination and stereotyping based on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ability, age, and so on. It differs from cognitive bias, which is a predictable pattern of mental errors that result in us misperceiving reality and, as a result, deviating away from the most likely way of reaching our goals.

In other words, from the perspective of what is best for us as individuals, falling for a cognitive bias always harms us by lowering our probability of getting what we want. Despite cognitive biases sometimes leading to discriminatory thinking and feeling patterns, these are two separate and distinct concepts.

Cognitive biases are common across humankind and relate to the particular wiring of our brains, while unconscious bias relates to perceptions between different groups and are specific for the society in which we live. For example, I bet you don’t care or even think about whether someone is a noble or a commoner, yet that distinction was fundamentally important a few centuries ago across Europe. To take another example — a geographic instead of one across time — most people in the US don’t have strong feelings about Sunni vs. Shiite Muslims, yet this distinction is incredibly meaningful in many parts of the world.

Organizations often bring me in as a speaker on diversity and inclusion to address potential unconscious discriminatory behavior. When I share in speeches that black Americans suffer from police harassment and violence at a much higher rate than white people, some participants (usually white) occasionally try to defend the police by claiming that black people are more violent and likely to break the law than whites. They thus attribute police harassment to the internal characteristics of black people (implying that it is deserved), not to the external context of police behavior.

In reality — as I point out in my response to these folks — research shows that black people are harassed and harmed by police at a much higher rate for the same kind of activity. A white person walking by a cop, for example, is statistically much less likely to be stopped and frisked than a black one. At the other end of things, a white person resisting arrest is much less likely to be violently beaten than a black one. In other words, statistics show that the higher rate of harassment and violence against black Americans by police is due to the prejudice of the police officers, at least to a large extent.

However, I am careful to clarify that this discrimination is not necessarily intentional. Sometimes, it indeed is deliberate, with white police officers consciously believing that black Americans deserve much more scrutiny than whites. At other times, the discriminatory behavior results from unconscious, implicit thought processes that the police officer would not consciously endorse.

Interestingly, research shows that many black police officers have an unconscious prejudice against other black people, perceiving them in a more negative light than white people when evaluating potential suspects. This unconscious bias carried by many — not all — black police officers helps show that such prejudices come — at least to a significant extent — from internal cultures within police departments, rather than pre-existing racist attitudes before someone joins a police department.

Such cultures are perpetuated by internal norms, policies, and training procedures, and any police department wishing to address unconscious bias needs to address internal culture first and foremost, rather than attributing racism to individual officers. In other words, instead of saying it’s a few bad apples in a barrel of overall good ones, the key is recognizing that implicit bias is a systemic issue, and the structure and joints of the barrel needs to be fixed.

The crucial thing to highlight is that there is no shame or blame in implicit bias, as it’s not stemming from any fault in the individual. This no-shame approach decreases the fight, freeze, or flight defensive response among reluctant audiences, helping them hear and accept the issue.

With these additional statistics and discussion of implicit bias, the issue is generally settled. Still, from their subsequent behavior it’s clear that some of these audience members don’t immediately internalize this evidence. It’s much more comforting for them to feel that police officers are right and anyone targeted by police deserves it; in turn, they are highly reluctant to accept the need to focus more efforts and energy on protecting black Americans from police violence, due to the structural challenges facing these groups.

The issue of unconscious bias doesn’t match their intuitions and thus they reject this concept, despite extensive and strong evidence for its pervasive role in policing. It takes a series of subsequent follow-up conversations and interventions to move the needle. A single training is almost never sufficient, both in my experience and according to research.

This example of how to fight unconscious bias illustrates broader patterns you need to follow to address such problems in order to address unconscious bias to make the best people decisions. After all, our gut reactions lead us to make poor judgment choices, when we simply follow our intuitions.

1) Instead, you need to start by learning about the kind of problems that result from unconscious bias yourself, so that you know what you’re trying to address.

2) Then, you need to convey to people who you want to influence, such as your employees or any other group or even yourself, that there should be no shame or guilt in acknowledging our instincts.

3) Next, you need to convey the dangers associated with following their intuitions, to build up an emotional investment into changing behaviors.

4) Then, you need to convey the right mental habits that will help them make the best choices.  

Remember, a one-time training is insufficient for doing so. It takes a long-term commitment and constant discipline and efforts to overcome unconscious bias.

Key Takeaways

To address unconscious bias requires understanding what it is and where and how you might fall into it. Just as importantly, it requires developing a series of healthy mental habits that prevent you from falling for unconscious bias. — -> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• What are some case studies of unconscious bias that you observed?
• Where might unconscious bias be a problem for you?
• What steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

 — 

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has changed life as we know it, as well as how we manage our households. While being shut mostly in our homes or observing infection prevention guidelines when leaving our house, it can be pretty hard to grapple with the reality of the world in which we now live. And yet, this is what we must all do to survive and thrive in this new abnormal.

Same Home, Different House Rules?

Susan, an entrepreneur and coaching client of mine, had a difficult time adjusting to the COVID-19 reality. As the founder of a 20-people startup in the medical devices industry, she was used to a routine and thrived by keeping her work life separate from her personal life. She also considered herself to be resilient and organized and thought she would just be coasting until the pandemic was over.

By late March, she had already figured out how wrong she was.

As she watched and read the news on how the pandemic was unfolding, Susan started to realize that things might not be going back to the way it was before anytime soon.

Accompanying this uncomfortable feeling was the fact that she could not seem to craft a new routine while working from home. She found it difficult to concentrate on work while also spending more time with her nine-year-old child, who was staying home from school.

In addition, her relationship with her husband — which for the most part had always been loving and easygoing — had started to become tense. Her husband was the main homemaker and caretaker of their child while she worked at an office. However, the pandemic changed that, and she found herself having to interact more with her husband and her child, who would pop in and out of her work space during work hours.

Susan reached out to me because she felt that she was not adapting well to the situations surrounding the pandemic as she had started to become curt with her child and her husband, who was also dealing with his own set of worries over an elderly parent in a nursing home. Aside from these, she was also unable to concentrate on her startup due to all the household interruptions.  

Knowing and Facing This New Abnormal

When I met with Susan over Zoom — by this time I had already moved my previously hybrid in-person and virtual coaching to all virtual — I told her that there were some essential points that she needed to understand in order to adjust to the new COVID-19 reality.

First and foremost, we won’t get anywhere if we don’t face the facts. We need to acknowledge that COVID-19 fundamentally disrupted our world, turning it upside down in a few short weeks in February and March 2020. We have to move past the discomfort of the normalcy bias and our intuitive feeling that the novel coronavirus “one day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” to quote Donald Trump’s words from a February 28 press conference.

Regrettably, it will not disappear; believing that it will helped get us mired so deep in this mess, making the US outbreak the worst in the world in terms of the number of deaths. The normalcy bias is one of over a hundred dangerous judgment errors that scholars in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics like myself call cognitive biases. They result from a combination of our evolutionary background and specific structural features in how our brains are wired.

Instead, we need to adapt to the long haul of battling COVID-19, at least until we create an effective vaccine, mass produce and distribute it, and actually vaccinate people. Optimistically, that will be in early 2022; more realistically, 2024–25; pessimistically, we’d never get an effective vaccine, for instance making do with weak versions that prevent 50% of all infections. If you think that’s too cynical, you may not realize that, despite facing the flu for over a century, our vaccine for it is still only about 50% effective.

Prior to a vaccine, we will be coping with COVID-19 through extreme measures such as thorough lockdowns and extensive social distancing in areas with outbreaks that don’t have the capacity and/or the political will to do the public health work that enables less extraordinary measures. That public health work involves not only providing the equipment, medications, and personnel needed to treat a surge of patients during outbreaks: that’s necessary, but not sufficient.

To relax extreme measures requires the public health work of quickly testing those with flu-like symptoms, isolating anyone who tests positive for COVID-19, contact tracing anyone they interacted with and asking those people to self-quarantine for 2 weeks, and using antibody testing to certify those who recovered from COVID-19 and are at least temporarily protected from re-infection to work in exposed areas. It also requires public education work of getting people to comply with social distancing, wear masks, minimize unnecessary social contacts, impose social peer pressure on noncompliers, and more broadly follow public health guidelines and support health workers.

Given that reality, you can anticipate that what will happen will be as follows: 1) Extreme lockdowns and social distancing to bring COVID-19 under control in a given area; 2) In a few weeks, a gradual loosening of some restrictions after COVID-19 cases fall to a minimal number; 3) After a few weeks or — if you’re lucky — several months, COVID-19 cases will start to grow and the regional government will impose another round of extreme measures. Such whack-a-mole waves of loosening and tightening restrictions will continue until we find a vaccine.

Survive and Thrive in the Pandemic

So how can you most effectively adapt to the uncertainty and dislocation that accompanies this new abnormal?

While you’re in a new abnormal, your underlying needs and wants remain the same. You just need to figure out different ways toward satisfying them. These ways should rely much less on interacting in-person with people who aren’t part of your immediate household and much more with those who are;

they should also rely much less on travel, whether in your local area or around the globe, and much more on staying at home.

You might have heard of Abraham Maslow’s theory of human motivation and the pyramid of needs based on his work. More recent research, summarized in Scott Barry Kaufman’s excellent book Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, revises this model to show that our fundamental needs consist of safety, connection, and self-esteem, and we will feel deprived without them. We also have needs that help us achieve our full potential through personal growth, what Maslow called “self- actualization” and what Kaufman more clearly defined as exploration, love, and purpose. A good approach to adapting to the new abnormal is evaluating your life through the lens of these needs and ensuring that you can still satisfy them.

Safety

Let’s start with physical safety. You should make sure you and your family are able to stay safe in your home for up to 2 months in case of a major outbreak in your area, let’s say as bad as happened in New York City. While unlikely, it pays to prepare for a realistic pessimistic scenario. That means having 2 months of basic food and cleaning supplies, along with any necessary medications.

Notice that 2 months is much more than the paltry 2 weeks recommended by the CDC, a far too optimistic guideline that fails to provide sufficient safety.

To prevent supply disruptions for others, consider buying such goods in bulk from specialized online vendors rather than emptying the shelves in your local grocery store. It’s both more responsible and cheaper.

Going back to Susan, she realized that when the pandemic hit, she had focused on transitioning her work to a virtual setup and not much else. Days into the lockdown, she realized that she and her husband had missed stocking up on food, and also lacked the necessary cleaning and medical supplies.

Another dilemma was that despite both of them being willing to cook more, their work lives were as hectic as when it was still on site — with Susan working on her startup and her husband having his hands full taking care of their child — and so they also didn’t have as much free time. Susan decided to order everything online, from groceries to medicine. She was also able to find a prepared foods vendor that can deliver cooked food to her home daily.  

Connection to Others

Protecting your mental safety brings us to the second fundamental need: connection to others. It’s a topic I describe in much more depth in my best-seller, The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships.

First, consider your immediate connections with members of the household.

If you have a romantic partner in your household, you’ll have to figure out how to interact in a healthy manner given that you’re together 24/7. You’ll likely get into each other’s spaces and on each other’s nerves. It’s much wiser to anticipate and work out these problems in advance than have them blow up down the road. The same principle applies to other members of your family. If you have older children who moved home after university closed, or younger children who aren’t going to school after it closed, you’ll need to figure out how to deal with them being cooped up inside. This includes staying in touch with their schools to get updates on online school work.

You’ll have to put more thought into dealing with older adults over 60 or anyone with underlying

health conditions in your household (including yourself if you fit either category). Given their much greater vulnerability to COVID-19, you and other members of your household need to take serious measures to prevent them from getting ill. That means being more careful yourself than you would otherwise be, since over half of all those with COVID-19 have no or light symptoms. Remember: don’t kill Grandma. And don’t let other members of your household kill Grandma.

Second, what about your connection to those who you care about who aren’t part of your household?

Your romantic partner might not be part of your household. Depending on how vulnerable to COVID-19 you and other members of your household might be, you might choose to take the risk of physical intimacy with your romantic partner, but you have to make this decision consciously rather than casually. Or you might choose to have a social-distance relationship, meeting at a distance of 10 feet or by videoconference.

The same goes for your friends. You can’t have a beer with them or meet for lunch in person, at least closer than 6 feet, and ideally 10. You’ll need to figure out effective ways of interacting with them virtually during this difficult time of the next several years, combined with socially distanced hanging out when possible, given restrictions and lockdowns.

You’ll also want to think about how you’ll revise your community activities: faith-based groups, clubs, nonprofit activism, and so on. For instance, you should definitely avoid church services for now, but fortunately many churches offer video worship services, and that will have to do. You can take the lead in your club on moving to video conference meetings. You will have to figure out how to replace your in- person volunteering, perhaps with virtual volunteering or with donations.

During one of our coaching sessions, Susan said she hadn’t realized how strained her relationship with her husband was until I had pointed out the need for healthy interaction while being together 24/7. After our talk, she sat down with her husband to have a serious conversation about the situation. Together, they decided to stick to their own separate routines, have their own spaces apart (with Susan spending time at her home office and her husband and child spending the days accomplishing school work in the living area), and come together as a family after the workday is done — as they would have before the pandemic — so that they wouldn’t get on each other’s nerves.

Soon after, they also sat down and conversed with their young child regarding COVID-19, remaining calm and simply discussing what they, as a family, needed to do to stay healthy. Due to their reassuring manner, their child expressed more willingness to open up to them about any worries he might have regarding the pandemic.

Susan and her husband also set aside some time during the weekend to reconnect with friends and immediate and extended family. Video calls were a big help in catching up with how their loved ones were doing, and it also brought Susan immense relief to find out that she wasn’t the only one struggling to adjust to the new abnormal.

They were able to schedule video calls with her husband’s father, who was in a nursing home. This helped ease Susan’s husband’s worries, and his improved mood also helped restore their healthy interactions.

Susan and her husband also decided to stick to their pre-pandemic family weekend routine of just relaxing and spending time on personal hobbies, avoiding any work as much as possible.

Self-esteem

Finally, address the third fundamental need of self-esteem, which refers to your self-confidence, self-respect, and sense of mastery over your fate. Thinking through and making a plan for addressing your physiological and mental safety and your relationships during the next several years of the pandemic will help you strengthen your sense of control and confidence. You’ll also want to think about other areas where you can further master in this time of restrictions and limitations.

For example, being at home offers a great opportunity to learn an instrument, pick up coding skills, or try to make a viral YouTube video. Doing so is empowering and can help anyone develop a sense of mastery over their environment.

Susan realized that working from home had afforded her an extra hour before dinner (time she used to spend wrapping up for the day at the office and driving home) and decided to take the opportunity to brush up on her guitar skills in the living area. It was the perfect way to transition from work to home mode, and her husband and child often joined her as they wound down their days as well.

Conclusion

Towards the end of our coaching sessions, Susan informed me that she had finally established a balanced work-life routine that suits her and protects her relationships with her loved ones. After facing the facts regarding what lies ahead in this pandemic reality, she was able to make appropriate personal plans and move forward, eventually restoring a healthy interaction with her husband and child. While Susan was satisfied with that state and we did not pursue self-actualization conversations, you can check out Kaufmann’s book to learn more about this area.

While the new abnormal ushered in by COVID-19 has brought unprecedented changes to our lives, there’s no reason you can’t survive and thrive in the new abnormal while we wait for a vaccine. You just need to identify, anticipate, and take care of your fundamental needs.

Key Takeaway  

You can survive and thrive in the new abnormal of the pandemic by identifying and addressing fundamental needs of your household — safety, connection, and self-esteem. — -> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• How aware are you of your household’s fundamental needs?
• Where might you do a better job of satisfying your own and your family’s fundamental needs during this pandemic?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: Pixabay

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

…

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

As the vast majority of companies rush to reopen, they’re falling into the trap of “getting back to normal.” They’re not realizing we’re heading into a period of waves of restrictions once again, due to many states reopening too soon. Indeed, some of the states to open early onward have already reimposed some restrictions, showing that as I predicted way back at the start of the pandemic, we will be facing rolling waves of restrictions and shutdowns, and need to focus much more on virtual interactions.  

We need to realize that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the way companies and organizations — big or small — operate. Organizations have to find a way to survive and thrive in this new abnormal, so it’s important for leadership teams to do a reality check regularly. To do so, we need to understand the parallels between what’s going on now, and what happened at the start of the pandemic.  

Consider Tim, the CFO of a 90-person tech start-up based in Texas that provides HR and Payroll software, along with other business back-end software. Unfortunately, the company’s leadership team, including Tim, believed Elon Musk’s statements when he downplayed the coronavirus in March.  

Since the C-suite thought the pandemic wasn’t a big deal and would blow over soon, they didn’t take the necessary precautions and preparations and ended up in a bad place when the shutdowns occurred. They had to turn to their very basic business continuity plan that did not factor in something as large scale as a pandemic. Thinking that things would “normalize” soon, they held off on making major decisions, such as moving all their operations to a virtual setup.  

Tim decided to contact me for a consultation after learning about my work through a recent webinar I conducted about how organizations can adapt to the changes brought by the pandemic. When he called me, his company was already embroiled in internal team conflicts and service interruptions, which resulted in a number of clients having problems with the software, and a couple of major clients even threatening to cancel. It was evident that the company needed help getting out of murky waters — and soon.  

Knowing and Facing This New Abnormal  

When I met with Tim as well as the company’s CEO and COO over Zoom — by this time I had already moved my previously hybrid in-person and virtual consultations to all virtual — I told them that there were some essential points that they needed to understand in order for their company to survive in this new COVID-19 reality.  

First and foremost, we won’t get anywhere if we don’t face the facts. We need to acknowledge that COVID-19 fundamentally disrupted our world, turning it upside down in a few short weeks in February and March 2020. Regrettably, it will not disappear; believing that it will helped get us mired so deep in this mess, making the US outbreak one of the the worst in the world in terms of the number of deaths.  

However, you might be wondering, why did Elon Musk — and even some political leaders — downplay the COVID-19 pandemic? It’s not like doing so had personal benefits for these leaders. They wound up thoroughly humiliated when proven wrong, hurting their credibility.  

The causes stem from a combination of three factors: the nature of the virus itself, the preexisting beliefs and plans of the political and business leaders, and the dangerous judgment errors we all tend to make that cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists call cognitive biases.  

Cognitive Biases and the Coronavirus  

So what are cognitive biases? Many pundits heap praise on business leaders who make quick gut decisions: about the direction of their company, about whether to launch a new product, about which candidate to hire. Sadly, just going with our gut frequently leads to devastating results for our professional and personal lives.  

Consider the Equifax data breach scandal. In May 2017, hackers stole the credit information of over 148 million people from the consumer credit reporting company Equifax, exploiting a security flaw that the company should have known it needed to fix, with the data breach called “entirely preventable” by a December 2018 Congressional Report by the House Oversight Committee. Even worse, the Equifax C-suite decided to cover up the incident for several months. The disastrous decision to conduct a cover-up — inevitably discovered later — gravely damaged Equifax’s reputation, caused a large and lasting drop in the company’s stock, and led to the CEO and a number of other top executives being forced out due to incompetence.  

What about the Boeing leadership’s catastrophic decision making on rushing its 737 Max airplane into production, despite a number of safety issues well known inside the company? In fact, one Boeing pilot, in a message to a colleague in 2016, said “this airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” Undeterred by such concerns inside the company, the Boeing leadership went ahead with production, cutting corners in the approval process. The story ends with two deadly crashes that killed 346 people and grounded the 737 Max, Boeing losing over $25 billion in market value before the pandemic, and the Boeing board firing its CEO.  

Make no mistake: each of the cases above exemplify value-destroying decisions that hurt shareholders by top corporate leaders who followed their gut. These examples of top leaders at prominent companies are not an isolated instance: a four-year study by LeadershipIQ.com interviewed 1,087 board members from 286 organizations of all sorts that forced out their chief executive officers. It found that over 20 percent of CEOs got fired for denying reality, meaning they refused to recognize negative facts about the organization’s performance. Other research shows that professionals at all levels suffer from the tendency to deny uncomfortable facts in business settings. Sadly, just going with our gut frequently leads to devastating results for our decision-making and leadership initiatives.  

Roughly speaking, we have two thinking systems. Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his research on behavioral economics, calls them System 1 and 2. I prefer the terms autopilot system and intentional system, which I believe describe these systems more clearly.  

The autopilot system corresponds to our emotions and intuitions, and its cognitive processes center around the amygdala, an older part of our brain. This system guides our daily habits, helps us make snap decisions, and reacts instantly to dangerous life-and-death situations through the freeze, fight, or flight stress response. While the snap judgments resulting from intuitions and emotions usually feel “true” because they are fast and powerful, they sometimes lead us wrong in systematic and predictable ways.  

The intentional system reflects our rational thinking, and centers around the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that evolved more recently. This thinking system helps us handle more complex mental activities, such as managing individual and group relationships, logical reasoning, probabilistic thinking, and learning new information and patterns of thinking and behavior.  

While the automatic system requires no conscious effort to function, the intentional system takes deliberate effort to turn on and is mentally tiring. Fortunately, with enough motivation and appropriate training, we can learn to use the intentional system to address situations where we tend to make systematic and predictable errors.  

Scientists call these mental blindspots cognitive biases. One of these is the normalcy bias, which caused Tim and his colleagues in the leadership team to decide erroneously at the onset, and amidst, this pandemic.  

Dealing With the Normalcy Bias  

The normalcy bias refers to the fact that our autopilot system drives us to feel that the future, at least in the short and medium term of the next couple of years, will function in roughly the same way as the past: normally. As a result, we tend to vastly underestimate both the possibility and impact of a disaster striking us.  

This bias leads individuals, businesses, and governments to fail to prepare nearly as well as they should for the likelihood and effects of catastrophes, especially slow-moving train wrecks such as pandemics.  

Given all that, the only way to deal with COVID-19 conclusively involves finding a vaccine. It usually takes a decade or more to develop a vaccine, due to the extensive financial costs and safety regulations around the approval process. Fortunately, government, market, and philanthropic forces have combined to channel extensive funding toward developing vaccines and minimizing the approval process standards to the bare minimum needed to ensure safety and effectiveness.  

Still, while over a hundred organizations launched projects to develop vaccines, and several have created a viable prototype, it will take many months for the vaccine to go through human trials. First, we’ll have a trial lasting several months to evaluate whether the vaccine has unacceptable side effects (in a regular, non-emergency situation, this part usually 1–2 years). Then, we’ll need more trials lasting a few more months to test whether the vaccine is actually effective (typically 2–4 years). Then, government bodies have to review the trial data to confirm effectiveness, which would take another few months (usually 2–4 years). Finally, we’ll need to see which of the many vaccines being developed and put through trials offers the best combination of maximal effectiveness with minimal side effects.  

According to the top vaccine experts, this is the one step of the process that can’t be rushed or solved by throwing money or expertise at it. If we’ll be pumping something into the arms of billions of people around the world, we need to get it right.  

Now, if a vaccine shows a great deal of promise, it’s possible that those at highest risk and most impact, such as medical workers in areas with inadequate protective equipment, might get a vaccine as an experimental measure. For them, the risk might be worth it; besides, their medical training would help ensure that they can give truly informed consent. But that’s not mass vaccination.  

In the ideal scenario, if one of the first several vaccines does successfully make it through the trials and proves highly effective without any unacceptable side effects — a very big if — we might have a vaccine approved for widespread use by summer of 2021.  

What then? Well, we need to manufacture the vaccine in mass, to vaccine at least the more vulnerable categories and eventually everyone. Producing enough vaccine for only, say, the 100 million vulnerable Americans would take a few months. You also have the obstacle of distributing it and actually vaccinating people, as well as dealing with anti-vaxxer sentiments, so another few months. That brings us into the start of 2022 on a highly optimistic timeline.  

Given that only a very small percentage of all vaccines make it through the trials, due either to unacceptable side effects or insufficient effectiveness, we shouldn’t expect that we’ll get so wonderfully lucky. More realistically, it might be not until 2023–24 when we get a sufficiently safe and effective vaccine.  

And if the universe decides to show us the middle finger, we might never find an effective vaccine to COVID-19. After all, we don’t have a fully effective vaccine against the flu. The one we have is a weak vaccine, only about 40% effective on average in reducing the likelihood of getting the flu, as well as reducing the severity of the flu if you do get it. That’s because the flu virus mutates quickly. So far, it seems that the novel coronavirus fortunately does not, so it’s very likely that we’ll escape the middle finger scenario, but we can’t yet rule it out.  

Now, this information was known from February 2020. However, the normalcy bias makes it very difficult for us to imagine that our world can turn upside down so quickly. In early 2020, it was extremely uncomfortable for political and business leaders, and ordinary citizens, to even begin to imagine that it would be until early 2022 that we can — with incredible luck — expect to deal with COVID-19, and more realistically 2024–25. That’s despite clear statements from the best scientific experts to that effect.  

It was pretty clear even from my first Zoom call with Tim and the CEO and COO of the company that their leadership team had suffered from the normalcy bias. Fortunately, recent research has shown us how we can effectively deal with such dangerous judgment errors.  

For the normalcy bias, it’s critical to understand the dangers of falling into it and acknowledge the pain you cause yourself and your company by doing so. Then, you need to consider realistically the long-term outcomes and plan for a realistic scenario that addresses the likelihood of major disruptions.  

However, it took until the second consultation call for them to admit (more than a bit grudgingly, actually) that they had succumbed to this mental blindspot. This refusal to admit to reality had less to do with the veracity of the facts I presented to them but their initial unwillingness to let go of their “gut feel”.  

After discussing the above points with them, they admitted that it was time to face what lies ahead. It was time to prepare their company for a much bigger disruption than they anticipated. We used the “Defend Your Future” technique to help them plan out for a variety of potential futures. We decided that while they would hope for the best, they would plan for the worst, a wise strategy for addressing the normalcy bias.  

Road to Adapting to the New Abnormal  

As the pandemic broke out, companies and other organizations overwhelmingly turned to their existing emergency business continuity plan and then simply continued with that plan as the pandemic continued.  

Yet continuing with emergency measures throughout the minimal 2 years of the pandemic is not wise, to say the least. A business continuity plan is meant for a week or two, a month at most if it’s a really good plan, before things start returning to normal (I tell you this as someone who helped businesses and nonprofits design many business continuity plans).  

Unfortunately, we will not return to the “normal” status quo ante pandemic. Ever.  

Do you think that, even in the most optimistic scenario of only 2 years of waves of stricter and looser shutdowns and social distancing, our society will ever be the same? Of course not. And let’s remember that we shouldn’t plan for the most optimistic scenario. As the saying goes, hope for the best, but plan for the worst. So assume a 5-year horizon instead of 2 years.  

Companies need to adapt to the next few months, not the next few years. And your emergency measures won’t cut it. You need to accept the current reality of ongoing waves of restrictions as the new abnormal, instead of a temporary emergency. That means fundamentally changing your business model if you want your company, nonprofit, or other organization to survive and thrive during these troubled years.  

This will include taking a long, hard look at your internal and external business models and scrutinizing the elements that drive your business. It will also entail revising or, in some cases, even totally revamping your daily operations and business continuity plan.  

No Longer Struggling, But Thriving  

When I last spoke with Tim in the end of June 2020, he told me that he, along with the CEO and COO, had decided to share their findings and the points we discussed during the coaching sessions with the rest of the leadership team. It was a difficult conversation, due to the growing conflicts in the company and mutual recrimination.  

However, after realizing that there wasn’t much sense playing the blame game given the urgency of the situation, the C-suite decided to buckle down and address the problems head on. After outlining the problems and potential solutions, they eventually got widespread buy-in to do what needed to be done in order to propel their company onto recovery.  

The leadership team swiftly addressed the internal conflicts, which was the necessary first step to addressing all the other issues.  

They focused much more efforts on a long-term transition to virtual. They minimized their physical footprint, having only a couple of people in the office to take care of necessary paperwork and finances.  

Tim, along with the CEO and COO as well as the VP of IT, made sure that quick, effective changes were made to the company’s policies and processes so that operations would be in line with the transition to virtual.  

After the internal conflicts and systems had been addressed, the leadership team focused on reaching out to the clients who were threatening to cancel due to the service interruptions. The company’s tech and customer service teams — at that time finally fully operational again — stepped up to soothe ruffled feathers and provide excellent support, from service restoration all the way to providing free additional wide-scale training on the software. Due to these efforts, most of the cancellations were averted, although two smaller clients did cancel.  

Tim told me that he and the leadership team were pleased with the results of the changes they made. He also expressed to me how glad he was they did so once the numbers of COVID-19 cases in Texas began to increase in mid-June, prompting a pause of the reopening process that eventually led to shutdowns again in late June.  

Conclusion  

During these disruptive times of the pandemic, it’s important to be agile and resilient. Keep in mind that even if your company was not able to make the best decisions at the onset of the pandemic, you can still steer it back to the right path by fighting and protecting against cognitive biases.  

Key Takeaway

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• Did your leadership team make bad decisions at the onset of the pandemic, and do you now want to make things right?
• Where might you do a better job of fighting against the normalcy bias?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: Pixabay

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

…

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

The mainstream media news sources that you consume can kill you - or save you. That’s the fundamental insight of a powerful new study about the impact of watching either Sean Hannity’s news show Hannity or Tucker Carlson’s Tucker Carlson Tonight: one saved lives, and the other resulted in more deaths, due to how each of these hosts covered the pandemic, and the resulting COVID-19 misinformation. 

This research illustrates the danger of falling for health-related misinformation due to dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health to politics and even shopping, as a survey by a comparison purchasing website reveals. We need to be wary of cognitive biases in order to survive and thrive during this pandemic, the topic of my new book, Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020).

Sean Hannity vs. Tucker Carlson Coverage of COVID-19

Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight are the top two US cable news shows, both on Fox News. Hannity and Carlson share very similar ideological profiles, and have similar viewership demographics, older adults who lean conservative.

One notable difference, however, relates to how both approached coverage of COVID-19, especially in February and early March 2020. Researchers at the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at University of Chicago decided to study the health consequences of this difference.

Carlson took the threat of COVID-19 seriously early onward, more so than most media figures - on the right or left. Already on January 28, way earlier than most mainstream media venues, Carlson spent a significant part of his show highlighting the serious dangers of a global pandemic. He continued his warnings throughout February. On February 25, Carlson told his viewers: "In this country, more than a million would die.”

By contrast, Hannity was one of the more extreme Fox News hosts in downplaying COVID-19, frequently comparing it to the flu. On February 27, he said "And today, thankfully, zero people in the United States of America have died from the coronavirus. Zero. Now, let's put this in perspective. In 2017, 61,000 people in this country died from influenza, the flu. Common flu." Moreover, Hannity explicitly politicized COVID-19, claiming that “[Democrats] are now using the natural fear of a virus as a political weapon. And we have all the evidence to prove it, a shameful politicizing, weaponizing of, yes, the coronavirus.”

However, after President Donald Trump declared COVID-19 a national emergency in mid-March, Hannity  - and other Fox News hosts - changed their tune to align more with Carlson’s, acknowledging the serious dangers of the virus.

Behavior and Health Consequences of Coverage Differences 

The Becker Friedman Institute researchers investigated whether the difference in coverage impacted behaviors. They conducted a nationally representative survey of over 1,000 people who watch Fox News at least once a week, evaluating both viewership and behavior changes in response to the pandemic, such as social distancing,  improving hygiene, and so on.

Next, the study compared behavior changes to viewing patterns. The researchers found that “viewers of Hannity changed their behavior five days later than viewers of other shows (p < 0.001), while viewers of Tucker Carlson Tonight changed their behavior three days earlier than viewers of other shows (p < 0.01); the difference in coefficients is also highly statistically significant (p < 0.01).”

Did these behavior changes lead to health consequences? Indeed.

The paper compared the popularity of each show in specific counties to data on COVID-19 infections and deaths. Controlling for a wide variety of potential confounding variables, the study found that areas of the country where Hannity is more popular had more cases and deaths two weeks later, the time that it would take for the virus to start manifesting itself. 

Here’s what the paper found: “Effects on cases start to rise in late February and peak in mid-to-late March before starting to decline, consistent with the convergence in coronavirus coverage between Hannity and Carlson. A one standard deviation greater viewership difference is associated with approximately 2 percent more cases on March 7 (p < 0.01), 5 percent more cases on March 14 (p < 0.01), and 11 percent more cases on March 21 (p < 0.01)... Deaths follow a similar trajectory on a two-week lag.”

The authors concluded that “Our findings indicate that provision of misinformation in the early stages of a pandemic can have important consequences for health outcomes.”

Cognitive Biases and COVID-19 Misinformation

It’s critically important to recognize that the study’s authors did not seek to score any ideological points, given the broadly similar ideological profiles of the two hosts. The researchers simply explored the impact of accurate and inaccurate information about COVID-19 on the viewership. Clearly, the false information had deadly consequences.

Such outcomes stem from excessive trust that our minds tend to give those we see as having authority, such as media figures that we follow. This excessive trust - and consequent obedience - is called the “authority bias.” 

When Hannity told his audience to ignore concerns about COVID-19, he led many to delay taking necessary safety measures by five days compared to the average Fox News consumer, with corresponding infection and death outcomes. By contrast, Carlson telling his audience to protect themselves led to them changing their behavior three days earlier.

A related mental pattern is called “emotional contagion,” where we are unwittingly infected with the emotions of those we see as leaders. Emotions can motivate action even in the absence of formal authority, and are particularly important for those with informal authority, including thought leaders like Carlson and Hannity.

Thus, Hannity telling his audience that Democrats used anxiety of the virus as a political weapon led his audience to reject fears around the pandemic, even though fear of the virus and consequent behavioral changes was the right response to COVID-19. Carlson’s highlighting of the deadly nature of this illness motivated his audience to take actions.

Authority bias and emotional contagion facilitate the spread of misinformation and its deadly consequences, at least when we don’t take the steps necessary to figure out the facts. Such steps can range from following best fact-checking practices to getting your information from news sources that commit publicly to being held accountable for truthfulness. Remember, the more important and impactful such information may be for your life, the more important it is to take the time to evaluate it accurately to help you make the best decisions.

Key Takeaway

Misinformation kills. Failing to vet thoroughly the quality of information from your favorite news source can lead you and those you care about to suffer health disasters, whether regarding COVID-19 or other health risks.—> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• What health misinformation have you observed about COVID-19?

• What kind of insights from this article can you share with others to decrease the deadly threat of misinformation?

• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?   

Image credit: MacDill AFB

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Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

In order to prevent conflicts across age divides, organizations need to avoid dangerous judgment errors. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show.

Video: “How to Prevent Conflicts Across Age Divides

Podcast: “How to Prevent Conflicts Across Age Divides”

Links Mentioned in Video and Podcast

• Here’s the article on How to Prevent Conflicts Across Age Divides
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, we are going to talk about young people today and how to engage with them effectively. I use stories about engaging with young people, but they can be just as applicable to any other group.  

How to engage effectively with young people today? We are all talking about the difference between baby boomers, the older generation, Millennials born after 1980, I was born in 1991 so technically I count as a Millennial, and the Gen Z that was born in 1995 and afterward.  

Now there are not as many differences between, Millennials, Gen Z and Baby Boomers as you might have heard about. The generational differences are not as strong. The strongest difference, according to some research on this topic by neuroscientists are by people who are digital natives and use technology very easily and effectively and grew up with it as opposed to people who did not. And of course, some people who are Gen Z and Millennials didn’t grow up with technology, they didn’t use it effectively, efficiently, they don’t have social media plus most do. And many less older people use technology as digital natives. So that is a challenge and as an example for associations.  

There was a report showing that associations from 2019 saw a change in their renewal rate from the previous year. About 24% reported that membership renewal rates declined, many less saw renewal rates increase. Associations have more and more challenges with renewal rates. Especially renewal rates for younger people. What is the reason for this? What is the reason for the renewal problem? Well, there are shifting mindsets within younger people, as I mentioned, being digital natives and the challenge is the leaderships of the associations just as the leadership of employers tend to be older and they don’t really understand a lot of the things that make younger people tick.  

The challenge, the biggest problem is that they use tried and true old-style methods to try to engage with younger people to whom these methods don’t reach. Why do they use tried and true methods that don’t reach young people effectively? Partially because of cognitive biases which are dangerous judgment errors that cause us to make bad decisions. An example of this is the false consensus effect. That’s one of the cognitive biases, the false consensus effect. It causes older people whether in association leadership or employers in corporations, or non-profits to assume that younger people that they engage with, employees, customers and clients, younger association members are just like them, a younger version of themselves. They approach younger people as they would approach a younger version of themselves. Unfortunately, actually that is not the case, digital natives are not quite the same as older people, when they come into the workforce and associations.  

Another one is the overconfidence bias which causes the association leader, executives and employers to be too confident about how much they know about what younger people want and how to approach them effectively. So, the overconfidence bias is another cognitive bias that leads people astray.

For instance, what’s happening with associations, many of them use conferences, in person meetings, chapter meetings, to try and engage their members, that’s the main way of engaging members. And of course, in corporations, non-profits, other organizations have a lot of staff meetings as a way of engaging people, interacting, it doesn’t work so well for digital natives. These are people who grew up with technology, they are much more used to engaging virtually, then older people are used to engaging virtually and the younger people tend to be more introverted. They grow up with more use of technology. They grow up with less engagement through face to face. So, they tend to be more introverted, they prefer less face to face interaction. They prefer more technological engagement and they don’t like conferences and staff meetings nearly as much as older people do. That’s a big assumption, a big problem engaging between older people and younger people.

Another one, this is with social media. Many, many associations don’t have a LinkedIn group, they don’t have a Facebook group. They don’t really have a good twitter presence, social media presence, Facebook preference and they aren’t even on Instagram. And of course, a lot of employers are either, nor are a lot of nonprofits, corporations and other organizations. They aren’t on these platforms or they aren’t using them effectively at all. This is a huge problem. It’s actually repelling. It’s really problematic for younger people, for younger employees who want to be employed, who you would like to work for you. For younger employees and for younger association members. This is a big problem, because when they see that there is no LinkedIn group for the organization, for the association, when they see that there is no Facebook group, when they see that there is a poor presence, when you are posting the same thing, to LinkedIn and to Twitter and to Instagram. When you are posting like once a week or once every couple of days, that’s a big big problem and a big big no no. You need to post different things on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You need to post at least twice a day on average, and you need to have Instagram as well and be posting appropriate content, images. You need to have a LinkedIn Group, you need to have a Facebook group, at least you need a LinkedIn group, if you are doing professional stuff and those are interesting requirements to engage young people effectively for associations, as well are organizations of various sorts.

You need to remember those are just two principles, more introverted, people who are used to social media, digital engagement and that’s just two out of a number of things that are differences between younger people and older people. That’s something you need to remember. You, as an individual, tend to be overconfident, we all tend to be overconfident, I tend to be overconfident about my engagement with others. And We all of us have a false consensus effect about assumptions that we make about how people like to engage with us and what they think.

This is a big challenge that needs to be overcome by employers trying to engage with younger employees and by associations trying to engage with younger members.

This has been another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, and there is a blog on this topic, of course, linked in the show notes. I hope this episode has been good for you. I want to hear back from you. What did you get out of this episode? How do you think you might benefit? How would you handle engaging with younger people better, or if you are a younger person, how would you handle engaging with older people better, knowing a bit more about them yourself now? Please tell me and leave comments. I’d love to hear back from you. I want you to click like and follow if you like this episode and sign up for the Brother, Wise Decision Maker Show Guide. It’s going to be in the show notes that delivers to your in-box twice a month a whole variety of resources for making the wisest decisions possible.

You can also check out with my book “Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters.“ Also check out the Wise Decision Maker Show Course, it has 8 modules. It has video-based modules and audio based modules and text based modules to help you make the wisest decisions possible.

Always my goal is to provide you with supreme value, and I hope I have done that. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode, my friends.

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on August 11, 2020

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

COVID-19 has disrupted many areas of our lives, including our careers. With so much uncertainty, having a stable job and career is more important than ever as you prepare for many possibilities. Several key industries have been uprooted and unemployment numbers have jumped to an all-time high, giving people good cause to be concerned. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to strengthen and protect your career during these uncertain times to survive and thrive in the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

You should regularly evaluate your job security, pandemic or not, but even more so now, when stability is especially important. Safeguarding your career calls for a frank self-assessment and making the best decisions. You need to be prepared in case you get laid off, or your work hours get reduced, or the company you work for – even the industry you are part of – goes under. Aim for your career to thrive – not just survive, in this new abnormal. 

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:  

And if you like audio, here’s a podcast based on the blog:

Or simply read onward!

8  Steps to Making Wise Career Decisions During the Pandemic

Due to the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the restaurant industry, one of my coaching clients, Alex, who served as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) in a regional chain of 24 diners in the Northeast US, wanted to explore switching her career to a different industry. 

The restaurants had shifted to a takeout model, but faced mounting losses, and the government bailout, she thought, might not save the chain if the pandemic lasted for more than a few months. She felt worried about the very high probability of having to shift to a lower-ranking role in order to get into a new industry, but also worried about her future if she stuck to the restaurant industry.

Alex turned to me as her executive coach and asked for my guidance in early March, before the pandemic fully hit. I recommended an 8-step decision-making process to her that addresses the dangerous judgment errors we make called cognitive biases, and coached her through the process to help her make the wisest and most profitable decision. 

Step 1: Identify the need to launch a decision-making process. Such recognition bears particular weight when there’s no explicit crisis that cries out for a decision to be made or when your natural intuitions make it uncomfortable to acknowledge the need for a tough decision. The best decision makers take initiative to recognize the need for decisions before they become an emergency and don’t let gut reactions cloud their decision-making capacity.

Alex had already decided to evaluate the decision to switch to another role and industry, so we were able to complete this step quickly. 

Step 2: Gather relevant information from a wide variety of informed perspectives on the issue at hand. Value especially those opinions with which you disagree. Contradicting perspectives empower you to distance yourself from the comfortable reliance on your gut instincts and help you recognize any potential bias blind spots.

I asked Alex to gather information from a wide variety of people with relevant perspectives. They included professional colleagues and mentors in the restaurant industry; contacts in other industries such as vendors to her restaurant chain; experts on the pandemic; and family members impacted by her potential switch, especially her stay-at-home husband who took care of her kids.

In particular, I urged her to include input from executives in her network who shifted to another industry, both those who made the switch successfully and those who did not. Likewise, I encouraged her to have a serious conversation with her accountant on her financial capacity to bear a job search that might take a long time, given the tribulations and uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

Step 3: With the data gathered, decide the goals you want to reach. Paint a clear vision of the desired outcome of your decision-making process. It’s particularly important to recognize when a seemingly one-time decision is a symptom of an underlying issue with processes and practices. Make addressing these root problems part of the outcome you want to achieve.

With the data she had on hand, I asked Alex to come up with a list of critical goals, which should address underlying issues as well. 

Among the goals identified were: 

• To make sure that within a year, she had a role that would pay her at least 75% of the salary that she was getting as COO of the restaurant chain, whether by staying at the chain or switching to another industry, per her accountant’s guidance
• To ensure that she had substantial room for career growth if she did make the switch
• One underlying issue that Alex identified is that while she favored innovation in business, she was often at loggerheads with several key stakeholders in her current company who didn’t want to deviate from traditional business methods. She was hoping that in shifting to a different industry and company, she would be able to address this issue as well. So an additional goal was to enable her to satisfy her passion for innovation. 

Step 4: Develop a clear decision-making process criteria to weigh the various options of how you’d like to get to your vision. If at all possible, develop these criteria before you start to consider choices. Our intuitions bias our decision-making criteria to encourage certain outcomes that fit our instincts. As a result, you get overall worse decisions if you don’t develop criteria before starting to look at options. Rank the importance of each criteria on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high). 

Alex came up with a number of criteria relevant for the switch and ranked them on 

her priorities, with 1 at the low end and 10 at the high end:

• Salary in a year (8)
• Innovation opportunity (5)
• Room for growth (6)
• Stability for the industry and the company in the foreseeable medium and long-term future (7)
• Ease of transition (5)

Step 5: Generate a number of viable options that can achieve your decision-making process goals. We frequently fall into the trap of generating insufficient options to make the best decisions, especially for solving underlying challenges. 

To address this, it’s very important to generate many more options that seem intuitive to us. Otherwise, we tend to generate only 1 or at most 2 options, and go with the one we initially prefer, rather than truly considering the variety of possible futures to make the most effective choice. 

Go for 5 attractive options as the minimum. Remember that this is a brainstorming step, so don’t judge options, even though they might seem outlandish or politically unacceptable. In my consulting and coaching experience, the optimal choice often involves elements drawn from out-of-the-box and innovative options.

Initially, Alex listed just one option for switching: it was obvious that she was already leaning towards the food delivery industry. However, I convinced her to add 3 more options so that she will have 5 at the minimum. She took a bit more time deliberating and finally came up with 5 options: 

• Stay in her current position
• Food delivery industry
• Meal kit industry
• Food processing industry
• Grocery store industry  

Step 6: Weigh these options, picking the best of the bunch. When weighing options, beware of going with your initial preferences, and do your best to see your own preferred choice in a harsh light. 

Moreover, do your best to evaluate each option separately from your opinion on the person who proposed it, to minimize the impact of personalities, relationships, and internal politics on the decision itself.

At this point, Alex was still leaning towards her favored option, which was to shift to the food delivery industry. She informed me that some of her former colleagues were also able to easily transition to this industry. 

However, I cautioned her to consider and evaluate each option carefully, and separate each option from those who recommended it to her. I also urged her to factor in all the variables first, such as the fact that the grocery store industry was booming and will continue to do so. 

So we went together through each option, and she ranked each option on each criteria variable. To do so, we made a table with options on the left and variables on the top. Then, after ranking each option on the relevant criteria, we multiplied the ranking by the weight of the criteria.

Alex was very surprised to discover that the grocery store option proved much better than all the other ones, including her favored food delivery option. That’s because grocery stores boomed due to the pandemic, and were hiring both workers and executives left and right. 

Moreover, those with whom she spoke foresaw that the pandemic would lead to lasting changes in how people got food, with a much bigger emphasis on eating at home and much less on either restaurants or cafeterias in the workplace. Given that people had more time than before, and looked for ways to occupy themselves, they also foresaw a shift away from delivery and meal kits, with more people spending their time cooking instead. 

The grocery store industry thus offered much more room for growth, stability, and salary potential 

than the other fields she considered. Due to their extensive hiring, she judged it not too difficult to transition there. Due to the many options within grocery stores, they had significant room for innovation as well. 

Step 7: Implement the option you chose. For implementing the decision, you need to minimize risks and maximize rewards, since your goal is to get a decision outcome that’s as good as possible.

First, imagine the decision completely fails. Then, brainstorm about all the problems that led to this failure.

Next, consider how you might solve these problems, and integrate the solutions into your implementation plan. 

Then, imagine the decision absolutely succeeded. Brainstorm all the reasons for success, consider how you can bring these reasons into life, and integrate what you learned into implementing the decisions. 

Alex imagined that the switch to the grocery store industry failed because of three things: 

• Lack of proper network with which to source for possible job opportunities; 
• Unwillingness to take on a role that is a step down in the organizational hierarchy;
• Inflexible attitude when learning new things, brought about by years of calling the shots as COO

Alex  realized that while she had an extensive network, most of the professional contacts she had cultivated were from the restaurant industry, so her network might not be adequate for job hunting. She also had some reservations about having to take a lower-ranking role, considering how hard and how long she had worked in order to become a COO. Finally, she contemplated how difficult it might be to have to relinquish being in the driver’s seat and follow someone else’s business strategy if she does step into a non-COO role. 

Alex brainstormed on possible solutions and decided on the following: 

• Spend a month growing her network so that she could make new contacts and get to know key players in the grocery store industry.
• Get in touch with former colleagues and mentors who had stepped down from top leadership roles to get their advice and insight on what they learned from the experience.
• Upon landing a good role, focus on learning new skills, brushing up on old ones, and doing a deep dive to get to know the grocery food industry. This way, she could focus her attention on becoming a valuable member of senior management instead of dwelling on any “power limitations.” 

When she had finished imagining failure and brainstorming for solutions, Alex proceeded to imagine that the decision to shift to a new role and industry was a success. 

After thinking of potential reasons for this success, she determined that this was largely due to her efforts to efficiently transition to her new role and industry by building new core skills. Aside from this, she was also able to bring some of her unique skills from the restaurant industry to the grocery store industry, including:

• Knowing how to serve customers effectively through creating a positive customer experience
• Her expertise in managing prepared food delivery, which was a crucial skill to have, given that grocery stores had to deliver food extensively during the pandemic
• Extensive knowledge on how supply chains operate, a strategic skill to have since the grocery store industry also faces issues of supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic 

Step 8: Evaluate the implementation of the decision and revise as needed. 

As part of your implementation plan, develop clear metrics of success that you can measure throughout the implementation process. Check in regularly to ensure the implementation is meeting or exceeding its success metrics. If it’s not, revise the implementation as needed. 

Sometimes, you’ll realize you need to revise the original decision as well, and that’s fine, just go back to the step that you need to revise and proceed from that step again. More broadly, you’ll often find yourself going back and forth among these steps. Doing so is an inherent part of making a significant decision, and does not indicate a problem in your process. 

For example, say you’re at the option-generation stage, and you discover relevant new information. You might need to go back and revise the goals and criteria stages.

Alex was able to successfully shift industries. Within 6 weeks, she was able to get into a large grocery chain as Senior Vice President of Prepared Foods. While it was a step down from her role as COO, she was able to get a compensation package that was 85% of what she received as COO in her former company, owing to the fact that she had joined a much larger organization in a booming industry.

I guided her through the implementation of her decision, where she set the following metrics of success:

• Expand her network by adding 6 contacts/month specifically from the grocery store industry 
• Identify and work on 4 core skills that she needed in order to thrive in her new role and industry
• Identify at least 6 key people in her new network and engage with them every two weeks on specific industry issues
• Develop mentors within this new industry

Job Hunting for Your Career During the COVID-19 Pandemic

When I last chatted with Alex by videoconference in early May, she happily informed me that she was easily able to transition to her new role. She confided that she was relieved and grateful that she switched jobs and industries when she did, considering how the pandemic unfolded. She was successfully expanding her network in the new industry, and identifying potential mentors. 

Most of the job hunting efforts that Alex expended is similar to what a typical job seeker would do, pandemic or no pandemic:

• Internal readiness is crucial. You cannot launch a half-baked attempt, and this is why applying the 8 steps discussed in this article is important.
• Networking has become even more powerful during these times, and – fortunately – more flexible. Due to the current pandemic, what used to be an in-person activity can now be done 100% virtually, which takes less time and greatly expands your geographic reach. Colleagues, contacts, mentors, recruiters, and possible employers won’t expect you to jump through the usual hoops of attending conferences and in-person introduction meetings. Simply sending an email or connecting through LinkedIn can be a good start nowadays. 
• Put a spotlight on your skills, but in the context of the pandemic. Where before you would cite in an interview how your skills would address a department or company need, this time, you would need to frame your skills in the context of this new abnormal. Prepare to be asked pandemic-related questions, and prepare to ask them as well. Given that many companies have shifted to a virtual setup, if you have significant remote work experience, or was able to solve a work-from-home related problem in your previous roles, now would be the time to highlight it. 
• Patience doubles its value as a virtue. Consider that the recruitment and hiring process may take much longer now, due to the many things that recruitment and management teams need to consider. Be prepared to wait for an update after an interview, or to receive an offer, or to be onboarded. But also be ready to respond quickly, as in today’s virtual-focused environment, there’s a greater expectation of responding to an email within 12-24 hours. 

Conclusion

While many people would settle for their jobs merely surviving in this pandemic, do you really want to be the person who settles? Or do you want to have the job security and the career growth that helps you live up to your true professional potential? You can get that if you are willing to conduct a frank assessment of your career and take the best decision-making steps to execute a successful career change.

Key Takeaway

Changing jobs or industries during this pandemic is not only possible, but might be critically important for achieving your career potential. Use the best decision-making steps so that you and your career can thrive, not just survive. → Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• What concerns do you have about making a career change during this pandemic?

• What in the article might help you switch jobs or industries?

• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on July 28, 2020

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Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Why do you buy what you buy? Are your purchases for the right reasons? Research shows that people overestimate their logical decision-making when purchasing, and instead make many irrational choices in their shopping. We think we shop based on our self-directed goals. In reality, we are shaped very strongly by our external context: the environment crafted by advertisements and salespeople, as well as website and store layouts. 

People overestimate their ability to keep their impulses in check, a tendency that behavioral economists and neuroscientists call restraint bias. It is one of more than a hundred mental blind spots that scientists call cognitive biases, which lead us to poor choices, in shopping, relationships, and other life areas.

It’s a good thing we can use research-based strategies to notice cognitive biases and overcome these mental blindspots. 

Those Who Think They’re in Control Are Often the Most Impulsive

Research on the restraint bias shows that those smokers who have a higher opinion of their impulse control often open themselves to greater temptation, which results in a higher rate of relapse. So if you think you’re great at impulse control, think again.

A new online survey by Top10.com gives more evidence for the effect of context instead of internal goals and drivers in people’s shopping choices. The survey asked a representative sample of over 1,000 Americans about how often they made impulse purchases, how frequently their shopping choices were caused by something they learned recently, and how often the setting shaped their buying decisions. 

Usually, people under-report their own behaviors when answering these kinds of questions, especially in social settings, because they feel embarrassed having to admit their own bad decisions. This is also the case when answering online surveys.

Scientists named this cognitive bias as post-purchase rationalization, referring to people self-justifying and developing more positive feelings for shopping decisions after making them, whether they are good or bad decisions. Due to this, the actual rate of external-driven shopping behavior is probably significantly higher than what’s seen in the survey results.

Caught Up in the Moment

When shopping in-person, only one-fifth of the survey respondents said that they rarely or never make impulse purchases. More than half of the respondents reported that they make impulse purchases over 40% of the time that they shop. If you consider the negative connotations associated with the concept of impulse purchases, as evidenced by online articles on how to stop impulse shopping and even therapy programs about the topic, it’s reasonable to assume the reality is substantially higher.

The numbers describe the significant majority of shopping behavior in the US, which still happens in-person. For instance, the US Department of Commerce reports that in 2017, Ecommerce sales totaled just $453 billion, while brick-and-mortar store sales were $3,043 billion. Despite this, online shopping is rising at a faster pace compared with in-person sales, with a 16% increase in Ecommerce from 2016 to 2017 compared to a 2% increase for brick-and-mortar stores over that same period. 

So how much impulse shopping do you think takes place online? Check out the graph below. 

When Shopping In-Person, How Often Do You Make Impulse Purchases, Compared with Thought out Purchase Decisions?

When Shopping Online, How Often Do You Make Impulse Purchases, Compared with Thought out Purchase Decisions?

Twice as many people minimize impulse purchases online, giving the answer “rarely or never” two-fifths of the time, compared to one-fifth for in-person buying. Just over a third report impulse purchases online over 40% of the time, compared to over half for in-person. 

What Explains The Differences? 

Research shows that online reviews often propel people’s impulsive purchasing behaviors. Many shoppers make dangerous judgment errors by trusting the reviews they see online. Even though fake reviews are everywhere, most people don’t make the effort to learn about how to spot fakes.

Another factor that research finds affects the likelihood of making impulsive online purchases has to do with website quality: it’s more likely for us to purchase impulsively if the website looks good to us. Additionally, interactive and vivid sites also boost impulse purchases. Beware of these sites if you want to curb your impulse shopping.  

However, there are factors that can limit impulse purchases online. The vividness only affects our sight, hitting only one out of five primary senses. Additionally, when we’re window shopping online, we can make quick comparisons between items using a shopping comparison website or - if there’s no other option - looking through online reviews. We can also put our phone down or turn away from the computer to think rationally.

By contrast, in-person shopping limits these kinds of comparisons, so it’s harder to resist because most of our senses are hit by stimuli. People shouldn’t underestimate the impact of the sensory vividness of in-store stimuli, because it speaks straight to our Autopilot System, the emotional part of us that motivates the large majority of decisions. This part leads impulse purchases, and our Intentional System - our rational part - often can’t stop the Autopilot System once it’s been triggered by emotionally appealing stimuli. 

Your Environment or Your Personality?

The Top10 survey showed that the respondents didn’t have the self-awareness of when they were motivated by the context to make their shopping choices. Impulse purchases is only one of many kinds of context-shaped shopping decisions. This means that the frequency of shopping decisions influenced significantly by the external context of the shopping environment—in-person and online—must be quite a bit larger than the frequency of impulse shopping decisions.

However, when asked about how often they made choices influenced by context, respondents gave numbers lower than those they gave for impulse shopping. About two-fifths for both in-person and online shopping said they rarely or never made shopping decisions based on the context. Only a third admitted making in-person shopping decisions over 40% of the time, and less than a third for online shopping.

How Was it Framed?

How can this lack of awareness be explained? A major culprit is the subtle but powerful cognitive bias called the framing effect, the tendency to decide differently based on how the decision is framed for us by the context.

Let’s say you walk into a shoe store and see a sign that says “get a pair of shoes for FREE, when you buy 2 pairs.” This is tempting and you’re likely to make the purchase even if you only wanted to buy one pair originally. After all, you’ll be getting a free pair of shoes!

Now, imagine if you walk into another shop to purchase a sweater and see a sign saying “buy 2 sweaters, get a third FREE.” You’ll find this deal less tempting because you’ll have to pay for two sweaters, when what you originally wanted was just one, in order to get the freebie. 

Why this reaction? Our emotions go with first impressions and prefer the easiest route. You’re more likely to pick the shoe store because it offered the free pair of shoes first and only after said that you have to purchase two pairs first, received a fast positive reaction, compared to the sweater store. 

Another aspect of the environment people frequently ignore is  the informational environment, whether from the external context or the retailer. People usually pay too much attention to something emotionally charged they learned recently, especially negative information, a cognitive bias called attentional bias.

What Can You Do?

You can develop a host of mental skills to avoid the dangerous judgment errors you encounter. 

First, acknowledge your vulnerability to cognitive biases and commit to addressing them. 

Second, focus on changing your context to limit bad shopping decisions. You can shop online to avoid temptation.   

Third, delay making a decision by at least half an hour before purchasing, or sleep on it if you can. This helps increase the pull of your Intentional System. 

Fourth, making a list of what you will buy, how much of each, and for how much, can also help you. You can’t do this for everything you buy, so do these for one-time significant expenses above $100 or items that you buy regularly. 

Lastly, high-quality advice has been found to be helpful in curbing bad choices. This can come from reputable online sources or people you trust. Determine who these are and consult them before you make a shopping decision. 

Key Takeaway

When it comes to shopping, we overestimate our abilities to keep our impulses in check. You can avoid poor shopping choices by developing a host of shopping mental skills.--> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider  (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• When was the last time you made a poor shopping decision, whether in person or online?
• Is there anything in the article that will help you curb impulsive shopping?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article? 

Adapted version of an article originally published in Top10.com

Image credit: Pixabay/StockSnap

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-recognized thought leader on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended our routines and lifestyles. While being shut mostly in your home or observing infection prevention guidelines when leaving the house, chances are you might be finding it difficult to adapt to the changes of the past few months. And yet, we all have to find a way to survive and thrive in the pandemic.

Liz, a coaching client of mine, had a difficult time adjusting to the COVID-19 reality. As an executive in the insurance industry, she thrived in her fast-paced but very organized work schedule and equally full social life. Her weekdays were spent mostly at her office, and her weekends were spent catching up on errands and attending professional networking events. Since she was also an avid traveller, she would take time off periodically to avoid work burnout.

All of this came to a grinding halt when the pandemic hit, or at least this was how Liz viewed it. Stuck alone at home during the lockdown, she found it difficult to adjust to life working from home and felt that her long-term personal and career goals had been put on hold as well.

Liz asked me for guidance as she grappled with bouts of boredom, loneliness, and low work productivity. She felt that she was not adapting well to the situations surrounding the pandemic and had also started to feel that she was not in control of her life. Liz told me that she wanted to feel enthusiastic about life again despite the circumstances, and the sooner, the better. She was willing to put in the work so that she can thrive in this new abnormal, as she previously did pre-pandemic.

Knowing and Facing This New Abnormal

When I met with Liz over Zoom – by this time I had already moved my previously hybrid in-person and virtual coaching to all virtual – I told her that there were some essential points that she needed to understand in order to adjust to the new COVID-19 reality.

First and foremost, we won’t get anywhere if we don’t face the facts. We need to acknowledge that COVID-19 fundamentally disrupted our world, turning it upside down in a few short weeks in February and March 2020. We have to move past the discomfort of the normalcy bias and our intuitive feeling that the novel coronavirus “one day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” to quote Donald Trump’s words from a February 28 press conference.

Regrettably, it will not disappear; believing that it will helped get us mired so deep in this mess, making the US outbreak the worst in the world in terms of the number of deaths. The normalcy bias is one of over a hundred dangerous judgment errors that scholars in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics like myself call cognitive biases. They result from a combination of our evolutionary background and specific structural features in how our brains are wired.

Instead, we need to adapt to the long haul of battling COVID-19, at least until we create an effective vaccine, mass produce and distribute it, and actually vaccinate people. Optimistically, that will be in early 2022; more realistically, 2024-25; pessimistically, we’d never get an effective vaccine, for instance making do with weak versions that prevent 50% of all infections. If you think that’s too cynical, you may not realize that, despite facing the flu for over a century, our vaccine for it is still only about 50% effective.

Prior to a vaccine, we will be coping with COVID-19 through extreme measures such as thorough lockdowns and extensive social distancing in areas with outbreaks that don’t have the capacity and/or the political will to do the public health work that enables less extraordinary measures. That public health work involves not only providing the equipment, medications, and personnel needed to treat a surge of patients during outbreaks: that’s necessary, but not sufficient.

To relax extreme measures requires the public health work of quickly testing those with flu-like symptoms, isolating anyone who tests positive for COVID-19, contact tracing anyone they interacted with and asking those people to self-quarantine for 2 weeks, and using antibody testing to certify those who recovered from COVID-19 and are at least temporarily protected from re-infection to work in exposed areas. It also requires public education work of getting people to comply with social distancing, wear masks, minimize unnecessary social contacts, impose social peer pressure on noncompliers, and more broadly follow public health guidelines and support health workers.

Given that reality, you can anticipate that what will happen will be as follows: 1) Extreme lockdowns and social distancing to bring COVID-19 under control in a given area; 2) In a few weeks, a gradual loosening of some restrictions after COVID-19 cases fall to a minimal number; 3) After a few weeks or – if you’re lucky – a few months, COVID-19 cases will start to grow and the regional government will impose another round of extreme measures. Such whack-a-mole waves of loosening and tightening restrictions will continue until we find a vaccine.

Thrive During the Pandemic

While you’re in a new abnormal, your underlying needs and wants remain the same. You just need to figure out different ways toward satisfying them. These ways should rely much less on interacting in-person with people who aren’t part of your immediate household and much more with those who are; they should also rely much less on travel, whether in your local area or around the globe, and much more on staying at home.

You might have heard of Abraham Maslow’s theory of human motivation and the pyramid of needs based on his work. More recent research, summarized in Scott Barry Kaufman’s excellent book Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, revises this model to show that our fundamental needs consist of safety, connection, and self-esteem, and we will feel deprived without them.

We also have needs that help us achieve our full potential through personal growth, what Maslow called “self-actualization” and what Kaufman more clearly defined as exploration, love, and purpose. A good approach to adapting to the new abnormal is by evaluating your life through the lens of these needs and ensuring that you can still satisfy them.

In order to guide her back to a thriving mindset, Liz and I focused on self-actualization during our coaching sessions.

Exploration

Exploration in this sense is driven not by fear and anxiety – such as the watching of daily news briefings on the pandemic – but by the thrill of discovery and curiosity about the novel, the challenging, the unknown. Exploration requires going outside your comfort zone and experiencing the growth associated with doing so.

While you’re restricted by being at home, you have a universe of information available for exploration through the internet. Decide on an area of discovery that you will pursue, something genuinely challenging.

You might take this time for an exploration of a different culture. Take the time to learn about, say, the daily life of people in the Philippines, and connect with some of them on Facebook to have conversations about their experiences and beliefs. Having done so myself, I can attest it’s a difficult experience of personal growth to grasp how similar they are to me, yet how different at the same time.

Perhaps you can take some time to explore volunteering virtually for a good cause, experiencing personal growth in doing so. For instance, during this pandemic many people – especially older adults – experience even more social isolation than they did before. A number of nonprofits provide an opportunity for you to connect with them through phone calls and video chats, giving them a sense of companionship.

You can also work on mastering new skills or further developing existing ones. Being at home offers a great opportunity to learn an instrument, pick up coding skills, or try to make a viral Youtube video.

After one of our coaching sessions, Liz decided to face her loneliness head on by exploring readily available technologies and online activities. This meant shifting most, if not all, of her personal interactions to a virtual mode. She scheduled more video calls with her friends and family, and also decided to reconnect with old friends.

This eventually led to rediscovering an old book club she used to participate in actively when she was younger. As she reconnected with the old members, they decided to revive and expand the book club, with Liz taking the lead due to her vast network and excellent organizational skills. Liz and the core group members made it a point to invite other friends who were also spending the lockdown period alone.

These actions led to a much more thriving social life for Liz, which helped her ward off loneliness, especially during the weekends, when she wasn’t working. With the online book club going really well, the members even decided to physically meet up once it was safe to do so, whenever that may be.

Love

Exploration also contributes to the second aspect of self-actualization highlighted by Kaufman: expressing love toward others, by which he means making a positive impact on their lives. By volunteering virtually to provide companionship to lonely elder adult strangers, you satisfy your need to make that positive impact.

Of course, you can also bring that love toward your existing relationships, such as to your family, partner, friends, and even your pets. Besides simply maintaining your connections – a fundamental need – you can also, without any expectations in return, devote your energy toward improving the lives of those with whom you have relationships. Perhaps you can lead the way in organizing virtual parties or game nights. Maybe you can send some healthy fruit to a friend’s house, just because. Surprise your romantic partner with an unexpected date night.

Let’s go back to Liz, who decided that the lockdown period would be the perfect time to adopt a pet. While she had cats growing up and had always wanted to adopt one again, she never had the time to do so previously due to her busy schedule.

After she realized that the new abnormal meant that she would have to spend more time at home - and in some aspects, she had already begun to feel more comfortable working mostly from home - she immediately headed to her community’s local animal shelter to look for a cat to adopt.

That day, she went home with not just one, but three cats - the first she adopted, while the other two she agreed to foster for a short period. The animal shelter was grateful for her help as they were understaffed due to the pandemic, and had been looking for people who can temporarily foster unadopted pets until operations were fully up and running again.

Liz felt immense happiness at having companions again, and also for having been able to help out in the community in her own way.

Purpose

The other critical aspect of self-actualization involves developing, refining, and pursuing your sense of meaning and purpose, a topic I explore in much more depth in my Find Your Purpose Using Science. In the context of the pandemic, it’s even more important to seek proactively a sense that you are contributing to something you’re passionate about that’s bigger than yourself, a personal mission of service that offers you fulfillment and contentment.

Some might find their sense of purpose in raising their kids and otherwise taking care of their friends and family, and that’s fine. You might focus on improving your local community, such as encouraging others to stay at home during the pandemic through blogging about your fun at-home adventures, and that’s fine as well.

Others (including myself) may emphasize serving their society through spreading valuable messages about how to adapt to and survive and thrive during the pandemic. Or maybe you might continue addressing issues you focused on before the pandemic, for instance accountants who volunteered to do taxes for low-income people continuing to do so, except via virtual means. Whatever you do, evaluate how much it contributes to your sense of purpose, and revise your activities to help further develop that sense within yourself.

Going back to Liz, the strengthened relationships and self-confidence brought about by her new virtual lifestyle has renewed her enthusiasm not just in her personal life, but also in the way she viewed and approached her profession. As she began to feel optimistic, she felt more willing to open up and participate in company-wide initiatives.

Liz signed up to mentor junior female executives. With her life and career goals coming into focus again, she wanted to take part in giving guidance and direction to younger women who were charting a similar career path. This proved to be a wise and fulfilling move, as not only did she prove to be effective at mentoring, she also felt more excited about each day despite the limits brought about by the pandemic. Moreover, through mentoring them virtually, she was able to breach geographic divides effectively.

Conclusion

When I last spoke with Liz, she had been extremely satisfied with the results of the steps she took during the first few months of the pandemic. She told me that she would be fine with going back to the office once it was safe to do so (or working from home for a longer period if needed), but she could see herself maintaining most of the changes she made as it ultimately added to her sense of purpose.

While the new abnormal ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented changes to our lives, there’s no reason you can’t thrive in the new abnormal while we wait for a vaccine. You just need to identify and address your self-actualization needs for exploration, love, and purpose.

Key Takeaway

The journey to self-actualization is also your path to thriving in this pandemic.  Evaluate your life through the lens of exploration, love, and purpose and ensure that you satisfy these needs...> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• How may pursuing self-actualization be helpful for you?
• Where might you do a better job of satisfying your needs during this pandemic?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on September 1, 2020.

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Company cultures and top leaders may unconsciously penalize subordinates who bring them bad news. This dangerous judgment error is called the MUM effect and it creates an atmosphere of secrecy that leads successful companies to stagnate and deteriorate. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes the danger of missing vital information due to the MUM Effect.

Video: “Are You Missing Vital Information Due to the MUM Effect?”

Podcast: “Are You Missing Vital Information Due to the MUM Effect?”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article: Are You Missing Vital Information Due to the MUM Effect?
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of “The Wise Decision Maker Show”, where you improve your ability to make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Today, we will talk about how to get negative bad information. It’s actually surprisingly hard to get negative information because, within a company, often it does not trickle upward. Often, it stays at the lowest levels. I’ll give you a case study. I will give you a story about how this happened.

I was giving this conference at a manufacturing association on avoiding business disasters for manufacturers. There was a tall thin man, probably in his 50s, who approached me, and he looked pretty agitated. I was a little concerned. I hoped he wasn’t angry at something I had said. He came up to me and introduced himself as Mark, and he asked me to tell him more about one of the cognitive biases/dangerous judgment errors that I have been talking about.

Now, if you have been following “The Wise Decision Maker Show” for a while, you know that cognitive biases are what cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists like myself call the dangerous judgement errors that are part of our brains’ wiring due to our evolutionary heritage, due to the data processing capacities of the brain, causing us to make bad mistakes in business settings, in life, and elsewhere.

The cognitive bias that Mark was interested in was called the MUM effect – M-U-M, mum, like quiet. MUM refers to people at the lower levels of the organization not passing negative information up the chain of command. They do what’s called shooting the messenger, colloquially, “Don’t shoot the messenger”, where people who actually give bad information, pass that information on, are blamed for that information or punished for passing up that information.

It’s a very common problem in companies. It happens a lot, so it has its own name by now, the MUM effect, and it applies not only to companies but all sorts of interactions where humans are. You don’t what to pass on information, that is the MUM effect. I started giving him some examples from my consulting and coaching. I told him how the MUM effect harms companies, causes them damage, because that’s what Mark seemed to want to know about. And he grew more and more agitated, more and more upset.

I wondered what was going on here. This is feeling kind of weird. Eventually he interrupted me and he shared his own story. He used to be the CEO of a company – a pretty successful manufacturing company, a few hundred people in the Midwest – and the company was doing pretty well until the Great Recession hit in 2008, and then things were kind of tough for a bit.

Mark thought that he was, as a CEO, pulling it through this rough patch, until a couple of years later when he was called by the chair of the board of directors and asked about some of the accounting discrepancies that had been occurring in the company. Mark was very surprised. “What accounting discrepancies? I have no idea what you are talking about.”

Apparently, the board got some anonymous whistleblower complaints about some accounting issues in the company. There were two members of the board who had some experience with accounting, and so they went to investigate, along with Mark, these accounting issues.

They went to the CFO of the company. They went to the accounting department, and they discovered, they were shocked – apparently, the CFO along with a couple of head accounting personnel, the comptroller and so on, were using some of the same fraudulent accounting techniques that got Enron and WorldCom and others in trouble around the time of the previous recession 2002, 2003.

It wasn’t quite as bad as Enron, but it was on the same principles. And they were using that to hide the negative situation of the company and the seriousness of the problems of the losses from Mark and from the board, and so on. It was a privately held company, so they were hiding it from the owners. It wasn’t a publicly held company, but still it’s not something you should ever do.

It was a very serious situation. Mark fired the CFO, fired the accountants who were involved. As they dug deeper, it turned out that the accounting shenanigans were actually not limited to the Great Recession. It happened on quite a bit smaller level, but it happened before, too.

So, they started investigating more about what was going on, and they found that accounting was not the only department where such issues were happening. It was also in operations, in manufacturing. For safety, there were some safety issues that occurred that were swept under the rug. The customer service department, some of the negative customer service interactions, they weren’t brought up to the attention of management and they weren’t reported as they should have been.

As a result of a broader investigation, what the board of directors discovered – Mark discovered, to his chagrin – was that the problem actually was Mark. He was, unfortunately, behaving in such a way that people who were passing up positive information were rewarded. People who were passing up negative information were punished. So that was really bad. It encouraged complacent behavior. It encouraged hiding negative information in the company, in the lower parts of the company, not passing it up the chain of command.

As a result, of course, that really hurts the company. Research shows that it’s not only Mark. It’s a very typical CEO trait. It’s a very typical top-leader trait that as any CEO goes higher in the ranks, they get more and more cut off from the previous sources of information, from the bottom up reports.

And the people who surround them, unless they are very actively fighting the natural human thing, how things naturally occur, is that the people around them become the praisers. Everyone likes to be praised, right? It feels good. It feels comfortable. You like people who like you. You like people who praise you. You like people who give you good news.

You don’t like intuitively people who give you bad news. So, unless you actively fight this very natural human tendency, you are going to get surrounded by sycophants, by people who just kiss up to you, the brown-nosers, ass-kissers and so on. Those are the people who remain around you if you don’t actively fight this trait.

And very many CEOs don’t. They just don’t fight this trait. They don’t realize that that’s what’s going on. They might think that they want the truth, but their behavior, their emotions aren’t actually conducive to learning the truth.

And the board ended up firing Mark. I would say it wasn’t an unfair thing to do because he was responsible as the CEO for setting the company culture, and the organization’s performance clearly suffered. It was really hurting. Good people were leaving the company because they don’t want to be in such an atmosphere where telling the truth gets them punished. And the people who were staying were more the people who just kept their heads down and passed up only good information.

The company failed to adjust to shifting market conditions even before the Great Recession, and it was in pretty serious trouble, much more serious than Mark was understanding when he thought he was taking the company through the rough patch.

Again, this happens very often. There was a study by Leadership IQ of 1087 board members, members of boards of directors of 286 organizations, that fired their CEOs. So, 286 organizations, 1087 people. That’s a lot. What they found was one of the top 5 reasons (so over a fifth), 23% of the CEOs were fired for denialism, meaning denying negative reality, failing to face the facts. And of course, part of the failing to face the facts comes from creating culture, where the negative facts don’t flow to the top and where they’re hidden at the bottom. Whether it is about safety or about customer service or whether it’s about the basic numbers of the company hidden through fraudulent accounting techniques, that’s a serious, serious problem.

And economic downswings often reveal this negative information and lead to the removal of leaders like Mark. So, Mark was actually in a pretty tough spot after he was fired. He was in a grim state of mind. He fell into a depressive episode for a while. He slept most of the day, didn’t want to eat, didn’t work out. He stopped spending time with friends. He snapped at his wife and kids. It got to be pretty bad, from his story. He was kind of tearing up when he was telling me this. It was hard to hear. It was a tough story. It was a tough time for Mark after he was fired. I mean, he realized that it was, to a large extent, his fault, and that was pretty bad.

Finally, his family wisely staged an intervention after he lost 40 pound in about 5 months. They staged an intervention. They got him some professional help. They got him to a therapist. They got him to a psychiatrist, he start taking meds and eventually he was able to address the depression that was taking serious hold of him. Five months, that’s a rough time.

So Mark, at the time I met him, he was just recovering. He recovered already his mental health. He was recovering from his job loss, his professional career. He was trying to recover his professional career. He went to the conference, the one I was giving the keynote at, both to tap his network, to try to get another job, after the 5 months that he was out. It was more than that – it was by that time 7 months, because it was 5 months in a depressive state, and it took 2 months to start recovering to the state where he was comfortable beginning to network.

And so he also wanted to tap his network to get another job and to also try to figure out what was going on, what happened, and he wanted to hear my speech on cognitive biases, these dangerous judgment errors to try to understand more what happened to him. He clearly made some bad decisions, bad judgment errors in his decisions making.

He was kind of upset when he found out how our brains screw us in professional decision making, even at the very top of the organization. In some ways, more at the top of the organization because of what I mentioned before, being cut off from previous sources of information, being surrounded naturally and intuitively, if you just go with your gut intuitions, what’s comfortable for you, being surrounded with sycophants.

And he felt confident that what happened with the manufacturing company he used to run would have never occurred if he learned about the MUM effect and other cognitive biases because he would have been working against the natural gut intuitions that caused him to make these really bad decisions.

So, he thanked me for gaining this understanding and started learning much more actively about cognitive biases, these dangerous judgment errors. And he made sure that he used them in his next job. So, he succeeded eventually in finding a new role, within the next year he found a role as the COO – not CEO – of a smaller manufacturing company, it was like 150 people.

Eventually he moved into the CEO position. And both as the COO and the CEO, he made sure to spread information about dangerous judgment errors, the cognitive biases, throughout the company as a part of helping his team, both continuing his own professional development in this and helping his team make sure that they don’t make the dangerous judgment errors that are such a natural intuitive part of who we are if we don’t try to take deliberate steps to address these dangerous judgment errors.

Mark’s story – I am still in contact with Mark, he sends me questions occasionally by email, and we chat by email, on the phone and Zoom video conference – and his story really stuck with me. Every time I think about it – when I am having a tough time convincing business leaders, professionals, entrepreneurs, about the importance of dangerous judgment errors, people saying to me, I go with my gut all the time – I remember Mark.

I remember his story and remember the terrible decisions we all make, occasionally when we go with our gut reactions because of the way our gut reactions are wired to intuitively surround us with sycophants and so many other problems. The MUM effect is one of over a hundred cognitive biases, over a hundred of these dangerous judgment errors that really screw up our judgment in very important situations, especially as we grow in our careers and become top-level leaders where we are cut off from previous sources of information.

Mark reminds me of how high-flying careers can easily be brought down without people doing anything malignant or malicious. Mark did not know about the accounting fraud that was going on. He set up a culture – he unintentionally created the culture. As the leader, he set the precedent. He set the culture and the norms that allowed that to happen. These cognitive biases, these dangerous judgment errors, can do the same thing to anyone. Any leader, any follower, any professional, anyone, you can fall into them, and just like Mark fell into them without realizing it.

And what you need to do, and what Mark realized he needed to do and he’s been working on in his new company that he is running – the manufacturing company, smaller, about 150 people or so – is to teach people there about these dangerous judgment errors, these cognitive biases and make sure they don’t fall into them.

And I hope you take Mark’s example. Don’t fall into these dangerous judgment errors. Do the counterintuitive things. Don’t go with what’s comfortable. What’s comfortable will often get us into huge trouble as it got Mark into trouble, hearing praise and liking people who liked him and who liked the company. You want to do the hard thing, the counter-intuitive thing, the thing that will be most beneficial for the long-term success of your career and your company by making sure to use effective decision-making strategies that address these dangerous judgment errors.

Check out the blog on this topic. It’s linked in the show notes, as always. There are some more blogs linked in the show notes. If you like this episode, please click Like and leave your comments in the episode. Let us know what you think. Let me know what you think.

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To learn much more about making the wisest and most profitable decisions, there is a great free resource called the “Wise Decision Maker” course. It’s an 8-module, video-based course. Please check it out. Register for it at disasteravoidanceexperts.com/subscribe. It’s also linked in the notes.

If you would like to get more in-depth information, very specific take-aways, and a lot of case studies, check out my book on this topic. “Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make The Best Decisions And Avoid Business Disasters”.

I hope to see you on the next episode of “The Wise Decision Maker Show”. As always, the wisest and most profitable decisions to you.

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on August 18, 2020

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Have you ever felt unhappy about a purchase you made despite spending hours reading product descriptions and reviews, comparing dozens of options, and finally choosing what you perceived to be the best deal? I faced the same problem many years ago, when I still lacked the knowledge of effective shopping techniques around buying choices.

We make shopping mistakes because of how our brain is wired and because retailers use human psychology to their advantage by manipulating the shopping process, particularly in digital contexts. Amazon and other retailers want us to spend as much time as possible on their websites to tempt us with a variety of add-ons and options and to cause us FOMO (fear of missing out) on the best possible deal. This drains our time and wallets - and even our happiness. It’s a good thing you can learn more about the psychological dangers of shopping through cutting-edge research in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience.

Choose + Buy = Happiness?

Tom’s wife usually does the grocery shopping in the family, but she had the flu so Tom went instead. Selecting the fruits and veggies went fine, but he hit a wall when he got to the bread section. There were over 60 varieties to choose from. Tom examined the ingredients and made comparisons; he wanted to get it right, after all. After 10 minutes of deliberation, he picked one that seemed like the perfect choice.

However, he had to repeat the process for the rest of the packaged goods. Different brands offered a host of choices, and his wife’s usual shopping list that said “bread” or “cheese” didn’t help. By the time he was finished shopping and paid for everything, he was tired and miserable.

Why did Tom have this kind of experience? Shouldn’t he be happy that there were many choices in the supermarket? After all, mass media presents the narrative that abundance of choice equates with happiness.

According to neuroscience and behavioral economics research, the real story is more complicated than that. While having some options make us feel good, once we get beyond that small number, we feel less and less happy the more choices we get.

For example, in one study, shoppers at a food market saw a display table with free samples of 24 different types of gourmet jam. On another day in the same market, the display table had 6 different types of jam. The larger display attracted more interest, but people who saw the smaller selection were 10 times more likely to purchase the jam, and they felt better doing so compared with those who had to select among the larger display.

This phenomenon was later named “choice paralysis”, referring to the fact that after a certain minimal number of choices, additional options cause us to feel worse about making a decision and also makes us unlikely to decide in the first place. This applies to both major and minor decisions in life, such as when choosing a retirement plan or something as simple as ice cream flavors.

Loss Aversion & Post-Purchase Rationalization of Buying Choices

Why do more choices cause unhappiness? Well, one typical judgment error we make because of the wiring in our brains is called loss aversion. Our gut reactions prefer avoiding losses to making gains. This is probably because of our evolutionary background; our minds evolved for the savanna environment, not for our modern shopping context. Due to this, when we have lots of options, we feel anxious about making the wrong choice and losing out on the best one.

Even having the opportunity to change your mind can be problematic. As it turns out, the benefit of having the option to exchange a product or get a refund is a myth. Another counterintuitive behavioral economics finding shows that people prefer to have the option to refund their purchases but feel more satisfied if the shopping decision is irreversible.

This is due to a phenomenon called post-purchase rationalization, which is also called choice-supportive bias. Research finds that after making a final decision, we try to justify it. We focus on the positives and brush off the negative aspects. After all, if you’re a smart person, you would not make a bad purchase, right? However, if the choice can be reversed, this post-purchase rationalization doesn’t turn on, and we’ll keep thinking about whether it was the right choice.

In-Person vs. Online Shopping in Buying Choices

Online shopping in many ways facilitates a more unhappy shopping experience. Let’s start with choices. According to research, most consumers have the same process of online decision making. The shopping process divides into two stages: first, lightly screen a large set of products to come up with a smaller subset of potential options; second, perform an in-depth screening of the items in this subset.

The much wider selection of products online, compared to a brick-and-mortar store, gives online shoppers the opportunity to examine a greater number of potential options. We know we tend to like more options, believing (wrongly) that the more options we examine, the happier we will feel about our final choice. As a result, we make ourselves less happy by examining even more products online, without even seeing the damage we’re doing to our happiness.

Another counterintuitive problem: it’s easier to return items you purchased online than in a store. For a store, you have to drive back there, wait in line and explain what had gone wrong, and then head back home. By contrast, most large online retailers will ask you to print a return label from their website and then ship the item back to them. Oftentimes, they would also pay for the shipping fee. This process is easier and takes much less time, thus many shoppers tend to see their online shopping decisions as tentative, therefore making themselves unhappy.

Another challenging aspect of online shopping concerns data privacy and security. Shoppers feel unhappy about the extensive tracking of their data online. Smart consumers know about and feel concerned about the risks involved in online shopping because of how online retailers store and sell their information.

How Can Your Buying Choices Promote Happiness?

Digging into research on factors that made my shopping a more unhappy experience years ago helped me improve my buying decisions. When choosing what to buy, the number one technique involves satisficing as opposed to maximizing. This is backed up by extensive research, both involving in-person and online shopping.

Maximizing behavior refers to finding the perfect option when shopping. Maximizers exhaust all available options to make sure that they get the best deal in terms of performance, price, and so on. They have high expectations, and they anticipate that the product will fulfill this promise.

It’s the opposite for satisficers. They set certain minimal criteria that need to be met, then search for the first available product that meets this criteria. They look for products that are “good enough” and those that can get the job done, even without the bells and whistles or savings which they might have found in an extended search.

Research shows that maximizing behavior results in less happiness, less satisfaction, and more regret than satisficing. This finding applies especially in societies that value individual choice highly, such Western Europe and the United States. In societies that place less of a focus on individual choice such as China, maximizing has only a slight correlation with unhappiness, yet still contributes to it.

To be happier, satisfice and limit your choices! Make a shortlist that compares a reasonable number of options and doesn’t include every product available. There’s no such thing as the perfect deal. Buying something that gets the job done, without excessive searching, is going to make you happier in the long run.

When you’re shopping in person, avoid Tom’s problems by skipping big supermarkets with a gazillion options of every product. Instead, go to grocery stores with a small selection of acceptable products, whether Aldi for cheaper price or Trader Joe’s for higher quality. You don’t need 40 types of butter, do you? Just 4 will do. If you really need to go to the supermarket, save yourself from the hassle of choosing from so many varieties by going for the store brand every time.

When shopping in-person and especially online, it helps to get objective information in advance to limit your options. Make sure to use credible product reviews and media sources for these.

You will also probably feel happier about a purchase by ignoring free return or refund offers, unless the product is defective. Treat each shopping decision as final and irreversible, and get post-purchase rationalization working for you. Combine this with satisficing to get great results,  because when you focus on “good enough”, your brain automatically highlights the positives, downplays the negatives, and lowers your expectations.

Key Takeaway

More buying choices lead to less happiness. To make better shopping decisions, satisfice and limit your options. There is no such thing as the perfect deal, so look for products that are good enough.---> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• When was the last time you were dissatisfied with a purchase despite spending hours comparing products and reading online reviews?

• Is there anything in the article that will help you become a satisficer?

• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Adapted version of an article originally published in Top10.com

Image credit: Pixabay/StockSnap

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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-recognized thought leader on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

What risks will you face in your work and life if the US Presidential election results in an election disaster, such as a constitutional crisis and widespread civil unrest?

That question may sound unreal to you. Yet it doesn’t sound so far-fetched to many political leaders and experts observing the run-up to the election. Indeed, major political players are reshaping their strategies and investing substantial time and money to prepare for the likelihood of this scenario.

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:

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Or simply read onward!

The main dynamics that may well bring about such a troubling outcome stem from holding this election in the middle of a pandemic. Perhaps twice as many are voting absentee by mail rather than risk catching COVID by voting in-person.

Mailed ballots take much longer to count than in-person votes. These problems will be exacerbated by: many less volunteers willing to help with the elections due to the pandemic; budget cuts coming from the financial blows resulting from the pandemic-induced recession; and most importantly, legal challenges due to the many more ways voters can make mistakes in absentee ballots compared to in-person voting.

Moreover, many of the most important swing states don’t allow absentee ballot counting until election day. That means it’s quite likely that there won’t be a clear victory for either party on election day.

The most dangerous scenario stems from many more Democrats voting by mail than Republicans. The outcome may be what’s called a “red mirage”: Donald Trump appears to be ahead on election night due to the fast counting of in-person ballots, but his lead starts shrinking as mail-in ballots are slowly counted.

Considering Trump’s criticism of voting by mail as rife with fraud, despite his FBI Director saying there’s no evidence of such fraud, it’s very likely he will call such a turn of events fraudulent. Indeed, he did so in Florida in 2018 when the lead of his allies shrank during post-election day counting.

He’s almost certain to do so if his own lead starts to shrink, which it inevitably will as many more Democrats vote by mail. He’ll likely unilaterally declare victory and call to stop the count.

Civil Strife and Political Chaos

What then? Unfortunately, widespread civil strife is a very serious possibility.

Polling shows a surprising and growing number of Americans on both sides of the political divide – 44 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats – who feel at least some justification in using violence if their side loses the election. Those numbers grew substantially from June, when they were 35 percent for Republicans and 37 percent for Democrats.

Moreover, in that same survey, those who answered that there is either “a lot” or “a great deal” of justification for violence if the other side wins increased for Democrats from 16 percent in June to 19 percent in September. For Republicans, it grew from 15 percent in June to 20 percent in September. By the election, these numbers will very likely go up even further.

The fact that protests and counter-protests over police violence and pandemic-related shutdowns this summer resulted in a number of deaths already supports this statistical evidence. And mark my words, if prominent political leaders say that the count should be stopped and declare victory, the summer of protests will seem like a pleasant summer rain before a derecho of violence after the elections.

Republicans will come to election offices, city halls, and state capitols to protest the count, especially in swing states but also across the country. It will be a vastly exaggerated repeat of the “Brooks Brothers” riot that happened in November 2000 with the disputed George W. Bush vs. Al Gore Presidential election, which provides a clear precedent.

An even more recent and ominous precedent: this summer’s protestors setting police stations on fire. Why wouldn’t those who want to stop the count take over an election office and burn the uncounted ballots? That way, there really won’t be any way to finish the count fairly and accurately.

Democrats will counter-protest to protect the count. Downtowns will fill with violence.

The Brooks Brothers riot succeeded in stopping the election count and resulted in Bush’s eventual victory. This time the potential violence, ballot destruction, and extensive legal challenges may result in stopping the election count in enough states to prevent either candidate from having a clear majority.

In that case, it would be up to the legislatures, Governors, and Secretaries of State of each state to decide how to distribute the electors from that state; there is already planning for such scenarios by the campaigns in case of disputed, unfinished counts.

Given that many swing states have legislatures controlled by one party, and the governorship by a different party, each would appoint a competing slate of electors. There’s no clarity about how to count such competing electors. If enough swing states face such a scenario, the Electoral College vote, which happens on December 14 and is certified on January 6, would be inconclusive.

In that case, the role of choosing the President goes to the US House of Representatives, with each state delegation having one vote. It’s likely that the Democrats will keep control of the House, but Republicans currently control 26 state delegations.

If the Republicans retain that majority and the vote happens, Trump would win. However, if the Democrats control the House, they could refuse to seat some Republicans for a variety of reasons, such as Democratic lawyers claiming election improprieties for those Republicans. It’s an impasse: we’re in a true constitutional crisis, with no way out.

Of course, while all of this is happening in the halls of power, people are rioting in the streets. The stock market is spiraling downward, as is the economy.

This scenario might seem like a true “Electionpocalypse.” However, it’s not the worst scenario by any stretch of the imagination.

What if a foreign enemy decides to take advantage of this uncertainty to launch a major cyberattack? Or perhaps a major superpower like China might decide on a military takeover of its long-time target of Taiwan, as it has been threatening to do lately following its successful legal takeover of Hong Kong, with the US preoccupied internally and unable to launch a meaningful defense?

What if the US military, tired of the incompetence and deadlock in the political system, decides to step in unilaterally? How about if the current Commander-in-Chief calls for it to step in, as many political leaders and experts fear he might – will they violate their commitment to obey civilian leadership? So many worse scenarios are possible.

I Don’t Believe It

You might have been nodding along while reading all that, agreeing in principle it’s all possible. Yet somehow, you’re not opening a new tab and Googling “how to protect my business and family from civil strife.” Why not?

Perhaps because while your rational, reasonable brain may admit the distinct substantial possibility of an Electionpocalypse, your gut doesn’t buy it. A voice inside your gut whispers that it never happened before, and so it won’t happen now; even if something like this happened on a much smaller scale in the 2000 election, things turned out ok, so this will turn out ok, too. And besides, this is just fear-mongering and idle speculation that can’t impact my life, the voice says.

Do you remember that same voice from reading articles at the beginning of this year about the possibility of COVID-19 turning into a pandemic? Your rational brain acknowledged the possibility; your gut reaction told you everything will be fine and to not worry about it, causing so many businesses, governments, and individuals to fail in preparing and planning for the pandemic, despite numerous warnings by risk management experts like myself.

Our brains have a disastrous tendency to underestimate greatly – essentially ignore – low-probability and high-impact disruptors that never happened before, what you might have heard called “black swans” or “unknown unknowns.” We find it hard to fathom that the country in which we live, the shining beacon of democracy, may now lose one of the fundamental pillars of democracy: an orderly and peaceful transfer of power.

This disastrous tendency comes from dangerous judgment errors that researchers in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases. These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health to politics and even shopping. They result from a combination of our evolutionary background and specific structural features in how our brains are wired; they lead us to make disastrous gut-based decisions, unless we use effective decision-making techniques to select the best options.

Cognitive Biases and Election Disaster Risk

Three cognitive biases bear the biggest fault for our failure to face the truth that we need to accept and plan for the possibility of an election disaster.

The normalcy bias refers to our brains assuming things will keep going as they have been – normally – and evaluate the near-term future based on our short-term past experience. As a result, we underestimate drastically both the likelihood of a serious disruption occurring and the impact of one if it does occur.

Thus, the black swan of an Electionpocalypse seems to our minds theoretically plausible. Yet, our gut feeling is that it’s so realistically unlikely that we don’t need to do anything to address it. We feel uncomfortable – in our gut – even fully admitting the real likelihood of this scenario, because then we have to treat it as realistic. Doing so feels very anxiety-inducing and depressing, and our mind shies away from this possibility.

That’s where a second powerful cognitive bias comes in, the confirmation bias. This mental blindspot describes our strong preference to look only for information that already supports our pre-existing beliefs and gut feelings. Even when we do find data that goes against our current intuitions, our gut reaction is to feel uncomfortable with and reject such evidence.

Regarding an election disaster, you might be feeling that you should reject the information in this article, even though it makes rational sense and provides extensive citations as evidence. Contemplating such a scenario seriously might cause too much discomfort. Your intuition might be driving you to reject its plausibility out of hand, rather than evaluating the likelihood carefully.

When we make plans, we naturally believe that the future will go according to plan. That wrong-headed mental blindspot, the planning fallacy, results in us not preparing sufficiently for contingencies and problems, and not changing our plans nearly quickly enough when they do come up.

The planning fallacy applies especially to black swan-type low-probability, high-impact events that never happened before, like the potential of an upcoming Electionpocalypse. It feels very counterintuitive to change our well-set plans for something that feels like it’s unreal.

Indeed, it should feel counterintuitive if you’re confronting the planning fallacy. You’re trying to go against your basic, inbuilt intuitions, and doing so isn’t easy at all.

Remember back to how difficult it is to resist eating a second doughnut after you decided to eat just one from the open box of a dozen donuts in the breakroom. Our gut reaction is triggered by sugar, due to our evolutionary background in the ancestral savannah and the need to eat as much sugar as possible to survive and thrive. In our modern world, with the overabundance of sugar, our feelings drive us to want much more sugar than we should have for the sake of our health.

By resisting that impulse, you’re resisting your gut reactions. You’re doing the same when fighting to avoid being overwhelmed by the planning fallacy, the normalcy bias, or the confirmation bias.

What’s the Real Risk of an Election Disaster?

Once we’re confronted with a substantial likelihood of an upcoming low-probability, high-impact negative event, we often make bad decisions about how to assess and mitigate such risks. That’s because our gut reaction to threats is the fight-or-flight response, a binary mindset of yes or no, black or white, attack or flee.

Such reactions helped us survive on the ancestral savannah, but don’t serve us well in response to most threats in the modern world. You can’t fight such low-probability, high-impact events, nor can you flee them. What you can do is look at what’s under your control: how you respond to their possibility by taking prudent steps to prepare and plan for various scenarios.

However, that’s not what usually happens. Mostly, we feel anxious and worried, fretting without doing anything productive.

Indeed, according to a poll I took of my contacts on LinkedIn, about two thirds feel at least somewhat concerned about disruptions to their work due to the possibility of an election disaster; over a third feel seriously or very seriously concerned.

Yet in follow-up interviews, almost no one is taking specific steps to address this possibility for their work and life. A couple are taking concrete steps, such as saving money and developing a side hustle, yet these actions aren’t nearly enough to mitigate the danger. Such failure to take action on claimed beliefs offers a classical example of a disparity between rational belief and gut feeling: we may believe we should lose weight, but we end up eating donuts instead of healthy fruit.

Instead, you need to apply the tool of probabilistic thinking, which allows you to calculate the probabilities of various events and plan out a long-term strategy.

First, assign a probability to various election disaster scenarios. What’s the probability that the mail-in ballots will take a long time to be processed due to legal challenges and civil strife, say stretching at least until the Electoral College vote on December 14? Given the serious preparations by both campaigns and other political leaders, as well as election expert analysis, I’d say no less than 30 percent, and as much as 50. You can assign your own numbers based on your own estimates.

After that, what’s the likelihood that the Electoral College vote will not be decisive? Perhaps only half of that, so being conservative and taking half of 30, we’re at 15 percent.

What about the likelihood of a stalemate in the House in early January, resulting in a full-blown constitutional crisis with no clear way out? This is quite likely if the situation gets there, perhaps two-thirds of all possibilities given the House makeup. So, we take two-thirds of 15 percent and end up at 10 percent.

Mitigating Election Disaster Risk

Now, we’ve turned the “black swan” of an election disaster into what’s called a “grey rhino,” an easily predictable, high-impact threat. How can you mitigate it?

First, imagine what the future for your work and life would look like if the civil strife and legal challenges lasted only through the Electoral College vote. What kind of problems might come up for you and how can you solve them?

For example, if you aren’t working at home and your place of work is near a city center or election office, perhaps it’s wise to transition to working at home for now while making sure to protect your workplace well against looting. If your home is close to such places, stock up on consumables and medicine, and get ready for curfews and other policing measures against civil disorder. Perhaps withdraw some money from your bank, in case it’s hard to get to it during this time.

Importantly, prepare psychologically for the likelihood of this scenario and its traumatic consequences. The experience will be traumatic, and you’ll need to take time for self-care, as well as supporting others you care about.

If you’re in a leadership role, re-evaluate your team and your organization's business continuity plan. Recall that voice in your gut encouraging you to ignore the possibility of the pandemic: the normalcy bias, confirmation bias, and the planning fallacy led to the vast majority of organizations to not prepare nearly well enough for COVID, and you don't want to fall into the same trap again. While you might hope that the potential of an election disaster will not disrupt your work, if your staff aren't working all virtually now, be ready to transition as many as humanly possible to working from home. If you're in manufacturing or other industries that need some people on site, make sure to hire additional security to protect your office from civil disorders.

Talk to your staff about the potential of an Electionpocalypse, and support them in taking steps, such as those outlined in this piece, to protect their households, work, and well-being. For the latter, highlight whatever mental health resources you provide, for instance an Employee Assistance Program. Get your systems and processes ready for many employees being unable to work at all or in part. Ensure there's thorough cross-training, particularly for the most significant roles, in case of such disruptions.

If you're in manufacturing, consider how you can minimize supply chain disruptions. Now might be a good time to order additional supplies, to protect yourself in case there's supply chain issues. Service providers should describe to their clients what steps they're taking to prevent service interruptions. If you’re a government entity, take extra steps to secure various public locations, especially election-related ones, and beef up security as needed.

What about potential opportunities and how can you take advantage of them? Perhaps you can foresee that the stock market will mostly crash, so you can buy bonds instead, or short the stock market. Maybe you can take the opportunity to prepare extra supplies in case your friends and family underprepare for this situation; you can also convey this article to them to help them prepare. Professionally, you can spread the word to your clients and peers, helping your network be in the best shape possible for the likelihood of an Electionpocalypse.

If you’re a business that provides services of relevance to potential civil disturbances - security, legal, insurance, risk management, investing, and so on - you might prepare some marketing and sales pitches for this eventuality. You might also consider moving quickly on closing some outstanding contract opportunities, since prospects might be distracted by an election disaster. Likewise, work on finishing up any internal or external projects that you can reasonably complete before the potential Electionpocalypse, and delay taking on new ones for now. Also, explore partnerships with other businesses that enable you to hedge against election disaster risks.

How many resources would you require to address problems and seize opportunities: time, money, social capital, information? Add them up, and multiply them by 30 percent. Then, go on to use those resources to prepare for this possibility.

Next, consider what problems and opportunities you might face, and what resources you might need, if the Electoral College vote is indecisive, and this situation goes into early January. Multiple these resources by 15 percent, or choose your preferred number. Then, use those resources to prepare for this stretch from December 14 to early January.

Finally, evaluate the problems, opportunities, and resources needed if the House voting ends in an impasse and a constitutional crisis. Multiply these by 10 percent or your chosen number, and proceed to prepare for this scenario.

Now, perhaps 10 percent for the worst of all scenarios, the constitutional crisis, doesn’t seem that high to you. Yet what’s the probability of your business or your house burning down any given year? Not very likely, right? Still, you’re not going to give up your fire insurance. In the same way, taking the steps above provides you with election disaster insurance; it would be just as foolish to get rid of your fire insurance as to avoid doing what you need to do to protect your work and life from Electionpocalypse.

Using this approach, you distribute your problem-solving, opportunity-taking, and resources across the different possibilities in accordance with your chosen evaluations. This counterintuitive approach addresses a number of cognitive biases and draws upon the research-based “Defend Your Future” technique, which you can use for all sorts of strategic planning.

Conclusion

Whatever you do, I hope you don’t simply finish reading this article and click complacently through to the next one. Too many made this mistake with my and other people’s articles warning about the serious threat of the low-likelihood, high-impact disaster caused by the pandemic. Don’t let your gut reactions lead you to the same disastrous outcome. Prepare right now for the substantial possibility of an election disaster and help others you care about get ready as well.

Key Takeaway

You can protect your work and life from the significant possibility of an election disaster by treating preparing for this likelihood as insurance...> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• How might your approach to the pandemic inform how you respond to the possibility of an election disaster?
• How might cognitive biases impede your ability to acknowledge election disaster risk and prepare for it?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: flickr.com/New Jersey National Guard

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

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Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Whenever you hear something repeated, it feels more true when you hear it repeated. In other words, repetition makes any statement seem more true. So anything you hear will feel more true each time you hear it again.

Do you see what I did there? Each of the three sentences above conveyed the same message. Yet each time you read the next sentence, it felt more and more true. Cognitive neuroscientists like myself call this the “illusory truth effect.”

Go back and recall your experience reading the first sentence. It probably felt strange and disconcerting, perhaps with a tone of outrage, as in “I don’t believe things more if they’re repeated!”

Reading the second sentence did not inspire such a strong reaction. Your reaction to the third sentence was tame by comparison.

Why? Because of a phenomenon called “cognitive fluency,” meaning how easily we process information. Much of our vulnerability to deception in all areas of life – including to fake news and misinformation – revolves around cognitive fluency in one way or another.

Unfortunately, such misinformation can swing major elections. Fortunately, we can take a number of steps to address misinformation and make our public discourse and political system more truthful.

The Lazy Brain

Our brains are lazy. The more effort it takes to process information, the more uncomfortable we feel about it and the more we dislike and distrust it.

By contrast, the more we like certain data and are comfortable with it, the more we feel that it’s accurate. This intuitive feeling in our gut is what we use to judge what’s true and false.

Yet no matter how often you heard that you should trust your gut and follow your intuition, that advice is wrong. You should not trust your gut when evaluating information where you don’t have expert-level knowledge, at least when you don’t want to screw up. Structured information gathering and decision-making processes help us avoid the numerous errors we make when we follow our intuition. And even experts can make serious errors when they don’t rely on such decision aids.

These mistakes happen due to mental errors that scholars call “cognitive biases.” The illusory truth effect is one of these mental blindspots; there are over 100 altogether. These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health and politics to relationships and even shopping.

The Danger of Cognitive Fluency and Illusory Truth

We already make plenty of mistakes by ourselves, without outside intervention. It’s especially difficult to protect ourselves against those who know how to manipulate us. Unfortunately, the purveyors of misinformation excel at exploiting our cognitive biases to get us to buy into fake news.

Consider the illusory truth effect. Our vulnerability to it stems from how our brain processes novel stimuli. The first time we hear something new to us, it’s difficult to process mentally. It has to integrate with our existing knowledge framework, and we have to build new neural pathways to make that happen. Doing so feels uncomfortable for our lazy brain, so the statement that we heard seems difficult to swallow to us.

Next time we hear that same thing, our mind doesn’t have to build new pathways. It just has to go down the same ones it built earlier. Granted, those pathways are little more than trails, newly laid down and barely used. It’s hard to travel down that newly-established neural path, but much easier than when your brain had to lay down that trail. As a result, the statement is somewhat easier to swallow.

Each repetition widens and deepens the trail. Each time you hear the same thing, it feels more true, comfortable, and intuitive.

Does it work for information that seems very unlikely? Science says yes! Researchers found that the illusory truth effect applies strongly to implausible as well as plausible statements.

What about if you know better? Surely prior knowledge prevents this illusory truth! Unfortunately not: even if you know better, research shows you’re still vulnerable to this cognitive bias, though less than those who don’t have prior knowledge.

Sadly, people who are predisposed to more elaborate and sophisticated thinking – likely you, if you’re reading the article – are more likely to fall for the illusory truth effect. And guess what: more sophisticated thinkers are also likelier than less sophisticated ones to fall for the cognitive bias known as the bias blind spot, where you ignore your own cognitive biases. So if you think that cognitive biases such as the illusory truth effect don’t apply to you, you’re likely deluding yourself.

That’s why the purveyors of misinformation rely on repeating the same thing over and over and over and over again. They know that despite fact-checking, their repetition will sway people, even some of those who think they’re invulnerable. In fact, believing that you’re invulnerable will make you more likely to fall for this and other cognitive biases, since you won’t be taking the steps necessary to address them.

Other Important Cognitive Biases

What are some other cognitive biases you need to beware? If you’ve heard of any cognitive biases, you’ve likely heard of the “confirmation bias.” That refers to our tendency to look for and interpret information in ways that conform to our prior beliefs, intuitions, feelings, desires, and preferences, as opposed to the facts.

Again, cognitive fluency deserves blame. It’s much easier to build neural pathways to information that we already possess, especially that around which we have strong emotions; it’s much more difficult to break well-established neural pathways if we need to change our mind based on new information. Consequently, we instead look for information that’s easy to accept, that which fits our prior beliefs. In turn, we ignore and even actively reject information that doesn’t fit our beliefs.

Moreover, the more educated we are, the more likely we are to engage in such active rejection. After all, our smarts give us more ways of arguing against new information that counters our beliefs. That’s why research demonstrates that the more educated you are, the more polarized your beliefs will be around scientific issues that have religious or political value overtones, such as stem cell research, human evolution, and climate change. Where might you be letting your smarts get in the way of the facts?

Our minds like to interpret the world through stories, meaning explanatory narratives that link cause and effect in a clear and simple manner. Such stories are a balm to our cognitive fluency, as our mind constantly looks for patterns that explain the world around us in an easy-to-process manner. That leads to the “narrative fallacy,” where we fall for convincing-sounding narratives regardless of the facts, especially if the story fits our predispositions and our emotions.

You ever wonder why politicians tell so many stories? What about the advertisements you see on TV or video advertisements on websites, which tell very quick visual stories? How about salespeople or fundraisers? Sure, sometimes they cite statistics and scientific reports, but they spend much, much more time telling stories: simple, clear, compelling narratives that seem to make sense and tug at our heartstrings.

Now, here’s something that’s actually true: the world doesn’t make sense. The world is not simple, clear, and compelling. The world is complex, confusing, and contradictory. Beware of simple stories! Look for complex, confusing, and contradictory scientific reports and high-quality statistics: they’re much more likely to contain the truth than the easy-to-process stories.

Fixing Our Brains

Unfortunately, knowledge only weakly protects us from cognitive biases; it’s important, but far from sufficient, as the study I cited earlier on the illusory truth effect reveals.

What can we do? You can use decision aid strategies to address cognitive biases, not only to defend yourself from misinformation, but also overcome the tide of misinformation destroying our democracy.

One of the most effective strategies is to build up a habit of automatically considering alternative possibilities to any claim you hear, especially claims that feel comfortable to you. Since our lazy brain’s default setting is to avoid questioning claims, which required hard thinking, it really helps to develop a mental practice of going against this default.

Be especially suspicious of repeated claims that favor your side’s positions without any additional evidence, which play on the illusory truth effect and the confirmation bias combined. Make sure to fact-check them with reliable fact-checking organizations, rather than accepting them because it feels good and right to do so.

Another effective strategy involves cultivating a mental habit of questioning stories in particular. Whenever you hear a story, the brain goes into a listening and accepting mode. Remember that it’s very easy to cherry-pick stories to support whatever position the narrator wants to advance. Instead, look for thorough hard numbers, statistical evidence, and peer-reviewed research to support claims.

More broadly, you can make a personal commitment to the twelve truth-oriented behaviors of the Pro-Truth Pledge by signing the pledge at ProTruthPledge.org. All of these behaviors stem from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics research in the field called debiasing, which refers to counterintuitive, uncomfortable, but effective strategies to protect yourself from cognitive biases. Peer-reviewed research has shown that taking the Pro-Truth Pledge is effective for changing people’s behavior to be more truthful, both in their own statements and in interactions with others.

These quick mental habits will address the most fundamentally flawed aspects of our mind’s tendency to accept misinformation.

Key Takeaway

You can protect yourself from misinformation by considering alternative interpretations, being suspicious of repetition, and taking the Pro-Truth Pledge...> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• To which cognitive biases do you think you might be most vulnerable?
• Which of the techniques to address misinformation will you plan to use?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: Pixabay.com/memyselfaneye

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

It might surprise you how much your decisions are actually influenced by those who are close to you. Research shows that if your friend stops smoking, your likelihood of smoking goes down by 36%, while if your spouse stops smoking, you’re 67% more likely to stop smoking as well.

Unfortunately, it’s not just positive tendencies that our friends can influence but also negative ones. Research has shown that if one of your friends becomes obese, your chances of becoming obese in a short period of time grows by 57%. Similarly, if one of your adult siblings become obese, the likelihood of you going that route as well increases by 40%.

This kind of negative influence also manifests in other real-life scenarios as well, such as in our shopping decisions.

A Bad Shopping Decision Spurred by Friendly Influence

Shanice was excited to buy the most souped-up iPad Pro as an early birthday gift to herself. She could recall when her friend Jasmine first brought an iPad Pro to their monthly girls night out and how everyone oohed and aahed over the features. Jasmine took videos and photos of the group, and the iPad Pro demonstrated crystal-clear audio and great photo quality.

Not wanting to be left out, Shanice took out over a grand from her savings and bought her own iPad Pro. When it arrived, she excitedly set it up and started playing with it. To her consternation, she realized that while she liked its photo and video features, she wasn’t particularly thrilled with its other offerings, and it also didn’t fit well into her smaller purse. The days passed and she used the gadget less and less.

That’s how Shanice described it to me when I noticed the iPad unused and gathering dust on her coffee table. She told me that her MacBook and iPhone fulfilled all her computing needs after all. The iPad proved useless to her, and she’d only bought it because Jasmine’s influence resulted in her making a bad purchase.

How Others Shape Our Decisions  

Even though we think of ourselves as rational beings, cognitive science research has shown that in reality, the rational part of our mind—known as the Intentional System of thinking—is like a little rider on top of a huge elephant of emotions and intuitions, which is the Autopilot System of thinking. These gut reactions determine 80-90% of our decision-making process, and we then create reasons to justify our emotional drivers. In other words, our instinct is not to be rational, but to be rationalizing, to seek comfortable lies instead of the hard truth.

These instincts are rooted in our ancestors’ experience in the ancestral savanna, when they had the evolutionary advantage of relying on these instincts rather than taking a step back to figure out the facts. They did not have plenty of resources at their disposal, and it was even less likely that they could save more. For example, if they were able to amass a lot of berries but couldn’t consume it immediately, these berries would go to waste. This is why we are so compelled to consume as much sugar as we can get our hands on, even though we know that it’s not good for us in the modern world.

Our Strong Tribal Instincts

In those days, we lived in small tribes and relied on it for survival. Getting kicked out of our tribe meant death. That made a strong tribal instinct critical for our survival. Such tribalism resulted in judgment errors—what scholars call cognitive biases—such as the halo effect. In this cognitive bias, if a person has a characteristic that we like, mostly because that characteristic is similar to an important element of ourselves, we will tend to rate all other aspects of that person higher than we should.

Another aspect of tribalism involves competing with other tribe members to ensure that we are at the top of the tribe’s totem pole because this would mean having access to the best resources of the tribe. This kind of tribal social status competition leads to a dangerous judgment error called social comparison bias, where we feel compelled to compete with and win over tribe members we perceive as having a better standing over us in the group hierarchy.

We are the descendants of those people who survived in the ancestral savanna environment and we still carry the emotions, intuitions, and gut reactions that helped our ancestors survive the savanna environment. However, in our modern society, these instincts often lead to problems.

Our Friends Shop and We Follow

Our Autopilot System reactions are helpful when those in our social circle do things that benefit us, such as quitting smoking, because we then have a halo effect around not buying cigarettes to emulate the quitters.

Unfortunately, the same system can be harmful when those in our social circle develop unhealthy habits, such as consuming too much junk food and becoming obese. The actions of those tribe members give us permission to do the same thing, because obesity-centered negative feelings—emotions that drive us to go to the gym and buy healthy food only—get weakened. In the end, the primitive urge to eat as much sugar as we can overpowers our civilized desire to maintain our health.

The same influence applies to shopping decisions, such as when Shanice wasted her money on the iPad Pro. She emulated the actions of those she considered part of her tribe – in this case, her group of girlfriends. However, she did not consider whether purchasing the gadget would serve her personal preferences and needs.

Keeping up with the Joneses

You’ve probably heard the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses”, which refers to our desire to maintain a standard of living comparable to those around us, such as our neighbors, who we consider to be on the same social level. Popularized by an early 20th century comic strip called “Keeping up with the Joneses,” this idiom points to a crucial aspect of our tribal shopping behavior.

Our instincts propel us to elevate our social status, and the social comparison bias in particular drives us to try to compete with others in our tribal group through our shopping.

This status-driven shopping is called by scholars as “conspicuous consumption”. It refers to buying products not primarily for its practical use, but for the prestige it will bring the buyer.

Similarly, tribal impulses also apply and can explain people’s purchasing choices when it comes to online shopping and virtual communities. Scholars found that virtual communities have a strong effect on the shopping choices of their members. The key mechanism through which such influence occurs is social identification, meaning the extent to which members of these virtual communities perceive the community to be their tribe.

There is an inherently higher degree of risk in online shopping compared with in-person shopping, given that you can’t actually see and touch the product you’re about to purchase in the former. Virtual communities, along with other online resources that compare and review products, provide trustworthy, third-party sources of information on the quality of online shopping experiences. According to research, such information has to be seen as credible. The halo effect for members of one’s perceived tribe boosts that credibility.

Making Better Shopping Decisions

Fortunately, recent research in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address cognitive biases, whether in your professional life, your relationships, or other life areas.

So how can you avoid the kind of bad shopping decisions made by Shanice or by people in your circle who eat junk food and grow obese? Get better friends!

Being aware of how your choices are influenced by those around you should propel you to be more intentional about the company you keep. Make new friends who are not like you, but who are like the person you want to become in the future. If you want to have a better fashion sense, make friends with someone whose fashion style you like. If you want to be more mindful of your spending and make better shopping decisions, consider being friends with those who are more practical in their spending and purchases.

In addition, consider spending less time with the “wrong crowd”. If you want to save your money but your friends want to spend their time on shopping sprees at the mall, it’s only practical not to meet with them frequently. In some cases, this might even lead to ending relationships. For example, if you would rather avoid alcohol but your friends like hanging out in bars, you should consider making new friends.

Lastly, keep an eye on new fads that sweep through your friends and influence you to make bad shopping choices. Make a commitment not to buy things for its status value. Instead, focus on making shopping decisions that actually meet your existing needs.

Key Takeaway

The people close to you influence your spending choices more than you think. To make wiser shopping decisions, be aware of how your choices are influenced and commit to only purchasing things for their practical value.---> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider  (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• When was the last time your friends influenced your shopping decision that you regretted?
• Is there anything in the article that will help you make better shopping choices?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Adapted version of an article originally published in Top10.com

Image credit: Pixabay/StockSnap

—

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-recognized thought leader on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Have you changed your views about COVID-19 months into this pandemic? Or are you anchoring to the same views you did in March?

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:

And if you like audio, here’s a podcast based on the blog:

Or simply read onward!

For example, many people still believe the false claim spread by many prominent leaders in March that COVID is no worse than the common flu. They protest against public health measures such as wearing masks, despite high-quality peer-reviewed studies showing that masks save lines.

They also ignore new developments, such as the recent urgent requests by governors to stay at home and telecommute to tamp down the explosive third wave of COVID. Likewise, they fail to pay attention to just-published research showing that restaurants, gyms, hotels, houses of worship, smaller grocery stores, and other crowded indoor spaces with prolonged exposure – including workplaces that fit such criteria – significantly increase COVID risk.

With all the information out there regarding this world-disrupting virus, there are plenty of opportunities to add to your knowledge of current events. In fact, so many fundamental aspects of what we believe about the pandemic have changed over time. If we truly relied on the facts, our perspective would be very different from where we started.

Unfortunately, the reality is more complex. We tend to continue treading the same path based on information we initially received. That’s regardless of strong new evidence that our path leads off a cliff. The name cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists give to this dangerous judgment error is anchoring.

It’s one of the many cognitive biases that lead us to make poor decisions, regarding the pandemic and other life areas. Recognizing the danger and impact of these cognitive biases helps us make much better decisions to manage risks wisely and survive and thrive in this pandemic.

Anchoring in Financial Services: A Case Study

Let’s consider the case of Lauren, the CEO of a 130-people regional financial services company based in Texas that had a lot of difficulty with remote work at the start of the pandemic.

The leadership team didn’t think they needed to prepare for a disruption of more than a week or two. This was because they followed early guidelines from the CDC to prepare for nothing more than a brief interruption due to a short-term outbreak.

As a result, the leadership team asked all of its workforce to come back to the office as states reopened, despite news reports of an increase in cases in Texas. A significant number of its employees were scared and resistant to come back to the office, leading to conflicts and tensions.

Eventually, the large majority of employees did return. Yet because of the company leadership’s perception that COVID-19 isn’t a big deal, neither the leaders nor employees took appropriate precautions. That’s because of a mental blindspot called “emotional contagion,” where followers take on the emotions, beliefs, and perceptions of their leaders.

In fact, most of the executives and employees did not follow guidelines on social distancing or wear masks, especially since the Texas state officials did not mandate wearing masks. Staff who tried to wear masks and do social distancing were ridiculed by their colleagues, with the tacit approval of the leadership.

You can probably guess what happened next.

Unfortunately, there was an outbreak of COVID-19 in the office traced to an all-hands meeting. Over two dozen employees caught COVID-19, including three C-suite leaders. Several employees, including the COO, ended up in the hospital, and two older employees died. This led to a plunge in productivity, attrition, and low morale within the company.

Lauren decided to contact me for a consultation in late May after learning about my work through a webinar I conducted about how organizations can adapt to the changes brought by the pandemic.

By the time Lauren called me, internal fighting had already spread throughout the organization, leading to resignations of some key employees. This led to a heavier workload for everyone else, causing even greater tension between staff and management.

Even those who initially steered clear of the chaos said they were starting to look for other job opportunities so they could jump ship. It was obvious that the company needed help - and fast.

COVID-19 and Cognitive Biases

When I met with Lauren as well as the company’s COO and HR head over Zoom, I told them upfront that they have to start acknowledging the disruptions brought about by COVID-19. Continuing as they did will endanger their company’s bottom line and even survival during this pandemic.

The refusal to recognize the gravity of the pandemic and even the act of downplaying it stem from a combination of three factors:

• The nature of the virus itself
• The preexisting beliefs and plans of the business leaders
• The dangerous judgment errors we all tend to make that cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists call cognitive biases, most notably anchoring

The latter mental blindspots stem, in large part, from our evolutionary background. Our gut reactions evolved for the ancestral savanna environment, not the modern world. Yet gurus and business leaders alike overwhelmingly advocate going with our gut. They encourage us to follow our intuition in making decisions, instead of using effective decision-making processes.

Anchoring: A Heavy Burden

Anchoring refers to our tendency to be too strongly anchored by the initial information we have and fail to update our beliefs sufficiently based on new evidence. That’s even if new evidence is, objectively speaking, much more persuasive. This dangerous judgment error harmed us in two profound ways with COVID- 19.

First, business and political leaders and ordinary people anchored on past pandemics within living memory, which – while serious – didn’t cause widespread disruption.

SARS, the first pandemic of the 21st century, led to around 750 deaths in 26 countries. The H1N1, also known as the swine flu, killed many more, as many as half a million. Yet it didn’t impact the US too much, with about 12,500 deaths, and even less in the UK, at about 500, which was at the high end of deaths in Europe.

Ebola and Zika barely reached the US. As a result, the large majority of Americans ignored COVID- 19, thinking it would pass them by as did these other illnesses.

The second profound harm came from the comparisons of COVID-19 to the flu. In a March 4 interview on Fox News, Donald Trump called COVID-19 the “corona flu” and said the death rate “is way under 1%,” implying it’s nothing to worry about and that we don’t need to take major actions to address the situation.

He affirmed this in a March 9 tweet: "last year 37,000 Americans died from the common flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on.”

Other leaders conveyed similar messages that everything is normal. For example, on March 5, with 115 diagnosed cases of COVID-19 and the first death in the UK, Boris Johnson said it’s “business as usual.”

Despite wide criticism and the glaring example of Italy, Johnson’s administration failed to impose lockdowns. Instead, it advised in early March that people simply wash their hands, and, if they recently went to northern Italy and showed flu-like symptoms, to self-isolate for 14 days.

On March 11, with 590 confirmed cases, David Halpern, chief executive of the government’s Behavioural Insights Team, told BBC News that the government’s aim involved shielding the most vulnerable people.

The government would allow COVID-19 to infect the UK population more broadly until the population developed herd immunity such that COVID-19 would stop transmitting itself, which requires about 60% to be infected. Next day, at a press conference, Johnson confirmed this strategy, telling people with flu-like symptoms to self-isolate and people over 70 to avoid cruises.

Indeed, the estimated fatality rate from COVID-19, about .5-1% with good-quality treatment, is much lower than the 50% average for Ebola and the 15% for SARS. Yet, the infection rate is much higher, in part because about half of all who get infected don’t show any symptoms. Even those who eventually show symptoms are often infectious before they do.

As a result, without strict controls, every infected person gets 2-3 others sick and any outbreak doubles in 3-6 days. Furthermore, about 10-20% of those infected have a serious illness, mainly older adults, and about half of those with a serious illness need to go to the hospital.

Given the fact that hospitals have low capacity for a surge of patients, a major outbreak would overwhelm healthcare systems.

Trump and Johnson’s irresponsible approach set the anchor for the approach of most other political and business leaders and ordinary citizens in their respective countries. Such anchoring cost many lives and untold billions of dollars and pounds.

Adapting to the New Abnormal

When the pandemic started, most companies activated their business continuity plans and then just followed along as the months rolled by.

However, I wouldn’t advise continuing with these emergency measures throughout the minimal two years of the pandemic. A business continuity plan is meant for a week or two, a month at most if it’s a really good plan, before things start returning to normal (I tell you this as someone who helped businesses and nonprofits design many business continuity plans).

It’s not likely that we will ever go back to the “normal” status quo ante pandemic.

Our society will never be the same, even in the most optimistic scenario of only two years of waves of shutdowns and social distancing. And keep in mind that we shouldn’t be shooting for the most optimistic scenario and should instead plan for the worst.

If the first or second wave of vaccines isn’t highly effective, preventing COVID at 80-90%, it will be more like a five-year horizon instead of two years. That’s what you should plan for going forward.

Companies need to go beyond emergency measures if they want to survive and thrive in the next few years. You need to adapt to the pandemic and accept the current reality of ongoing waves of restrictions as the new abnormal.

This essentially means transforming your internal and external business model if you want your organization to chart a productive and rewarding course during these troubled years.

Doing so will include taking a long, hard look at the elements that drive your business. It will also entail revising or, in some cases, even totally revamping your daily operations and business continuity plan.

Moving Forward From Anchoring

When I last spoke with Lauren a few months ago, she told me that after serious deliberation, she called for a leadership meeting to reexamine the facts on COVID-19.

She and her COO came to the meeting armed with the most accurate information on the pandemic that they could find, curated from news sources that give priority to factual reporting.

They were right to come prepared, because it was one of the most excruciating discussions they’ve ever had in their career. Most of the executives were still anchored on previous information from March that the virus shouldn’t be taken seriously.

As a result, they did not want to acknowledge that a change needed to be made. Even those who were on the fence initially - including one of the executives who caught the virus earlier and recovered - didn’t want to change their stance. The executives clearly didn’t want to admit that they were wrong.

It was a good thing that the three of us - through several consultations - had prepared for such a scenario. Lauren, after seeing how obstinately the C-suite was acting, deftly reframed the discussion as a restrategizing effort instead of a finger-pointing and blaming exercise.

She also made sure to highlight how competitors of theirs who adapted to the situation were actually thriving during the pandemic.

Finally, in the face of overwhelming evidence that COVID-19 was a serious matter and that they needed to take immediate steps, the executives eventually acknowledged the gravity of the situation. This paved the way to the leadership team finally coming together to create and take the following steps:

As a result of these efforts, the company was able to correct its course and finally get back to a productive path. The employees felt safer, and thus became more productive. Though the retention efforts only had an 80% success rate and some key employees did not come back, the leadership team agreed that it was a far better result than they were heading toward before the strategic pivot.

The strict policies on working onsite also minimized health risk, thereby lessening the company’s risk of accountability in case of an outbreak in the office. This was a heavy load off the C-suite’s back. They were finally able to focus on product development and saving client relationships, which in part was fortunately already boosted by the sales team’s efforts.

Lauren informed me that the leadership team was pleased with the results of the changes they made. She also told me about how relieved she was that they did so so once the numbers of COVID-19 cases began to increase, prompting a pause of the reopening process that eventually led to a cycle of reopening and restrictions.

Conclusion

Anchoring causes us to focus on initial information we’ve received, even if it is erroneous. As the pandemic continues to disrupt businesses, you need to watch out for misinformed views and beliefs that will hold you back from growth. Keep your company resilient and adaptive by defending yourself from the dangers brought by anchoring.

Key Takeaway

Anchoring keeps you shackled to initial information and keeps you from moving forward. Make the best decisions to propel your company by breaking free from this mental blindspot...> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• Did your leadership team anchor on erroneous information at the start of the pandemic, and do you now want to make things right?
• Where might you do a better job of fighting against anchoring?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: ekoingfreemind/Pixabay

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

More buying choices lead to less happiness. To make better shopping decisions, satisfice and limit your options. Look for products that are good enough. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes why more buying choices cause unhappiness.

Video: “Why Do More Buying Choices Cause Unhappiness?”

Podcast: “Why Do More Buying Choices Cause Unhappiness?”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article Why Do More Buying Choices Cause Unhappiness?
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hi, and welcome to another episode of the wise decision maker show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. I'm your host, Agnes Vishnevkin. In for Gleb zipursky today, and today we're going to talk about why is it that more buying choices can cause more happiness? Have you ever made a buying decision that you regret? I know that a few years ago, I bought an armchair, and I spent so much time thinking about it. And you know, comparing different reviews and I went to a few stores and I sat in all the different chairs. And then when I finally bought it, I was disappointed. And I had it in my house for many years. And it was just so frustrating to have spent so much time looking for something and thinking about it. And I thought that I made the right choice, but I just wasn't happy. So Has that ever happened to you? I hope I'm not the only one. Because of that kind of mistake. You know, now that I know more about behavioral science and psychology, I know that there are several things that caused these shopping mistakes to happen. And one of them is that it's the way our brain is wired. We're not really wired for making so many complicated choices. We're not wired for living in the 21st century, we're wired for the ancient Savanna. So that's kind of something that leads to these difficulties. Another thing is that the shopping process is manipulated by retailers who want us to buy more stuff. And so they often, you know, take steps that make us buy more stuff, but not necessarily feel better. And this is especially true for online shopping. And we'll talk about that in a moment. Now, when we talk about having lots of options and lots of choices, it's intuitive, you know that that would help us be happier, right? But is that really so? So there's some really interesting research that shows that really, that's not what happens. For example, there was this one choice, one interesting study that I really was fascinated to learn about, where there was the split table setup for shoppers to taste different kinds of gourmet jam in a supermarket. And this was done on several different days. And one day, they had a setup with 24 different flavors of jam. On another day, they had a setup with six kinds of jam. And so what happened, it turns out that when they had 24 types of jam, they had lots of people coming and tasting. But when they had six kinds of jam, not as many people came to taste it, but a lot more people made choices. And so choice paralysis is something that happens when people this is the way the name for that phenomenon. When people have so many options, you know, they look at 24 flavors of jam, and they taste them all, but they kind of can decide. Whereas when they had six, they were much more ready to decide. And then there were many more sales made. So research shows. And that's just one example that when we have more than a small number of options, we can be less happy. And it's kind of harder for us, even though we think more options might be better. And so that's just one interesting phenomenon. And the other one that I want to talk about is the fear of missing out, you know, FOMO, so to speak. And that's something that, there's a technical name for it, it's called loss aversion. And many psychological studies have shown that we really want to avoid losses, much more than we want to make gains. So say, I'm afraid of losing $20 far more than I want to gain $20. And that's just kind of, you know, the way we are probably from our evolutionary background in the savanna, when you know, it's very dangerous to lose. And we live in a very risky life. So basically now when we have a lot of options, that leads to anxiety about losing out on the best one, if we choosing a mind two things, you know, option, you know, maybe strawberry jam or blueberry jam, and I feel like okay, strawberry jam, I'm going to get it and maybe subconsciously, if I feel like I'm missing out, okay, I'm missing out on blueberry jam, okay, I miss out on one flavor. But if there's 10 flavors, and I pick strawberry, I'm going to feel more anxiety just automatically intuitively inside that I missed out on nine other options. So speaking about unintuitive things, here's another one, the opportunity to change your mind, which happens when we have the option to return or to get a refund or to exchange our purchase. And there's, you know, a very technical name, but it also kind of explains what it means: it's post purchase rationalization rationalizing after purchase. Another one is choice supportive bias. It's another way to describe the same phenomenon. And it's a psychology term that means, you know, we are biased towards something that supports the choice we already made. And what happens is that basically subconsciously, after we make a final decision, we try to justify to ourselves by focusing on the positives, because say, if I bought an armchair, and I can't return it, and then I'm going to be, you know, kind of feel like, Oh, that's a great armchair, I love this armchair. This is great. It's so comfy. And you know, because subconsciously, I'm kind of like, I'm stuck with it, I can't give it back. So just as well might enjoy it. Whereas if the choice can be reversed, then it's very easy to keep thinking about whether this was the right decision. And so that will happen if there is a 30 day return. And you know, what happens? There's a lot of direct to consumer mattress companies that say, you know, you can return your mattress within 100 days. So I'm going to spend those 100 days sleeping on that mattress wondering if you know, should you return it? Should you not to get a refund or not? Well, if there was no refund, you'd be much more likely to like it, you know, unless it's obviously uncomfortable. So, there, there is a very counterintuitive lesson about returns and refunds, which I don't know, I personally always appreciate. But I guess, no, since it doesn't really make us happy. But something to reconsider. Now let's talk about online shopping. And like I said, the retailers really do so much to make it more difficult for us, they just want us to buy more stuff. And so there are more choices. You know, there are only so many things that you can buy in a store. But there are so many more things that you can buy online, so many things that are more things that you can consider. And like we just talked about a moment before, the more choices we have, the less happy we are. Another thing that happens online is that often they're very easy returns, you know, when we buy clothes, just you know, things like this, it's often very easy to return, all you have to do, you don't have to go to a store, you just put it in an envelope, drop it in the mailbox, or just you know, leave it in your mailbox outside your house, sometimes. That's it, and it's gone in ease. So basically, shopping decisions don't feel so final. And that takes away from our happiness. So now that we talked about a few things, about a few of the challenges with our shopping experience, how can we use them to make it better, there are many things that we can do. And a big one is don't maximize, is when we try to make a decision that's as good as possible. as perfect as possible. Buy the perfect armchair, the perfect sweater, and don't do it. We're going to be much happier if we just satisfies and satisfies means to get something that's good enough, something that meets your needs. And then you'll be happy you won't need to look, you won't be subjecting yourself to all these difficult thoughts and automatic patterns that we just talked about. Limit your options, when you have fewer options to look at, you won't have that loss aversion, you make the option the choice faster. So one thing that I like to do now, nowadays, when I shop for answers is I think beforehand, what is it that I want in my armchair? I think about it in advance, I make a list. Then when I'm scrolling online, you know, these days, I'm not really going to the store very often now that the COVID pandemic is COVID-19 pandemic is upon us. You know, I immediately pass on all the options that don't meet my goals. So I set my goals in advance. And that does an excellent job of limiting my options. Another thing that I do to limit my options is say when grown at a grocery store just by the store brand. I don't look at 25 kinds of yogurt, I just buy the store brand yogurt, and that helps a lot. And finally, you know another way to avoid maximizing is to remember that perfect is the enemy of good. And that's you know, that's just something to keep in mind. Another way to limit your options is very helpful for online shopping, is to look at credible product reviews. And finally, to do your best to ignore the option to have a free return to have a refund. Just remember that you know even though you might think that it's good. The sooner you ignore it, the happier you'll be with your decision. Because then you will just like your mind do its automatic work and rationalize the decision that you made and you'll just feel so much happier. So that's What I wanted to share. I hope these tips were helpful for you. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the wise decision maker show. And I encourage you to check out the links in the description of the video below. There will be a link to a blog that describes this topic in detail. And most importantly, it has links to the different studies that were mentioned and a few others. There are also links to other blogs about decision making and using science based tools like what I just talked about. So check out the links, please share, like, subscribe, let us know what you think in the comments. Is this something you think will be helpful for you? Have you recently made a decision that you regret? Let us know what you think. And finally, I hope you check out our free eight module video course at disaster avoidance experts.com slash subscribe. That's disaster avoidance experts comm slash Subscribe for our free video course and check out our book. Never go with your gut how pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. Thanks again for tuning in. And I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the wise decision maker show. And until then, I wish you only the wisest decisions take care

Transcribed by http://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

You can protect yourself from misinformation by considering alternative interpretations, being suspicious of repetition, and taking the Pro-Truth Pledge. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes how to defend yourself from misinformation via neuroscience.

Video: “Defending Yourself From Misinformation via Neuroscience”

Podcast: “Defending Yourself From Misinformation via Neuroscience”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article on Defending Yourself From Misinformation via Neuroscience
• The book Pro Truth: A Practical Plan for Putting Truth Back Into Politics is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the wise decision maker guide, where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Today, I'd like to talk about how you defend yourself from misinformation. And we usually talk about misinformation in the political sphere. But misinformation applies just as much to the business world where we get false information, whether false information about stocks or false information about professional activities, health information, or private life, personal life, there's a lot of health misinformation floating around out there, and all sorts of misinformation. So the techniques that I'll describe are applicable to all sorts of misinformation in all arenas. The first thing to realize about defending yourself from misinformation using neuroscience based techniques is to think about and understand how we deal with information, information in the first place. Before we get to misinformation, our brain is unfortunately, pretty lazy. That's just the reality of it. This is what cognitive neuroscience research shows, we don't like to spend energy on processing things we don't like that our brain doesn't feel good about that it doesn't feel right about spending energy and processing things. So it prefers to follow the route of easiest processing. It's lazy, it's low energy, that's good. A way to that you should think about your brain, just like my brain, my brain is just as lazy as everybody else's brain. And the reality is, yours is too. So as a result, we dislike and we just trust my dislike, and I distrust just intuitively with my emotions, going with my gut information that feels uncomfortable. So when we get information that feels uncomfortable, we inherently dislike and distrust this information. That is just how it works. That's how our brain works. And of course, by contrast, we feel good about what we like and we trust, information that we feel comfortable with. So that is very important that when we go with our gut intuitions, which is what we talk about comfortable information, right? What does it mean for information to be comfortable for us? It means that it feels good in our gut, it feels good, how we are defined by God, heart, whatever, it feels good, the information makes you go like, yes, this is right, this is good. This is true. This feels right. That is the feeling of information that you inherently like and trust that's comfortable. And of course, uncomfortable information is now this is wrong, that can be true. your gut is telling you that it makes us vulnerable. Unfortunately, these feelings about information, and perceptions, where we perceive information we like, well, that's comfortable to us, that we are trustworthy is true. And we perceive information that is uncomfortable to us as something we dislike, something that's not trustworthy. And something that's not that old makes us vulnerable to cognitive biases, those are the dangerous judgment errors that result in the US buying into misinformation, buying into misinformation, because the cognitive biases are how we get to information that we like and trust. That's unfortunately false. So this is critically important to realize, there's lots of information out there that we like and trust, that's false. And there's lots of information out there that we don't like that we don't trust. That's true. It's just the way it works. It's just the way our brain works. And just the way the reality works. And cognitive biases are the specific patterns that you can use to recognize when you're likely to fall for misinformation that are specifically three cognitive biases I want to talk about that are especially important for misinformation for addressing misinformation. And there are over 100 cognitive biases out there. You can learn more about them in my book, never go with your gut how pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. So just look up the list on Wikipedia, if you want a quick reference guide, but that are free that are most important for addressing misinformation. Those are the truth effect, confirmation bias and narrative fallacy. So those are the three you want to really focus on addressing in order to protect yourself from misinformation. So those are the true effects. What does that refer to? Well, that refers to the fact that when we hear something that's repeated again and again, it feels more true each time we hear. So again, when we hear something when we learn something more than once. We trust it more than we've trusted it before. And that's Just the way our brain works when we hear something, again and again and again, we feel more positive toward it, our lazy brain feels that, hey, we heard this information before, and therefore, it's not as novel. so lazy brains are lazy brains that react strongly to novel information, we inherently have more of a suspicion of novel information, we have more of an arousal response in our brains toward novel information. And when we have more of an arousal response, we have, generally speaking, a discomfort with that information. But when we hear the information again, and again, and again, we have less of an arousal response, we're more comfortable with it. And so as a result, we trust it more, because we have less of that arousal response. So that's something you really got to be watching out for information that's repeated, repeated, repeated again, where the first time it feels the second time, you have less response. And third time It feels Oh, yes, this is old news. And therefore old true news. Even though it might be complete misinformation. That's the first thing you want to watch out for. The second thing, confirmation bias. If you've heard about any cognitive bias, you've probably heard about this one. Confirmation bias is very well known. We inherently look for information that confirms our beliefs. And that's, of course, natural for the lazy brain. Think about the brain. It's a lazy brain. It doesn't like information that goes against its beliefs. So we inherently look for information that confirms what we already believe, because we feel good about it. We feel good about what we already believe, regardless of whether it's true or not. And we look for information that confirms what we already believe, because we want to feel good. We don't inherently want things to be true. That is not a want. This is a thought pattern, our gut feeling, our gut desire is to look for information that is comfortable to us, that confirms what we already believe. So that is what we look for, what are our beliefs, our feelings, our intuitions, our desires, all of these sorts of things. And another part of the confirmation bias. Of course, the inverse of that is that we reject information that goes against our beliefs, our feelings, our intuitions, our desires. If we don't like something, if we don't want something to be true, then we will inherently reject information about being true, even though that information may be very accurate. So you gotta watch out for confirmation bias, especially with kinds of false claims. If you're defending yourself from misinformation, not simply looking for accurate information, but specifically defending yourself from misinformation. When you feel that something is true, because it meets your beliefs. You've got to be suspicious of yourself, those intuitions, those feelings, those as dyers, they may well lead you in the wrong direction. And next, the third thing. And last but not least, is the narrative fallacy. We trust narratives we like stories that sound convincing, but some true. And that's why everyone who wants to convince us communicates in stories, whether it's politicians, whether it's people who are presenting, trying to get us to buy something, sell us on something in business settings, or in health settings, someone who wants to push some kind of homeopathic fake medicine. They tell stories they tell convincing Stories of Real people or people that sound like real people. And that sounds true, these stories feel true to us. Our brain, the deeper emotional part of our brain. The lazier part of our brain really likes to take in information from narratives. It likes to have easy, convincing explanations of the world. So like so simple, clear narratives, those are the ones that sound convincing to us. The reality is, the world is not simple. The world is not clear. The world is complex, confusing, contradictory. So when you hear those simple, clear narratives about reality, you get to be suspicious that you're being fed some gray day misinformation. So now that we know about the free most important cognitive biases that make us vulnerable to misinformation, how do we actually fix them? How do we fix our brains? The first technique so there are a number of techniques that research has shown are effective for addressing misinformation, addressing those cognitive biases that lead us to buy into misinformation. The first is whenever you hear a claim, whenever you hear a story, whenever something that confirms your beliefs, Especially something that you hear more than once. Consider alternative possibilities. And be wary of favoring ones that, especially repeated claims that favor your side. So you want to consider alternative possibilities and can always consider alternative possibilities. Now, there's a claim out there that you're hearing, consider immediately what can be the alternatives to consider the opposite. You know, one thing you might hear one thing, but the reality might be the complete opposite. Or the thing that you hear might be an exaggeration of reality. So for example, with stories, very often what happens with stories, I mean, some stories are outright Bs, people are just feeding you complete misinformation. But some stories are a form of misinformation, where you cherry pick a story from a variety of stories, some maybe, for it had maybe, let's say, some medicine, some supposedly homeopathic medication, some fake medication, you know, there's a story of someone who took it, and they got better. Now, that's the story that will be repeated time and time and time again, even though there might be 1000 people who took the same medication and didn't get better, got worse, or and though the person who took the medication might have gotten better for a whole variety of other reasons. You know, there's a lot of research in medicine that shows that overtime or on bodies cure a lot of illnesses. So taking a medication does not and then getting better does not mean that that medication is what caused you to get better. You want to have clear evidence based research studies showing that hey, this medication is actually correlated with an improvement in your health, rather than fake homeopathic medicine, which cherry picks things. So that's often an exaggeration, that results in misinformation. You want to question stories, so please make sure to question stories in particular, and something that you can do more broadly. So besides these strategies, considering alternative possibilities, be wary of repeating claims that match your beliefs for so fighting the confirmation bias, illusory truth effect, questioning stories, those narratives that you're getting and falling for the narrative fallacy. More broadly, you can make a personal commitment to the truth at pro truth pledge.org. Again, that's PR O TR, u th p la gg e.org Pro truth pledge.org. That website lists a set of 12 simple, clear behaviors, including those that I just talked about just now considering alternative questioning stories, being wary of repeated beliefs, and many more so 12 behaviors that neuroscience research has clearly shown are correlated with the truth. So if you follow those behaviors, you'll be much more likely to protect yourself from misinformation, and also protect our society from misinformation, protect your colleagues from misinformation, protect everyone you engage with from misinformation, if you follow those 12 behaviors. So that's how you protect yourself from misinformation. I hope this has been helpful for you. Something I want to note is that there's a blog in the show notes that has a lot more resources on this topic. So please check out the blog, it'll go into much more depth, all the citations for this stuff, so you can read it in more for more depth. If you like this episode of the wise decision maker show, please click like. And of course, follow it on whatever venue you're getting your wise decision maker show. We are both in video form and an audio form. So you might be hearing the podcast, you might be watching the video. Please go and check out the other one. It will be in the show notes as well. Leave your comments, I'd love to hear what you think about our shows that helps us improve our content and help make it better for you going forward. Now something that I wanted to mention is that all of these shows are based on a number of books that I wrote. Now one of the one that I already mentioned before now is never go with your gut hopin you're nearing leaders to make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. It's linked in the show notes, talks about how to make the wisest decisions in all sorts of settings and addresses cognitive biases. Another one that's really irrelevant to truthfulness is called pro truth, a practical plan for putting truth back into politics. And that talks about all sorts of things relating to truthfulness and how to protect yourself and our society and our businesses from misinformation. One thing I want to note is that there's a free resource that you can take advantage of that's supremely useful. It's called The wise decision making course. There are eight video based modules that provide clear guidance on how to make the wisest decisions and avoid business disasters and avoid all sorts of disasters, including by protecting yourself from misinformation addressing cognitive biases. The first module of that course is an assessment on dangerous judgment errors in the workplace, which helps you understand where these cognitive biases might be harming you and your workplace and your colleagues and your life in general. So check that out at disaster avoidance experts comm forward slash subscribe again, that's disaster avoidance experts dot com forward slash subscribe and of course it's going to be linked in the show notes. Alright everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the wise decision maker show. And as always, I'm wishing you the wisest and most profitable decisions

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

---

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

What are you paying attention to during this pandemic? What you’re focusing on can make a big difference to your business, your career, and your health.

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:

And if you like audio, here’s a podcast based on the blog:

Or simply read onward!

Many people are very excited by the prospect of effective vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which have applied for emergency authorization from the FDA. This wonderful news has deservedly lifted the stock market, and many companies are moving to eliminate planned budget and staff cuts.

Yet my conversations with a number of C-suite leaders show that too many are showing excessive enthusiasm over these vaccine news. They forget that the vaccine rollout to the general public is slated for early Spring of 2021.

They’re not facing the full reality of today’s third wave of COVID, which is flooding many hospitals and leaving patients stranded. Governors have launched renewed shutdowns by late November across the US to decrease the strain on the medical system. As a result, the economic situation will not improve, realistically speaking, until late Spring 2021.

It might seem hard to contemplate that the next few months will be even worse than the last few months, but that’s the reality we’re facing. If you’re not paying attention to the reality of the third wave, then your attention is misdirected, as it is for so many people.

Consider what catches and holds your attention whenever you read or watch the news. Most of us tend to be optimistic and focus on the bright side of life. Sure, we might acknowledge that it’s much wiser to balance optimism and pessimism about the future of the pandemic, given the combination of both good and bad news: good news in the long term of Summer 2021 onward, bad news in the short and medium term of this Winter and Spring.

Yet it’s hard for us to pay attention to contradictory ideas. Holding such opposing perspectives in our mind causes cognitive dissonance, unless we train ourselves to accept complexity and nuance. Thus, most people prefer to let go of the negative information and focus on the positive, despite the danger to their business, their career, and their health of doing so.

In my conversations with executives, I had to bring a number down to earth to face this unpleasant reality. To do so, I shared the story of a client who paid attention to the wrong things in the early stages of the pandemic; this case study helped convince them

Manufacturing Attention: A Case Study

The story featured James, the COO of a mid-size manufacturing company. Its senior leadership was determined to push through with its product expansion plans even during the onset of the pandemic. When COVID-19 made the news in December, James as well as the company’s CEO and CFO dismissed any thoughts that it could turn into anything serious.

However, as COVID-19 numbers started to climb in the US in early March, James grew concerned and discussed with the other leaders the possibility of postponing their expansion plans. He suggested rerouting their resources towards boosting tech and security to prepare for a possible work from home migration for the company. Then, there was the looming threat of loss of productivity in case of an outbreak and perhaps even a shutdown.

The company was behind industry peers in its technology investments, relying heavily on manpower to perform assembly line tasks instead of purchasing more advanced equipment to automate its work. Operations would be crippled if even a small portion of employees were not allowed to go to work, or refused to do so due to safety concerns, since the company’s current manufacturing process required a wide set of specialized skills.

The company had already been testing some equipment to automate more tasks with good results for the past few months, technology that many of their competitors had already secured and implemented in the last couple of years. James urged the CEO to greenlight the purchase of this equipment and its wide-scale implementation, instead of waiting another 12 months, as initially planned. Using this equipment, many fewer workers with a more general skill set would be needed to produce the company’s products.

Unfortunately, the CEO and CFO and most of the company’s senior leaders remained unconvinced and still focused on the expansion plans, since doing so was projected to lead to the most growth for the next couple of years. Indeed, a lot of effort and planning had gone into it, and most of James’ colleagues were strongly against scrapping or shelving it.

The way the other executives saw it, the number of people infected with the virus in the country was still significantly lower compared with those from China or even Italy. They expected that COVID-19 wouldn’t gain much traction in the US. The CEO decided to push through with the product expansion plans.

Of course, you can already imagine what happened next, given the boom in COVID-19 cases and the wave of restrictions that were soon imposed on the country. James’ company, along with many other companies in the manufacturing industry, was heavily disrupted.

James decided to contact me for a consultation in late May after learning about my work through a webinar I conducted about how organizations can adapt to the changes brought by the pandemic. When he called me, his company was already embroiled in internal team conflicts and its operations had already been severely disrupted. Even after the state allowed reopenings for businesses, many employees either refused or were unable to go to work due to quarantines, greatly slowing production.

Even those who had desk jobs had a lot of difficulties working remotely due to the company’s overall lack of preparation for a work from home setup. The company’s business continuity plan was completely inadequate for such a major disruption. It was evident that the company needed help getting out of murky waters - and soon.

Paying Attention to COVID-19 and Cognitive Biases

When I met with James as well as the company’s CEO and CFO over Zoom, I told them that we need to acknowledge that COVID-19 severely disrupted our world and will not disappear anytime soon. Believing otherwise helped drive many companies deep into chaos because business leaders failed to take the right action at the right time.

The refusal to recognize the gravity of the pandemic and even the act of downplaying it stem from a combination of three factors:

• The nature of the virus itself
• The preexisting beliefs and plans of the business leaders
• The dangerous judgment errors we all tend to make that cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists call cognitive biases

The latter mental blindspots stem, in large part, from our evolutionary background. Our gut reactions evolved for the ancestral savanna environment, not the modern world. Yet gurus and business leaders alike overwhelmingly advocate going with our gut and following our intuition in making decisions, instead of using effective decision-making processes.

One of these cognitive biases is the attentional bias, which caused James’ colleagues to decide erroneously at the onset, and amidst, this pandemic.

Dealing With Attentional Bias

Attentional bias refers to our tendency to pay attention to information that we find most emotionally engaging, and ignore information that we don’t. Given the intense, in-the-moment nature of threats and opportunities in the ancestral savanna, this bias is understandable. Yet in the modern environment, sometimes information that doesn’t feel emotionally salient is actually the most important data.

For example, the fact that the novel coronavirus originated in Wuhan, China, and caused massive sickness and deaths there, didn’t draw much attention as a salient potential threat among Europeans and Americans. It proved too easy to dismiss the importance of the outbreak in Wuhan, due to stereotypical and inaccurate visions of the Chinese heartland as full of backwoods peasants.

In reality, Wuhan is a global metropolis. The largest city in central China, it has over 11 million people and produced over $22.4 billion in 2018. It has a good healthcare system, strengthened substantially by China after the SARS pandemic.

A major travel hub, Wuhan’s nickname is “the Chicago of China”; it had over 500 international flights per day before the outbreak. If we assume an average of 200 people per plane, that’s 10,000 people a day flying out of Wuhan to the world.

Europeans and Americans, with the exception of a small number of experts, failed to perceive the threat to themselves from the breakdown of Wuhan’s solid healthcare system as it became overwhelmed by COVID-19. They arrogantly assumed this breakdown pointed to the backwardness of China’s heartland, rather than the accurate perception that any modern medical system, without major interventions like social distancing and masking, would become overwhelmed in the face of novel coronavirus.

They also failed to recognize the thorough interconnectedness of Wuhan to the rest of the globe. A case in point: the first case of COVID-19 in the US was diagnosed in a traveler from Wuhan in the state of Washington. The first epicenter of COVID-19 in Europe, northern Italy, has unusually close ties to Wuhan.

Europeans only began paying serious attention to COVID-19 when it began to take root in Italy.

Americans, in turn, started to pay attention when COVID-19 surfaced in Washington State.

Do you know who didn’t ignore Wuhan, besides a small number of experts? Those to whom this city felt emotionally salient. Those who understood that Wuhan could be fairly compared to Chicago in the US, Manchester in the UK, or Frankfurt in Germany.

That emotional salience helps explain why many Chinese communities in Europe and America acted quickly and effectively to minimize the impact of COVID-19. For instance, the 50,000 Chinese in

Prato, Italy – a quarter of the city’s residents – went into voluntary lockdown at the end of January.

That’s three weeks before the first recorded infection in Italy.

With their connections to China, they could envision what was to come, and spread the word to close their businesses, stay home as much as possible, and wear masks in the rare cases when venturing outside. That helps explain why, according to Renzo Berti, the top state health official for the region, none of the Chinese residents in Prato got COVID-19 and the town’s infection rate was half of the Italian average, 62 cases per 100,000 people rather than 115 for the entire country.

Imagine what would have happened if everyone behaved like these ethnic Chinese? Businesses, individuals, and governments acting together could have prevented the enormous death toll and economic devastation from the novel coronavirus. Yet our attentional bias led us astray.

Path to the New Abnormal

As the pandemic broke out, companies and other organizations overwhelmingly turned to their existing emergency business continuity plan and then simply continued with that plan as the pandemic continued.

Yet continuing with emergency measures throughout the minimal two years of the pandemic is not wise, to say the least. A business continuity plan is meant for a week or two, a month at most if it’s a really good plan, before things start returning to normal (I tell you this as someone who helped businesses and nonprofits design many business continuity plans).

Unfortunately, we will not return to the “normal” status quo ante pandemic. Ever.

Do you think that, even in the most optimistic scenario of only two years of waves of stricter and looser shutdowns and social distancing, our society will ever be the same? Of course not. And let’s remember that we shouldn’t plan for the most optimistic scenario.

As the saying goes, hope for the best, but plan for the worst. What if the first or second wave of vaccines fails? Then, it will be more like a five-year horizon instead of two years, and that’s what you should plan for going forward.

Companies need to adapt to the next few years. And your emergency measures won’t cut it. You need to pay attention to and accept the current reality of ongoing waves of restrictions as the new abnormal, instead of a temporary emergency. That means fundamentally changing your internal and external business model if you want your organization to survive and thrive during these troubled months.

This will include taking a long, hard look at the elements that drive your business. It will also entail revising or, in some cases, even totally revamping your daily operations and business continuity plan.

Steering Back to Efficiency

When I last spoke with James in the end of June 2020, he told me that he, along with the CEO and CFO, decided that it was time to face reality and gauge how deep the company was in the mess. They decided to meet with all the senior and line managers to assess the most pressing issues in each department and come up with short- and long-term ways to address the pain points.

Next, the CEO held a company-wide virtual town hall meeting to update everyone about what was happening and to present how senior management planned to solve the company’s crisis. This move made sure everyone got on the same page, while also reassuring rank-and-file employees that managers were aware of and listening to their concerns.

Due to the CEO’s efficient and engaging way of handling the town hall, a lot of pent-up resentment across the company was significantly reduced. This paved the way for better cooperation, which was crucial for the succeeding major steps that James, the CEO, and CFO took -- starting with stopping all projects related to the product expansion and shelving it for the next two fiscal years.

Fortunately, only about 30% of the budget resources had been released for the expansion-related projects by the time they first consulted me. As a result, the CEO, CFO, and James were able to make a timely and strategic plan on how they can reallocate the remaining 70%, including:

• Purchasing and installing the automation equipment
• Investing into necessary social distancing and hygiene measures at their manufacturing facilities to comply with CDC guidelines
• Boosting tech, security, and funding for home offices for an efficient work from home transition for all employees who could be moved to telecommuting
• Providing professional development for their workers, both in working from home collaboration and communication for those who worked from home, and in using the new equipment and CDC guidelines compliance for those who needed to come to work

In addition, James, along with the CEO and CFO as well as the relevant executives, made sure that quick, effective changes were made to the company’s policies and processes so that operations would be in line with the transition to virtual and CDC guidelines compliance. Due to these efforts, the company was able to resume smoother operations and employees were able to achieve a more efficient way of working from home and in the factory.

James told me that he and the leadership team were pleased with the results to the changes they made, overall. He also expressed to me how glad he was they did so once the numbers of COVID-19 cases began to increase in mid-June, prompting a pause of the reopening process that eventually led to a cycle of reopening and restrictions.

Conclusion

Remember James’ example and evaluate where you might be paying attention to the wrong data. Step back and acknowledge the complexity and nuance of the situation, despite the challenges of cognitive dissonance. Then, balance accurately both bad and good news to determine your path forward.

Key Takeaway

You can defend your company from disastrous leadership decisions by paying attention to what’s important during this pandemic...> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• Did your leadership team make bad decisions at the onset of the pandemic, and do you now want to make things right?
• Where might you do a better job of fighting against attentional bias?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on December 8, 2020

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Anchoring keeps you shackled to initial information and keeps you from moving forward. Make the best decisions to propel your company by breaking free from this mental blindspot. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes how to avoid anchoring your business to the wrong data.

Video: “Are You Anchoring Your Business to the Wrong Data?”

Podcast: “Are You Anchoring Your Business to the Wrong Data?”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article on Are You Anchoring Your Business to the Wrong Data?
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Wise Decision Maker Show, where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Today, I want to talk about anchoring, specifically, whether you're talking anchoring your company to the wrong data. Now, what's up with anchoring? What is this concept? And why is it bad? Well, anchoring has to do with how we perceive information, how we hear information, and how we get attached to the initial information we hear on any topic. So any topic whether we learn about a person, or an event, or development, business trend technology, the first piece of information that we hear about the topic tends to very much anchor us and color our future impressions of this topic, it's very hard for us to switch our perspective from this initial anchor. So what happens is that the initial piece of information, especially if it comes from our source that we trust that we perceive as credible, valuable, that it's trustworthy, we tend to see all of this information through this lens, all the information that we're getting through the lens of initial information. That's why it's especially important to be careful about the first information you hear, and to be very willing to update your mind to change your mind based on new evidence. Because most of us don't actually this is a tendency, cognitive bias, a dangerous judgment error called anchoring. So if you've been watching, checking out the wise decision maker show for a while, you know, we talk about cognitive biases quite often see, these are the dangerous judgment errors that cause us to make really bad decisions, to have bad perspectives on reality to not see reality as it is, and then come to wrong conclusions, whether in business, whether in life, all of these sorts of things. So you’ve got to be very careful about anchoring. Because often, when new evidence is actually quite a bit more persuasive, objectively, you know, when you're looking from outside, you will tend not to update your beliefs to change your mind based on this new evidence, you'll tend to stick to what you know, it's comfortable. That's what our gut intuition tells us to do, to stick to what we know to our pre-existing beliefs, conceptions, information, and then not change our minds based on new evidence. So you have to watch out for this anchoring. It's a pretty bad tendency. As an example, let's think about this pandemic. covid 19 coronavirus, pandemic, huge, huge example of anchoring. I've been so frustrated with so many people who have been anchored on the initial information they received. So that's been really bad, really, really bad. I mean, you probably know that, let's say the Centers for Disease Control, they changed their guidance based on new evidence. So they came up with some initial guidance that said, you know, prepare for two week disruption or something like that. And, you know, don't need to wear masks, but COVID-19 spreads mainly through touching surfaces. Over time, they changed their guidance, they said that no, you actually need to prepare for a much longer disruption than two weeks, it's going to be much more serious, that COVID-19 mainly spreads through airborne particles, and that you actually do need masks that are very protective, especially protective of you, it helps you protect yourself when you wear a mask. And it helps protect other people from if you have COVID-19 without knowing it, because so many of us are asymptomatic. When we have COVID-19 this information, this new information. This is how science works. You get new information, and you change your beliefs. And this is how business works. You really know how hard you should work to get new information. And you change your beliefs based on this new information. Unfortunately, many business leaders don't approach business this way, even though they should stick to their initial decision. They say, okay, we made this decision, and therefore we're going to stick to it. That's what makes us good leaders. That's a terrible, terrible perspective. And that is one of the worst aspects of anchoring this really negative impact on leadership, where leaders perceive themselves as having to stick to their initial judgment. So they have got some initial information, they stick to it, even though new information causes them to change and should cause them to change their minds. And this is how really high make the biggest profit in business and how to protect your health in this pandemic. So another aspect of anchoring with COVID-19 was that there were a number of recent pandemics, that h1 f1, flu, the swine flu, all of these pandemics that had an impact in Asia, or Africa or the Ebola virus, that didn't really have much of an impact in the United States. I mean, some impact of course, but not a huge impact, not nearly as big as COVID-19 So folks, anchored under previous impressions. You don't necessarily anchor on the immediate thing you hear about COVID-19, you can anchor on your previous impressions of pandemics as a whole. So that's another tendency that we have anchored on previous information we got about the topic and not changed our mind about based on new evidence, which showed that COVID-19 is clearly going to be much worse than these other pandemics. Then, of course, many leaders unfortunately compared COVID-19. To the flu, Elon musk famously compared COVID-19 to the flu, many other business leaders, as well as other leaders, political leaders, civic leaders, comparing COVID-19 to the flow. Of course, that's a bad comparison. As we know now, I mean, many people wish really, we knew then, and these leaders had perhaps some ulterior motives for comparing COVID-19 to the flu, based on them not wanting to disrupt their business processes, and so on, which really is not a good idea. Because in the end, of course, it's much better to face reality, accept reality, rather than hope for and wish for an optimistic outcome, which is definitely not going to come COVID-19, of course, is much more deadly than the floor, about five to 10 times more deadly. And it seems about as contagious, maybe even more contagious, more problematically, we don't have any defenses against COVID-19. Whereas, of course, against the flu, we have a number of treatments. And we also have vaccines, which are somewhat effective. So that's a bad comparison, even though it's much more contagious and much more deadly than the flu. So those are some bad tendencies when comparing an COVID-19. When anchoring to initial evidence, you heard on COVID-19, whether about masks, whether about its comparison to the flu, whether previous pandemics and this is something that unfortunately, a lot of companies run into. So for example, one of my consulting clients, was a company, a fin tech company, 130 people fin tech company in Texas, which initially, the CEO and CIO on the C suite had an impression of COVID-19 is no worse than the flow, not a big deal, you know, don't really need to prepare for any serious disruptions. And so they didn't treat it seriously. Well, unfortunately, not treating it seriously, not instituting the kind of precautions the CDC mandated as something that really businesses should be doing led to a major outbreak in the office. And including some C suite leaders who got sick, the CEO had to go to the hospital. And numbering a couple of employees not C suite level, but older employees died was really bad. And the company got into a lot of trouble with employee morale, people didn't have good retention. They had bad customer service, of course, because of all these disruptions. So the CEO called me, once she saw me on the podcast talking about her business leaders needed a webinar talking about how business leaders need to pivot for the covid 19 pandemic and for the postcode future. And so we talked about the situation. And I pointed out how anchoring they really should have known by me, which is when this outbreak happened, and when they saw me on the webinar and called me that there was a lot of new information about COVID-19 being much more deadly than the flow. But you really need to take these guidelines from the CDC seriously. And especially in Texas was a problematic situation, because it didn't close in nearly timely enough manner. And three opened way too fast. And so there was a huge surge in cases. And that was pretty bad around that timeline, with May, April, May, June. So that was pretty bad. And they really should have done much more to protect themselves. So we talked about anchoring, we talked about the kind of strategies that they needed to actually improve their performance. And they went off on a good path. After that. They really had changed their program. Previously, they mandated all employees to come back to the office when Texas reopened, which was way too fast. And that's what they had an outbreak of. And so instead of that day, rolled out and working from home, everyone who wanted to work from home could come into the office, but they discouraged people from doing so. So only people who really needed to come to office had to choose to come to the office. And that was much more helpful, helping improve employee retention, employee morale and got the company going off on the right track. So that's the kind of problem that business leaders experience. And professionals experience all sorts when they anchor to the wrong data, whether in the pandemic or any other business development, whether they do that their product will be great in the marketplace. Despite evidence showing that it's not great in the marketplace. There is a reason about 70 to 80% of all product launches fail because they are people who are to anchor to the initial impressions, they think the product will be good. And they tend to only look at information showing that it's good, ignoring information that the marketplace is not as receptive to the product as you wanted. So there's so many other tendencies in business, we're anchoring trips folks up, you got to watch out for these tendencies. And you have to protect yourself and your business from anchoring. Alright, so this was another episode of the wise decision maker show. And I hope you found this episode beneficial. Please follow us on whatever media you enjoy this episode, wherever both videos and podcasts version, so make sure to check that out. It'll be in the notes. So if you check me out on the podcast, the video will be noted. If you're checking out the video, the podcast will be noted in the notes so you can check those out and follow us and the other formats as well as on your favorite formats, whether iTunes, YouTube, wherever you'll find us across the spectrum. Please click like if you liked the episode, and please comment, we'd really love your comments. And that helps us make the show much better. Same thing for reviews, please leave a review whatever you heard and saw this episode. Of course, as always, there's a blog with much more information about this show in the notes. So make sure to check out the blog that talks much more about the case study gives a lot of citations with the scientific evidence behind what I'm talking about, and business evidence. So check that out as well. There are a couple of books that are really relevant to this topic. One is my book called never go with your gut how pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. Of course, it's about decision making risk management change management. So check that out and then resilience, adapt and plan for the new normal of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. That's about how you adapt to COVID-19 and the COVID and the post COVID economic recovery. So check that out make sure you read it if you want to make it if you want to protect your business in the context of COVID-19 and the post COVID recovery and of course your career as well. You want to check out a free resource called the wise decision maker course. This is a free course with eight modules, eight video based modules on making the wisest decisions, check that out at disasteravoidanceexperts.com/subscribe. Alright, I hope you've enjoyed this episode. And as always, the wisest most profitable decisions to you, my friends

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Do you find yourself increasingly upset whenever you take in news regarding COVID-19, especially the recent third wave? Do you often ask yourself -- whenever you get a glimpse of your friends' relatively productive lives through social media posts -- if you're the only one who isn't flourishing throughout this pandemic?

If you've been feeling extra stressed out or worried lately, it’s not uncommon. Many other people are also feeling this way.

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:

And if you like audio, here’s a podcast based on the blog:

Or simply read onward!

As the virus spread through the country, destroying plans as well as routines, it left a path of unpredictability in its wake -- enough to create some mental health and wellness problems that need to be resolved.

As a matter of fact, according to a CDC report on mental health and wellness, stress and anxiety, as well as clinical depression, are on the rise in the US. In fact, the national rate of stress and anxiety tripled in the second quarter compared to the prior-year quarter (from 8.1% to 25.5%). Meanwhile, depression practically quadrupled (from 6.5% to 24.3%) from a year ago.

Those numbers, together with the significant results of the pandemic in our personal and professional lives, are absolutely a cause for concern. Here’s what you need to do to deal with COVID anxiety.

Handle COVID Anxiety Immediately

You might have been tempted to minimize or ignore how you really feel, or perhaps you didn't quite understand how anxious or stressed you've been all along.

Nonetheless, take into consideration the impact on your overall wellness if you continue to sweep these problems under the rug. Note that your anxiety and stressors aren't going to vanish by willing them away -- similar to how COVID will not simply magically disappear.

You need to avoid the lure of the normalcy bias or that tempting feeling that you can just fast-forward the difficult parts of this year, or that things will quickly return to exactly how they were pre-COVID.

The normalcy bias is among over a hundred harmful judgment mistakes that scholars in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics like myself call cognitive biases. They result from a combination of our evolutionary makeup and also particular ways that our brains are wired. Such mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health to politics and even shopping. Fortunately, recent research has shown effective and pragmatic strategies to defeat these dangerous judgment errors.

To address stress and anxiety, we have to adjust to the long battle of dealing with COVID-19 as well as tackling issues now. There is simply no point in delaying this adjustment.

Simply consider how your productivity, comfort, as well as individual and work relationships will get a boost when you opt to tackle the problem directly.

Address Your Needs to Beat COVID Anxiety

Most probably, a great deal of the things that are making you anxious or giving you stress involve the uncertainty brought by the pandemic. You most likely feel like you have no control over your life. The vulnerability you feel might even lead you to make mountains out of molehills.

There are things within your control, nonetheless. Securing these will likely give a sense of stability and comfort -- and don’t we all yearn for these during such nerve-wracking times?

You're likely familiar with Abraham Maslow's theory of human motivation and also the pyramid of needs based on his work. Maslow suggested that specific essential requirements need to be met so that people will remain motivated.

Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman refined Maslow's theory with newer research, and his revised model demonstrates that human beings require the following to remain balanced and motivated.

Safety

This pertains to physical safety. See to it that you and also the ones you love can remain sheltered in a safe place for months at a time if there are major COVID outbreaks in your area. You must be able to stay in this place keeping in mind the waves of infections and also limitations that we’ll all have to deal with as we wait for a vaccine.

While it's unlikely, it pays to plan for a realistic pessimistic circumstance. This would mean having 2 months' worth of basic food and also cleansing materials, in addition to required medicines. To ensure a good supply, consider buying such goods in bulk from specialized online suppliers instead of clearing the racks in your local food store. This would be the more practical and responsible thing to do.

Also keep in mind that numerous companies (most likely including your own, too) as well as organizations have moved to a remote work setup. You may need to telecommute for a while, possibly longer than you anticipated, depending on the business strategy your firm decides to embark on. This translates to more time spent inside your home, so make sure that it's a place where you can work without obstacles.

Connection to Others

Your relationship with your loved ones as well as your community is incredibly vital if you want to get rid of COVID stress and anxiety. There are several things you'll need to do to maintain it.

Initially, think of your immediate connections with household members. With these connections, it's better to expect and address concerns in advance as opposed to having them explode later on. If you live with a romantic partner at home, you'll need to figure out exactly how to engage in a healthy way given that you're with each other all the time.

The same applies for various other family members. You might also have children who are cooped up inside the house if they’re back from school or university. In that case, you'll have to figure out ways to help them deal with lockdown fatigue.

You'll additionally need to correspond with their schools for updates on school work. These updates will help you get a better sense of how your children's schooling should be addressed - one less thing to worry about.

More consideration should be given towards dealing with older adults above 60 or anyone with health conditions in your home (including yourself if applicable). Because they are at higher risk of getting COVID, significant measures need to be taken to prevent them from getting ill.

Remember to take more care than you usually would have before this pandemic, since over half of those who contract COVID manifest no or light symptoms.

Second, think about your loved ones who don’t stay in your home. You and your romantic partner might not be living in the same house. Based on how vulnerable you and other household members might be to the virus, you might opt to have a socially distant kind of relationship or you might opt to take the risk of physical intimacy.

No matter which option you decided to take, just ensure that you are making the choice consciously and not casually.

Apply the same principle to your friendships. You will need to figure out ways to stay connected with every friend, since social distancing recommendations and preferences may vary.

This means that if having a beer or lunch in person isn’t possible yet, you could choose to interact online and spend time virtually instead. Keep in mind that you might need to sustain these alternative ways of engagement for the next few months, maybe years.

This also applies to your community activities, such as nonprofit activism, clubs, faith-based groups, and so on. You need to make an online routine in case social distancing restrictions are tightened again.

Considering the ongoing waves of lockdowns and restrictions, I highly recommend figuring out what kind of arrangement works for you and your connections. The sooner you’re able to address this, the better for all involved. While different US states have varying guidelines, anything can change depending on the severity of COVID outbreaks.

Keep in mind as well that maintaining strong connections will give you more stability and comfort during these difficult times. Having good relationships will allow you to handle COVID anxiety better.

Self-Esteem

Finally, make sure to address and secure your self-esteem. This refers to your self-respect, self-confidence, and your sense of mastery over your fate.

You can do this by planning how you want to live your life during and after this pandemic. Doing so will boost your sense of control and help you feel confident, which is a good approach when handling anxiety and stress.

You should also explore other areas in your life where you can make improvements - even enhancements - during this period of limitations and restrictions.

You could even pick up or enhance new skills. Staying mostly at home provides a great opportunity to learn how to cook those dishes you’ve wanted to try for the longest time, or play an instrument, or learn a new language.

If you sync your efforts with signing up for an online hobbyist group, you’ll create even more meaningful connections. I’m sure you’ll agree that this is even better.

Dealing with your most important needs is empowering and will assist you in developing a good sense of mastery over your current environment. If you do this intentionally and consistently, it provides a strong counterpoint to anxiety and stress during the pandemic and even after.

Conclusion

We can’t forecast exactly how the COVID-19 pandemic will end and how much more of our personal and work lives will be disrupted along the way. That’s why it isn’t uncommon for us to experience stress and anxiety during this period.

Nevertheless, while the uncertainty this thought brings can lead to different degrees of worry, there are things you can do to meet your fundamental needs. Being able to do so will free you from the discomfort of stress and anxiety.

Key Takeaway

Deal with COVID anxiety and stress immediately by addressing your fundamental needs of safety, connection to others, and self-esteem...> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• Have you been feeling stressed or anxious during this pandemic, and do you now want to make a change for the better?
• Where might you do a better job of fighting COVID anxiety?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: Engin_Akyurt/Pixabay

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on December 22nd, 2020  

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Defend your organization from disastrous leadership decisions by paying attention to what’s important during this pandemic. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes how to make sure that you are paying attention to what matters during this pandemic.

Video: “What Are You Paying Attention to During This Pandemic?”

Podcast: “What Are You Paying Attention to During This Pandemic?”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article on What Are You Paying Attention to During This Pandemic?
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Today, what I'd like to talk about is our attention, especially as it applies to the pandemic. But of course, with other principles applicable to all sorts of situations, whether in business or in life, you have to be paying attention to what you're paying attention, you've probably heard that attention is our most precious commodity, especially right now in what's called the attention economy, where everyone wants our eyeballs, where everyone wants us to pay attention to them and to not to other folks where that's what really matters. So you have to be thinking a lot about your attention, and where you focus your attention, because it's not random, you know, people are trying to draw our attention, but you can choose to devote your attention to the right things, what really matters. And that is critically important for you to realize, because when you just go with your intuition, when you just go with your gut, unfortunately, other people are going to succeed in taking advantage of your attention. And you're also not going to react appropriately to major events like the pandemic, because our gut intuition or reactions, just as they are , have not been adapted/evolved. For the current environment. If you've been checking out the wise decision makers for a while you know that our gut reactions are actually adapted for this and family environment. That long ago time when our ancestors were hunters, foragers and gatherers, living in small tribes of 15 people, 250 people, that's the context to which our gut reactions our natural way of paying attention is adapted to. And if you don't learn that if you don't pay attention to what you really should, in the modern world, if you just go with your gut, if you go with what's comfortable, which the vast majority of people do, then you're going to get yourself in a heap of trouble. So many people got themselves in a heap of trouble with not paying attention to the pandemic, effectively, the specific cognitive bias, the dangerous judgment, and ear error that I'll talk about here is called the attentional bias. But dangerous judgment errors come from the specific ways that our mind has evolved over time. And the way it's structured right now, these are dangerous judgments of ours, the mental blind spots have caused us to deviate away from the ideal way, we would pay attention and in general interpret reality, we don't interpret reality. Well, we don't interpret reality accurately, truthfully, just because of how our brain is wired. Just because of that Savanna environment. Our brain is well adapted for the savanna environment, but not the modern environment. So you have to choose to take different routes in the modern environment in order to make sure that you pay attention to what you really should. That problem with the attentional bias, that's it describes our specific tendency. So it's dangerous judgment errors. cognitive bias describes our specific tendency to pay attention to what is most emotionally salient. What does that mean? It means whatever poses our emotions, whatever pulls our gut reactions, that's what we pay attention to. So whatever feels irrelevant to us, whatever feels important, is what we will pay attention to whatever feels important, not if it's actually important if it's actually unimportant, if it just feels important. That's what emotional salience is emotional salience is the feeling of relevance. And again, our feeling that something is relevant and important, may not have anything to do with reality, there may be selling important things that we're missing, and so many minor trivial things that we perceive as important. And that tensional bias describes our tendency to fall into this trap, overlook critical information, pay too much attention to information that really doesn't matter. Especially with the pandemic, of course, we overlooked incredibly important information about the pandemic about what it is about the developments, their focus in three lies, and how bad it is with cats. So here's the crucial thing about the pandemic, the beginning of the pandemic that people didn't realize. They thought that well, it's just, you know, something weird in the middle of China. It's, you know, Wu Han, right, what's behind China. It's just nowhere in China, right? And there are so many pandemics that began in East Asia that really didn't reach the United States. But then that sputtered out that didn't really matter to us. Well, when I was looking starting to look at what was going on when Wu Han China in December of 2019, and January, early January of 2020, I saw that Wu Han is actually not middle of nowhere, China, it's a major metropolis. Did you know that? I didn't know that when I was looking I mean, I heard the name before. So guess what, somehow my mind but it was, it is a major Metropolis has 11 million people 11 million people, that's more than in any city United States, it produces $22 billion of revenue per year, over $22 billion in revenue per year. It has something like 500 international flights a day, with an average of let's say, 200 people per flight. That's 10,000 people flying in and out of Wuhan, China Daily. Wow. Well, there's a reason it's called the Chicago of China. It's kind of that transportation hub, that regional transportation hub, a lot of roads, railroads go to it. And of course, these international flights. So we missed that critical information, because it wasn't emotionally salient. The vast majority of people didn't pay attention to it. When they started researching it, I realized that, hey, this is actually a pretty dangerous situation, because of all those international flights. And now, Wu Han is a major modern metropolis. And its public health infrastructure collapsed, completely collapsed. In the face of COVID-19. It was pretty terrible, you've probably heard about the huge hospitals that have had to be built up, and how people were locked up in their homes. So obviously, to me, this was something that was going to get out. This is not something that was going to be localized to China, and then if you look at what was happening, of course, the first countries that were hit outside of China, we're in the immediate East Asian neighborhoods. But the next place after that was northern Italy, Northern Italy. Why? Well, because it had such close ties to Wu Han. So it was the region outside of East Asia that had the closest ties to work on because of their ties to Chinese cloth merchants in the clothing industry. So that's why it was hit first and so powerfully. And that was clear evidence to me that, hey, Northern Italy was going to get hit. And it's going to be pretty bad throughout the world, Europe and the United States. So I started talking about it and writing about it. But folks didn't really want to pay attention to it. They thought that Well, again, it's the middle of nowhere China. So it was a manufacturing company. I'll give you an example of someone who became a client of mine manufacturing company, mid sized manufacturing company. And it the CEO, the CEO, the C suite, they started hearing about, you know, hey, this disease in the middle of China, whatever, you know, they're reading the newspapers or reading online, you know, how folks read the news get their news that these days, but they didn't really pay attention to it. They said, Well, whatever plenty of previous pandemics passed us by right now we need to focus on our priority, pay attention to our priority, which is, at that time, a major product expansion for the manufacturing company. So the range of products they were expanding. And so they ignored information about the pandemic, even as it not only began to be a problem in China, of Wu Han and elsewhere, but also northern Italy. And then we're spreading from Italy, Northern Italy, to the rest of Europe. And of course, starting up in the United States of northern Italy. It was taking root in early February of 2020, then the United States, and it was really becoming more and more widespread throughout late February, and was declared a national emergency in mid March. And in early March, they still weren't working, it was clearly going to be an issue. They were still not doing much about it. They're just going about their business looking at product expansion plans, not really even looking at their business continuity plans and adjusting them to address the situation. You know, they were kind of like Elon Musk, the major industrialist intrapreneur, founder of Tesla, right, which is one of the biggest companies in the world. They tweeted on April 9, that hey, this pandemic, there's not going to be a big deal, that it's just, you know, overblown. And he tweeted on March 19, that, hey, you know, there'll be close to new, zero new cases in the US by the end of April. Well, clearly, he was very wrong. Unfortunately for the company that I'm talking about, their leadership was paying attention to folks like Elon Musk, who is a major model for industrial success, who they want to emulate. This was manufacturing, to be clear, not some midsize manufacturing startup. So they wanted to emulate that and they were paying attention to him. They weren't paying attention to the CDC, they were kind of ignoring the, even the declaration of emergency and they didn't really pay attention to what was going on, until suddenly, their state declared the shutdown, and they had to immediately figure out what to do about the shutdown. So that was when they started paying attention to it. Clear their attention was off base. Clearly they weren't paying attention to the right things they should have. I mean, definitely, in late February, when they were taking growth knighted states, they should have looked at their planning there and seen that the product expansion is not a good idea, we need to look at their contingency guidelines. What so the CEO of the company, how I found out about it contacted me, after watching a webinar that they presented on how businesses can adapt successfully to the pandemic, and the post pandemic recovery. That was some time I gave a webinar in April. And he contacted me because I think it was early May. So contacted me and talked about the situation. And once we started talking, I found out that it was after the product expansion, their next plans, the company's plans were to buy some automation equipment, which their competitors had bought. And they were kind of behind in buying. And they were like, well, we'll expand the product. And then we'll buy this automation equipment, which we bought pretty quickly. And the processes can be adapted to the situation pretty quickly. But they chose not to do that the CEO actually went to the CEO and as the pandemic was kind of rolling out and saying, hey, maybe we should consider looking at this and prioritizing this automation equipment. Because, you know, if we are forced to somehow have issues because of the pandemic of some of our workers getting sick, automation will help us right? Well, the CEO didn't want to hear anything about it really wanted to focus on this perfect expansion. And that was a big problem, because they got really kind of screwed with it. With the pandemic, they really should have adjusted their plans. So when the CEO contacted me, we talked through the situation, we saw that it was still a quite viable option to get the automation equipment and replace a lot of their manufacturing needs, workforce needs not a lot, but a significant percentage proportion, and enable them to work in shifts do much more social distancing. So when we got to talking to the CEO and the rest of the C suite, and eventually they grew convinced that hey, this will really need to put the product expansion on hold, and shift our resources to buy the automation equipment. Fortunately, they didn't expand all of the resources for the product expansion, they only expanded and spent 30% of the resources. So they were able to shift much of the remaining resources into buying automation equipment, installing it and getting it up and going. And then they were much more capable of surviving and thriving through the rest of the pandemic, because they could Institute much more appropriate social distancing guidelines, they could have reduced the workforce. So it wasn't so much of a problem for them, as it was previously. And as it would have been, if they didn't go for this process. And of course, there were many other things that they did, such as the rolling out of work from home programs for employees, who could back office employees, sales and so on, could work from home. Various folks marketing, accounting could work from home. So that was a part of it. And there were a number of other things that they changed to adapt their sales and marketing to the pandemic. But that's a different story. So the crucial thing is to realize that their problem was not paying attention to the right things. And so many leaders didn't pay attention to the right things. So you have to realize what you're paying attention to in the pandemic. And more broadly, think about where your attention is dedicated. Because in this modern attention economy, so many people are trying to get our attention, and they're trying to get it for their topics. And we don't realize what's happening. So we have to be very intentional about where we pay our attention, not fall for this attentional bias, and make sure that we pay attention to the topics that benefit us most, and help us achieve our goals, in business and in life. All right, this has been another episode of the wise decision maker show. I hope you've enjoyed clicking like please, if you've liked it, and please leave your comments. And leave your reviews wherever you've been watching or hearing. This episode of the wise decision maker show. Your comments in your reviews are very helpful for us to improve our content and allow you to serve you better and give you more value going forward. And please make sure to follow us on whatever media you consume this content, iTunes, YouTube spreaker, whatever your favorite media is. And keep in mind this is a wise decision maker show that comes in both video casts and podcasts. So if you've checked out the podcast you want to check out the video cast is going to be in the show notes. So if you've checked out the video cast and you want the podcast or let's say listening in your car, or listening at home when you're doing some chores, check out the podcast Version it's going to be in the notes. There. There are two really relevant books for this topic that one is called never go. They've got pioneering leaders who make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. That's going to be of course about decision making, change management, risk management, all of these sorts of things that you want to make sure to which you want to make sure to pay attention carefully. The link is going to be in the notes, it's going to be disaster avoidance experts.com. forward slash never got and another book is called resilience, depth and plan for the new normal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic, which talks about adapting to the pandemic and the post pandemic recovery. So post COVID future so make sure to pick that up. That's going to be a disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash adapt. And of course, it's going to be in the show notes. And there's a free resource which I think you'll really enjoy. It's called the Wise Decision Maker Course. It's a free eight video based module course on making the wisest decisions in all areas of business and life. So check that out, it's going to be at disasteravoidanceexperts.com/subscribe. Alright everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show and that it helps you make the wisest and most profitable decisions, my friends.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on December 29, 2020

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

The news headlines about mutated COVID strains originating in the UK, South Africa, and elsewhere have spread anxiety about the implications for organizations and individuals alike. Recently identified in the US, these strains likely arrived here by mid-November, with hundreds of probable cases by now. Yet should you be truly worried and change your plans?

The media, experts, and officials have focused on concerns about vaccine effectiveness. While some legitimate concerns exist that our vaccines might be 10-20% less effective against the new strains, this relatively small difference shouldn’t make you too worried. In fact, scientists may quickly update the mRNA-based vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech to make them fully effective against these new COVID variants.

So once the US achieves herd immunity through mass vaccination by the end of 2021, these new strains won’t really matter. However, another aspect of these new strains should make you very worried indeed: they’re much more infectious.

Unfortunately, the implications of their infectiousness have received little news coverage. Moreover, prominent public officials have downplayed concerns about the new strain, saying there’s no cause for alarm. For example, Adm. Brett Giroir, the White House coronavirus testing czar, gave an interview on December 27 to “Fox News Sunday,” where he said “It is not any more serious than the normal stains of COVID.”

Such complacency reflects our sleepwalking in the pandemic’s early stages, despite numerous warnings from myself and other risk management experts. Our brains don’t deal well with such threats, making it much more difficult to adapt successfully to slow-moving and high-impact train wrecks such as the pandemic itself, or to a much more infectious variant.

Are the New Strains Really More Infectious?

Research shows that the UK strain is anywhere from 56% to 70% more infectious, meaning each individual person who gets the new strain infects 56-70% more people than the older COVID strain. The new variant quickly came to dominate the old strain of COVID in Southeast England, going from less than 1% of all tested samples at the start of November to over two-thirds by mid-December.

Image courtesy of BBC

The South African strain appears even more infectious than the new UK strain. It came to dominate the country quickly: first found in October, it was responsible for over 80% of all new COVID cases by the end of December.

To corroborate this research, let’s compare new daily COVID cases per million people over the last several months.

Image courtesy of Our World In Data

The UK, US, Canada, Italy, and France all experienced a major rise in cases in September and October. That’s mainly because colder weather in the Northern Hemisphere drove people to interact indoors, where COVID spreads much more easily.

All these countries imposed various levels of lockdown in late October and early November. That decreased or stabilized their numbers by late November and early December, with the exception of a Thanksgiving-induced bump in the US that stabilized by mid-December.

The UK’s numbers, however, look different. After going from under 250 new cases per day in the start of October, it went to nearly 400 by mid-November. By early December, it successfully bent the curve, with new cases dipping below 250 again. However - unlike any of the other countries - it then experienced a sharp uptick from 250 in early December to over 500 by the end of December. Given the UK didn’t experience any holiday bumps or changes in government policy, the new strain offers a very convincing culprit for this deadly surge.

By contrast, South Africa is in the Southern Hemisphere, and it's summer there from December to February. So COVID cases should decrease, not increase. However, South Africa experienced a major surge, from below 30 cases per day in early November to over 180 by the end of December. Given no policy changes or other viable explanations, the new COVID variant is almost certainly to blame.

Why We Ignore Slow-Moving Train Wrecks

How worried do you feel right now? Is your heartbeat pounding, do you feel a wave of heat, are your palms sweating? Are you thinking about how to change all your plans for the next six months?

Probably not, because our minds aren’t well adapted to processing the implications of these seemingly-abstract numbers. We fall into dangerous judgment errors that scholars in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics like myself call cognitive biases. They result from a combination of our evolutionary makeup and also particular ways that our brains are wired.

Such mental blindspots impact all areas of our lives, from health to politics and even shopping. Fortunately, recent research has shown effective and pragmatic strategies to defeat these dangerous judgment errors, starting by learning about those three most likely to harm us in the pandemic.

We suffer from the tendency to focus on the short term, and minimize the importance of longer-term outcomes. Known as hyperbolic discounting, this cognitive bias causes us to underestimate the eventual impacts of clear trends, such as a more infectious strain of COVID.

The normalcy bias results in us feeling that things will generally keep going as they have been — normally. As a result, we underestimate drastically both the likelihood of a serious disruption occurring and the impact of one if it does occur. Indeed, while evaluating the future based on past experience often works, it’s not a good approach for new situations like a novel variant.

When we develop plans, we feel that the future will play out according to these plans. That mental blindspot, the planning fallacy, threatens our ability to prepare effectively for and pivot quickly when facing risks and problems. That includes neglecting both major unknown threats, also known as black swans, as well as, more surprisingly, big and obvious threats, known as gray rhinos; the new strains fall into the latter category.

The Implications of Much Higher Infectiousness

Let’s not make the same mistakes we made in the beginning of the pandemic, making sure to take seriously the real threat of these new strains. So what are the implications?

It took the UK about two weeks to double its numbers from December 10 at 240 new cases per day to December 24 with 506 cases. In South Africa, we see a similar pattern of doubling, from 86 cases on December 10 to 182 on December 24. In both cases it took about two to three months from discovery of the variant to the start of the case surge as the new variant took over.

Given that the new variant was discovered in the US in December and that both variants had likely landed in the US by mid-November, we can anticipate they have started taking over. Based on the examples of the UK and South Africa, they will likely become predominant in March or April. You can expect to see a gradual rise in cases as these strains begin to grow in February and March; then, a sharper surge as they become prevalent in April, doubling every two weeks.

After the post-Thanksgiving bump, the US has maintained a daily new case count of just over 200,000 from December 10 to December 24. What will happen once it starts doubling? Our current rate of just over 200,000 cases per day will be at 400,000 in two weeks. Then, at 800,000 in two more weeks, and then at 1,600,000 in two more weeks.

Imagine what that means. Hospital systems in California, Texas, and other states are already overwhelmed, resulting in rationing care and even turning away patients. What happens if in two weeks, their patient load doubles, then quadruples, and so on? New York City’s terrible outbreak in March will seem like a summer shower compared to the upcoming tsunami that will flood our medical systems.

It’s hard to imagine, but the numbers don’t lie. And of course, hospitals are only part of the picture.

The surge will undoubtedly cause major shortages. That’s due both to supply chain disruptions as employees get sick in large numbers, and also as shoppers engage in panic buying. Industries badly hit by the virus, such as travel and hospitality, will be hammered even more.

Won’t Someone Do Something?

The doubling every two weeks will occur under the current US interventions policies: won’t those with power address the problem?

Perhaps, but it’s unlikely. Given their focus on the effectiveness of vaccines against the new strains, they will most likely emphasize improving vaccine production and distribution, which has already been delayed.

If we get back on schedule, by the end of February, we should finish vaccinating the 24 million in nursing homes and medical staff. We’ll then start on the next phase, the 20 million Americans over 75 not in nursing homes, and the 30 million front-line essential workers, and hopefully will finish by April. But that will be less than a quarter of the over 330 million US citizens. The vaccines will start making a real difference in the summer, especially when Pfizer starts delivering the second batch of 100 million shots in July. We’re facing a very dark Spring.

What about government restrictions, such as the lockdowns recently introduced in the UK and South Africa to battle the strains, or perhaps a ban on foreign nationals to restrict the import of these new strains into the US as announced by Japan? We shouldn’t hope for the latter. The CDC has announced that it will require negative COVID tests from UK travelers. That won’t help with the many people who have COVID but aren’t sick enough to test positive yet.

Politicians won’t impose lockdowns unless they see a clear surge. Unfortunately, we can expect the post-Christmas and New Year infection bumps to hide the impact of the much greater infectiousness of the new strains. Officials will expect numbers to rise in January and then stabilize by February.

When they see numbers keep going up, they will start to express concerns and look for the cause. By the time they home in on the new strains as the source of the problem, and especially by the time they convince top politicians to act, it will of course be too late.

After all, there’s extreme politicization, widespread protests against, and severe economic pain from pandemic restrictions in the US, which were arguably overdone early in the pandemic. Thus, the large majority of governors - those with the true authority over restrictions - feel very reluctant to impose the kind of severe lockdown necessary to fight the new strains.

Even if some do, it’s unlikely that people will follow the restrictions. Consider the case of California. The governor instituted strict restrictions in early December following the Thanksgiving spike. However, pandemic fatigue led to mass public noncompliance, protests, and police officers refusing to enforce the lockdowns.

We can expect the same elsewhere around the country as the new strains take root. Lockdowns won’t be introduced until way too late and protests against lockdowns will sweep the country once again. And while the Biden administration’s intention to issue a mask mandate for federal buildings and request for mass mask wearing will help, it won’t do much.

What Can You Do?

For yourself as a private citizen and your household, change your plans:

• Prepare for months of mass supply chain disruptions by getting non-perishable supplies of consumables, ideally using online sources that won’t empty store shelves for others
• Prepare for lack of access to emergency medical care by minimizing risky activities such as skiing, travel, or substantial household repairs
• Take steps right now to get into strict pandemic lockdown for your household until you all get vaccines: that means avoiding indoor interactions with those outside of your household, or at most brief interactions while masked; wearing masks when outside if you can’t be more than 12 feet away; getting groceries and other essentials delivered instead of going to sores if at all possible; delaying non-emergency medical visits
• To the extent possible, insist on working from home, or invest in a career transition to permit work from home
• Communicate to your friends and family about the new strains and encourage them to take steps to protect themselves until they have vaccines
• Protect the more vulnerable, such as by taking extra precautions around friends and family members over 60 or those with illnesses that make them more vulnerable to COVID such as diabetes
• Be ready to deal with other people making poor decisions, and take whatever steps you need to address such problems
• Prepare psychologically for the tragedy of massive deaths as our hospitals get overwhelmed

If you’re a leader, then prepare your team for this situation:

• Communicate to them about the new strains and encourage them to take the steps above to protect their households
• Strongly encourage your employees to take advantage of any mental health resources you offer to prepare for the trauma of mass deaths
• Coordinate with your HR on how to compensate for the much higher likely caseload of COVID in your team and burnout due to trauma caused by mass deaths and ensure cross-training for key positions
• Transition now to your team working from home as much as possible
• Revisit your business continuity plan to prepare for mass disruptions in the Spring and Summer
• Prepare for major disruptions to your supply chains and service providers, as well as travel disruptions and event cancellations
• By taking all of these steps early, you will have a major competitive advantage, so get ready to use the consequences of this competitive advantage to seize market share from your competitors who fail to prepare

Conclusion

We’re in for a world of pain this Spring and early Summer. It may feel unreal, but that’s simply our cognitive biases telling us that, just like they did early in the pandemic. Don’t be caught off guard, again, by ignoring this warning.

Key Takeaway

We greatly underestimate the dangers of the new COVID strains due to cognitive biases such as normalcy bias, hyperbolic discounting, and planning fallacy. We need to change our plans drastically to adapt to the new reality...> Click to tweet.

Questions to Consider (please share your thoughts in the comments section)

• How alarmed do you feel about the new COVID strains and might you feel insufficiently alarmed due to normalcy bias, hyperbolic discounting, and planning fallacy?
• What might you and your team gain from addressing normalcy bias, hyperbolic discounting, and planning fallacy in your approach to the pandemic and other major disruptors?
• What next steps will you take to change your plans to adapt for the new strains?

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on January 5, 2021  

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Deal with COVID anxiety and stress immediately by addressing your fundamental needs of safety, connection to others, and self-esteem. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes what to do if you are feeling COVID anxiety.

Video: “Are You Feeling COVID Anxiety?”

Podcast: “Are You Feeling COVID Anxiety?”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article: Are You Feeling COVID Anxiety?
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript  

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. I'd like to talk today, about COVID anxiety. A lot of folks are feeling it, the pandemic has been so stressful. And believe me, I'm feeling it as well. The wonderful news is that we have vaccines coming up very highly effective, that's great. But it'll take a while for them to get here. And in the meantime, we're really in the worst stage of the pandemic, in terms of case counts, there's never been more cases in the US and around the world of the pandemic, it is really bad right now. And this is a perfectly understandable time for us to be feeling anxiety around COVID. And you want to address that anxiety effectively. You don't want to wait for it, it won't just magically disappear if you wait for it and hope it will disappear. And I know that myself, I'm someone who suffers from an anxiety disorder and anxiety adjustment disorder. It's something well, I suffered from it more in the past and something I had treated. And I let it get so bad because I didn't realize I should go and actually get it treated by a professional or do other interventions. You know, there are certainly some things that if things get bad enough, you should definitely go and get professional help. And I did so I got both a therapist and a psychiatrist and got psychiatric medications that was very helpful. But if I caught it earlier, before it got so bad that I got into a diagnosable condition, I could have done a number of things to address it earlier. And you can do these things. If you feel anxiety developing before you need to go to a specialist. And of course, if it's bad enough, you'd definitely want to get the help of a specialist. But just like the pandemic, anxiety won't disappear. So you make sure to take care of it. Don't fall into the normalcy bias. The normalcy bias causes us to believe that hey, the future will be much like today, you know, everything will go back to normal will be fine. Not the case, even once the pandemic is gone, the anxiety around it will still be there even once you get a vaccine. And I really hope you're planning to get a vaccine. Even once you get a vaccine, it will still take a long time to adjust to the new conditions and our behaviors or thoughts or feelings or patterns of engaging with others will never go back to January 2020. Just because of the experience of the pandemic. See, can't think that all will go back to normal, everything will be fine. Now just be crossing my fingers waiting until that time and just tolerating this anxiety, don't do it. You want to take active steps right now to address the anxiety that you might well be experiencing? And of course, if you notice anxiety, how do you notice that you're experiencing anxiety? Well, there are different ways of coming out for different people. For me, for example, anxiety comes out in a feeling of fatigue, in the feeling of agitation in a feeling of just desire to move quickly and accomplish things quickly. And restlessness, chest tightness. And heavier when the anxiety is heavier, it's expressed in fatigue, but it might be different from you. For you. It's just whatever your responses to a perceived external threat. Whatever those responses are when there is no external threat. I know that when I face a real external threat, I get agitated. And because of my response, there's the flight response. And there's the five responses, my response is the fire response. The flight response, that's the fatigue, for me, is what I get when I can't address a threat once that big or somehow I can't actually take action to address it. You want to learn how you respond to threats, how your body responds to threats. And then see, do you have that threat response? When you hear things about the pandemic when you learn what's going on? news about the pandemic, maybe like your relatives about your friends are generally in the news? And then do you have that? Do you have that in anxiety response and that will tell you that you're likely suffering from some COVID anxiety and you want to take steps to address it. So you want to think about addressing your basic needs as a first preliminary activity. Uncertainty is very stressful and we don't know what's going to happen with the pandemic in the future. So you want to create a sense of stability for yourself over things that you can control. There is a concept called locus of control. So people who feel that the world is outside of their control, it's called having an external locus of control. And they are just resigned to their fate. They feel that, well, the world just buffs them around and they go with the winds, whatever they go. That's not a great perspective on the world, a much more effective perspective is an internal locus of control, where you focus on the things you can control. And there are only three things that any of us can control: our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors. That's all we can control in life, our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors. So those are the things you really want to focus on those, that's what you want to focus on and have your internal locus of control over those. And through that, you can control your environment, your external environment, you want, especially address for the sake of COVID, anxiety, your sense of safety, your sense of connection to others, and your sense of self esteem. So those three areas will really help you address COVID anxiety, and those are your basic fundamental needs. So if you've heard of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that's what they refer to those basic needs, those fundamental needs, that we really need to address to make sure that we don't feel that threat to our world. So address those three needs safety, connection to others and self esteem, safety, what's that? So safety, you want to address basic safety, a basic sense of safety for yourself. As we go with this situation, with COVID getting worse and worse. And the winter, it's really bad cooped up inside, people aren't taking as many precautions as they should be. So we're having more and more cases, that's a big problem. And we're having more and more restrictions, of course, as a result, and in case there's an outbreak in your area that's especially big, you'll have like a number of areas, have municipalities and even whole states have stay at home orders and closing down on non essential businesses and really, kind of drastically not saying it's bad. But you have to understand not saying it's a bad policy choice by the government can debate that that's a separate question. But it will happen in a number of areas. I know it's happening in some areas, and will happen and others. So you want to be prepared for these waves of restrictions. And that means having a couple of months worth of basic supplies. Because people are buying out groceries, people are buying our basic supplies, I don't recommend that you go to the store and empty your grocery shelves, you can go to websites that sell things in bulk, and those will be cheaper for you easier to deal with. For example, not statcom does not sell in bulk. And beans have come whatever, just Google beans in bulk, or not some bulk or toilet paper in bulk, or whatever you want to purchase. And that will help you that'll save you some money. And that will make sure that you don't empty the grocery shelves for other folks. non-perishable food is once you want to get that's why I mentioned beans and sell on consumables or paper cleaner, and so on medication of various sorts, whatever medication you're using, given online pharmacy, those can be helpful and don't have to have any interactions with people. So that's what you want to be thinking about in terms of safety. Next connection to others. How do you connect to others in this really bad situation with a pandemic, especially if you can do indoor stuff normally, that's difficult. So what you want to do is make sure that you still maintain relationships with others who care about friends and family and your broader community, and figure out ways to do that. Members of your household figure out how to maintain your relationships with them without going stir crazy. As you're both cooped up in this cold weather in the winter. It's pretty bad. And these restrictions you want to figure out how you are going to connect with them and engage with them in a healthy manner when you're interacting with them? 24 seven, your romantic partner, they might be a member of your household they might not be. So you want to figure out how are you going to stay engaged and connected with them again, this 24 seven environment, it's a pretty if they're a member of your household, it's pretty difficult when you're used to interacting with them, you know, maybe for an hour to a day, which is for working folks. That's what the typical interactions were like before the pandemic and right now if you're both working at home with so many people, that's a 24 seven environment. Loved ones in high risk groups. So senior adults, for example, if you're taking care of your elders or if you have parents if you're lucky enough to have people Parents who are still alive, or other folks like that, and some calls, how are you going to engage with them, especially if they need elder care, especially if they need care and support. So you want to think through and make a plan for engaging with them in these few months remaining of the pandemic, hopefully very few months with the vaccines on the way your friends, you want to make sure to stay connected to them. That's an important source of meaning and purpose for you for film, unseal, stay connected with them virtual interactions, maybe some outdoor hikes right now in this cold, chilly weather, and community and faith groups. So that we definitely don't want to do in person indoor interactions. But you can certainly do virtual interactions. And there are certainly some outdoor activities you can do even in cold weather. self esteem is the last area. And this is something that folks don't think about nearly well enough, they might think more about safety and connection to others. But self esteem has been shown to be really important for basic as a basic fundamental need for us to really feel in control of our life. And in our environment. To have that sense of mastery, you want to have that self respect. So make sure you're doing whatever gives you a sense of self respect. And it can be difficult in the pandemic, because the previous things that might have given you a sense of self respect, might be unavailable if they depend on indoor activities and connection to others in ways you know, indoor hanging out with people having that self respect, maybe some hobbies, maybe those community and faith groups. So you want to make sure to replace that maybe some volunteer service, self confidence, which gives you a sense of self confidence. Again, it's going to be harder in the pandemic because of the deprivation. So you want to make sure to replace that figure out how else you can get self respect and self confidence in virtual ways in ways that are not dependent on risk activities, sense of mastery over your own fate, whether it be about your work, and making sure to have a career that will be pandemic aligned, you know, maybe more virtual work, changing, shifting your career, maybe developing hobbies, developing activities that help you stay in control. So for example, I'm doing much more indoor gardening right now. So I'm growing some herbs, doing indoor house keeping householding, which I previously hired folks for are handymen and women to repair things. So that gives you a real actual sense of control and mastery that you want to be thinking about these sorts of things, and making plans to achieve these things. So don't simply think I'll do this, but make a specific plan for how you will achieve self respect, self confidence. And that sense of mastery. Learning new skills is a great way of doing so. So you talked about indoor gardening for me, and household activities, whatever skills that you might want to learn you've been putting off on the backburner, this might be a good time to do so. Especially skills that help you have that sense of control over your immediate environment. So those are the things that you want to be thinking about as you're moving forward and addressing COVID anxiety, focus on those addressing those basic needs. So again, safety connection to others, and self esteem is what you want to address to make sure to get away from that COVID anxiety, which is really harmful, dangerous, and not productive. You want to make sure to take care of it. And if it gets especially bad Of course, go have a virtual appointment with a therapist, have a virtual appointment with your primary care doctor for some medication, have some virtual appointment with your therapist for a full four with a therapist for therapeutic help. So that's definitely something to do if you can't take care of it on your own or if it's bad enough that it seriously interferes with your daily life. All right, I hope this has been helpful for you for learning how to address COVID anxiety. As always, for I hope that you've enjoyed this episode of the wise decision maker show. So please make sure to click like on the show if you've liked it on your favorite venue. We have both a video cast and a podcast. And both will be linked in the show notes. So if you're listening to this on a podcast, you can check out the video cast. You're listening to us on the video cast. If you're watching this on the videocast check out the podcast and follow us of course on your favorite venue whether it's iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, spreaker, or wherever you're listening to us. Please follow us. Leave a comment and leave a review. I love to hear your comments. I'd love to hear your views. They really helped me learn how to serve your needs better and how to provide better content for you. Please Of course, share it on social media. If you found it helpful, send it to a friend. Make sure that they learn how to address COVID anxiety. Now there will be a couple of books that I want to recommend for you to read one is a basic book on how to address threats, manage risks, make good decisions, whether about anxiety or anything else. It's called never go with your gut how pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. And another one specifically relevant to COVID will be resilience, adaptation and plan to the new normal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus pandemic. The first one never goes there. You'll find that disaster avoidance experts comm forward slash never got it's going to be linked in the show notes and the other one on adapt and plan to the covid 19 coronavirus pandemic and the post pandemic recovery will be a disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash adapt that will be linked in the show notes. For a great free resource on making the wisest decisions possible. It's the fundamentals of the Wise Decision Maker Show. It's called the Wise Decision Maker Course. It's an eight video based module course on making the wisest decisions. So check that out at disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash subscribe, and that will be in the show notes. All right. I hope you found this episode of the wise decision maker show helpful. And as always, I'm wishing you the wisest and most profitable decisions, my friends

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on January 12, 2021.  

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Form lasting connections to stakeholders and help them feel understood by using the three social intelligence methods of empathetic listening, echoing and mirroring, and building rapport. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes how to build strong stakeholder relationships using 3 social intelligence methods.

Video: “Build Strong Stakeholder Relationships Through These Three Social Intelligence Methods”

Podcast: “Build Strong Stakeholder Relationships Through These Three Social Intelligence Methods”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article: Build Strong Stakeholder Relationships Through These Three Social Intelligence Methods
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

We'll talk about how to build strong stakeholder relationships. Building stakeholder relationships is incredibly important in order to get your job done, and actually in life as well. So it's whatever you want to accomplish, you want to figure out who your key stakeholders are, which previous episode or otherwise the decision maker shell talked about. And then you want to build effective stakeholder relationships. And you can do it using social intelligence. And I'll specifically talk about three social intelligence methods that you can use, and you should use, if you want to get those stakeholders on your side, and build those effective long term stakeholder relationships that will help you achieve whatever goals you're trying to pursue. Let's talk about social intelligence. What the heck is that? Social intelligence refers to a strategic capacity and ability to understand, grasp, evaluate, and then influence other people's emotions and relationships. What do you care about? Well, our emotions, fundamentally, is what determines our decisions, our behaviors, that are thoughts, even. So you want to appeal to people's emotions, you want to understand what other people's emotions are, and you want to be able to influence them. And of course, relationships, the interactions that people have with each other, that you have you to your stakeholder and that your stakeholders have to other folks, their own stakeholders, you want to be able to understand those and influence those as well. So that's what social intelligence is about. And we'll focus on these three methods on the emotions part, not so much on the relationships, well, to focus on the relationships between you and the stakeholders, not on the relationships between your stakeholder and their stakeholders. So talk about the emotions, how do you understand and evaluate their emotions and influence them? And then how do you influence and evaluate and influence your relationship with that stakeholder who you're targeting? Talk about three techniques, as I mentioned, so three key techniques, empathetic listening, echoing in mentoring, and building rapport, let's go depth into each of them. And I'll talk about why they're important and why you should do them and how you should do them. So why they're important, why you should do them, how you should do them and pathetic listening. What is that about? empathy. First of all, the first part of empathetic listening has to do with understanding other people's emotions, it's a skill, it's the ability to understand what other people feel. It's often confused with two other concepts, I want to make sure that we don't confuse them. Sympathy, meaning caring about what other people feel. That's a separate, distinct area. And you don't want to confuse that with empathy. Those are two distinct areas. And empathy has to do with understanding what other people feel. And you don't have to, at the same time, have a sense of concern about what they feel or have a sense of caring, that is sympathy. But empathy is a distinct thing. So just being very clear, it's about understanding, just that's what it's about. And it's not compassion, either. Compassion is expressing your concern for other people. So when you feel and express compassion, when we talk about compassion, it's about you showing other people that you care about how they feel. So that's, again, a distinct thing you have. So three things, we're talking about three things, we have empathy, understanding what other people feel sympathy, caring about what they feel, that's an internal thing within you, and compassion, showing them that you care about what they feel. So empathy is the first part of empathetic listening, when you're listening to other people, you want to focus on their emotions, because their emotions are really going to be driving their behaviors, their thought patterns, their decisions, and their relationships with. So listen to what they mean, not simply to what they say. We often focus too much on the content of what people are saying, I don't, we don't listen to the subjects, the crucial, crucial meaning behind what's going on. Why are they saying the things they're saying? What kind of emotions are pushing them? Are they anxious? Are they fearful? Are they excited? Are they joyous? Are they confused? Are they uncertain? There are various ways that our emotions drive us to say certain things. So you want to figure out what people mean? What is the emotional basis for what they're saying? So that's what you want to do, then that's when you're listening. That's a part of empathetic listening. But just as important, a part of empathetic listening is she Showing that you're listening. So you want to show them that you're listening not simply that you're just waiting to speak, there are too many people who are just waiting to speak. And it's so special when someone listens to you with an open heart, just listening to you and showing you that they're listening to you, because how do you show you have an open heart. Now, when people say, this is a person who can focus their whole attention on you, and listen to you with an open heart, that indicates that the person who's listening has the skills whether learned or naturally built instinctive skills, of demonstrating their concern with the other person demonstrating their empathetic listening. So when you've signaled attention, you want to signal attention when you're listening, both non verbally and verbally, you can signal non verbally by doing things like nodding, by body gestures, like huh. See, non verbally, you can do it non verbally, we use body gestures, using things like where you're looking at them in various ways that indicate that you're changing your posture, your body language, in response to whatever they're saying. So you want to make sure that it's in tune with whatever they're saying. And then, of course, verbally, and you don't have to say, Oh, right, you don't, don't interrupt them and share your story, unless you believe it would be very appropriate. And they would be happy to hear your story at that moment, which is going to be much more rare than you think. So you want to be pretty careful about interrupting people when you can, especially if you're engaging in pathetic listening, what you want to do is have verbal signs that say things like, Mm hmm. Oh, yeah. Huh. That's interesting. Aha, oh, yeah. Oh, that must have been scary. Oh. So those sorts of things that are not really interruptions, even when you say that must have been scary or frustrating or something like that. But shows that show here that emotions that you're understanding their emotions, but it doesn't really interrupt them, it lets them go on and at the firm's them. So it's affirming statements, verbal statements, and non verbal statements that show that you're getting their emotions, what they care about. So you really want to be responding to the underlying emotions, rather than the specific content of what they're saying. And use your responses to convey that you're understanding their emotions. That's what empathetic listening is about. It's a really important skill to develop, to show your concern for your stakeholders. So that's the first of three skills first, a free skill. Next one. Second one, echoing and mirroring, echoing and mirroring? What's that about? Kind of like it sounds, this is about showing that you're paying full attention. So we talked about those signals of a cent. This is a bigger, deeper way of showing that you're paying attention that echoing in mirroring, what you want to do here is rephrase key points that they're making, in your own words, not simply repeat them, but show in your own words, that you understand what they're saying, but integrate their own jargon. So if they're saying things like synergizing, one thing with the other, or if they're using acronyms, ISO or something like that, use those acronyms. Use those specific ways of phrasing things. If they're saying something, I serve my clients and my business, rephrase that. So talk about their service, talk about things that speak their language, things that people don't regularly say, things that are specific to them jargony, perhaps to their profession, or perhaps to them as an individual, because they're expressing their values, their concerns with what they're saying in their jargon. So you want to rephrase these key points in your own words. And this can be very quick, you know, so if you're, if someone has been sharing for three minutes, five minutes, about how they're serving their clients, and how they're really excited about doing so, because they feel it really calls to their sense of duty to make people thrilled, let's say, and you couldn't say that something like, so it sounds like your service is very important to you. And it makes you really fulfilled to frill people to delight people. And that's kind of a 15 second summary of somebody's five minute description. And that will help people really feel your stakeholders really feel that you're listening to them. You're using their terms, but you're kind of repeated Raising a little bit maybe if they say thrilled you say delighted and thrilled and delighted, I mean pretty much the same thing. But it shows that you're using your language. At the same time when you talk about serving people, it's not necessarily a common way of talking about clients, let's say, many people use different languages. So there you're using kind of their jargon, whatever speaks to them. And you want to mirror their tone and posture. If that kind of laid back tops, lowly and calmly, then you want to be late, back, talks, low, calm, if they're animated, and gesturing and excited, you want to do some of that as well. Don't be exactly like them, that'll be a little bit off putting, but you want to move toward them. Whatever your natural, if you're naturally slow. In your talk, you can have a drawl you may be and you're talking to somebody who is more of a New Yorker type. And I say that with all. With all love for New Yorkers, I'm someone who grew up in New York City. So I understand what that's like. So if somebody is the New Yorker type, they're faster energetic, the gogo fast paced, you may be wanting to speed up closer to them, to make them feel like you are aligned with them. And you want to do that throughout the conversation. So start at your normal pace. And then speed up. And again, if you are more of a New Yorker type, and you meet somebody who is more like this slower paced talking with someone, someone from the south, let's say, then you want to slow down throughout the conversation, and so that you match them and so they feel cared for and respected. So that's key. That's the second skill again, second skill out of three. And the third one, the third skill is building rapport. That's the key skill. So you got that empathetic listening, you now have heard their emotions, you understanding where they're coming from, and you have shown them that you care about their emotions, then, on a deeper level, you're echoing and mirroring their points, you're showing them that you understand the content of what they're saying, and that you care about the content of what they're saying. And finally, building rapport. That is an even deeper way of building that relationship, establishing those positive emotions and connections with your stakeholders. So getting that relationship strengthened by showing your stakeholder that you understand their feelings, that you understand their goals, that you understand their own values, and their challenges. So four things four things, emotions, goals, values, and challenges. You want to signal that you understand those, you want to express compassion. So as part of doing so we talked about compassion, remembering the difference between empathy, sympathy and compassion, empathy, understanding what other people feel, that's internal, sympathy, understanding. Sympathy is about caring what they feel. And that's again, internal compassion is about expressing caring for what people feel, and that's external. So you want to express caring about what they feel. You want to express caring, that's their emotions, you want to express caring about their goals, you want to express caring about what values they have. And you want to express caring about their challenges. You want to convey that you understand your stakeholders positions, and that emotions, goals, values, and challenges kind of combine into their position, and their perspective, whatever you're collaborating on. So you want to show that you understand where they're coming from what they care about, that is going to be really important for you, and find points of commonality, your stakeholder and you of course, you're not going to share everything, by definition, right? Otherwise, you will be the same person as they are. And you're not that. So you want to instead of looking at points of differences, which people tend to do, they, you know, forget how much they share, and they focus on emphasizing their disagreements. You don't want to do that. You want to instead focus on the points of agreement, focus on the commonalities. So when you're building relationships, of course, there's a different time when you're negotiating, trying to figure out differences, to focus on addressing differences, that's totally normal, unreasonable. But when you're focusing on building that relationship, you really want to highlight the commonalities that you share, that you want to have that sense of connection around. So that's what building rapport is about. Understanding signaling that you understand that emotions, goals, values, challenges, expressing compassion for them, caring for all those conveying that you understand their position as the stakeholder whatever they are, and finding points of commonality between When you add them. And finally, finally, this is an important and careful point. So nuanced points, you want to use humor. Now, if you're not great using humor, this is optional. So being very clear, this is optional, just kind of adding that in as a bonus thing that you can do. If you are decent at using humor, you want to use it carefully, making sure that you don't make off color jokes. Because those really harm relationships, the surprising way you'd be surprised at how much they call it relationships. So you want to make sure that you don't make off color jokes. Anything that you do use humor, the safest humor to use is to make fun of yourself. That's definitely safe humor. If you find that your stakeholders making fun of something unless it's themselves or their company never want to do that, that organization never wants to do that or their group wherever they are affiliated with but something external, something that's not related to them, you can make fun of that as well. Don't make more aggressive fun of it than the stakeholder. But you want to use humor carefully and that's safe, so that's reasonably safe. But the safest point to use humor about is yourself. And I would encourage you to pre plan some things built in some things that you think would appeal to the stakeholder. So you know if you can point yourself out, Potter up below Matic light in a harsh light in some way. Make a joke at your own expense, do so build that planet in and practice it. So it comes up naturally. It's too hard. It's difficult to do spontaneous humor. If spontaneous planned humor or spontaneous sounding plant humor, let's say that way, if you have not practiced it, make sure that you practice it and integrate effectively. Again, this is an optional part of building rapport that doesn't have to do with the crucial things, those previous things that I talked about signaling that you understand that emotions, goals, values and challenges, showing compassion, understanding their position, showing that you understand their position and find your points of commonality. Those are the fundamentals of building rapport. using humor carefully is an option. All right. So those are the key key aspects of how you build those stakeholder relationships using the social intelligence skills of empathetic listening, echoing in mentoring, and building rapport. So those three key skills will help you build strong stakeholder relationships, and help you achieve whatever goals you're trying to achieve. All right, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this new episode of the wise decision maker show, please click like, if you like it on whatever venue, you're listening to it on iTunes, Amazon podcasts, YouTube, we do have both a video cast and the podcast. And both will be linked in the show notes. So if you're listening to this on the podcast, check out the video cast, maybe like that, if you're listening to this on the videocast. Check out the podcast for when you're driving or taking care of house chores or something like that. And there will be a blog with much more about this information linked in the show notes. So check that out. And there are two books that I want to recommend that are quite relevant to this topic. One is never go with your gut how pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. That's about decision making. Risk Management, strategy, change management, overcoming resistance to change so make sure to check that out. It's a disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash never got and it's linked in the show notes. Also, you'll want to check out the blind spots between us on how to overcome unconscious cognitive bias and build better relationships, very relevant stakeholder relationships, of course. So it's about relationships, communication, unconscious bias issues, it's going to be a disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash blind spots and linked in the show notes. Finally, there's a free course that I think you'll find very interesting and relevant to you called the wise decision maker course. It's eight video based modules on how to make the wisest decisions possible. It's going to be a disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash subscribe, and of course linked in the show notes. All right. As always, I will see you at the next wise decision maker show and I hope that in the meantime, you will make the wisest and most profitable decisions, my friends

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on January 19 2021  

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Asking the 8 Powerful Questions during a pre-engagement stakeholder assessment will lead to better engagement and stronger relationships with your stakeholders. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes the 8 powerful questions you need to ask before stakeholder engagement.

Video: “8 Powerful Questions You Need to Ask Before Stakeholder Engagement”

Podcast: “8 Powerful Questions You Need to Ask Before Stakeholder Engagement”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article on the 8 Powerful Questions You Need to Ask Before Stakeholder Engagement
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Today, I want to talk to you about the eight powerful questions you need to ask before effective stakeholder engagement. So you want to engage your stakeholders effectively, especially your key stakeholders, the ones who are most important to you, you know, it's easy to want to say, Hey, I engage with all of my stakeholders, but really gotta identify the most important ones, the ones who are critical to you, that you probably heard about the Pareto principle that most things 20% of the key elements have 80% of the most impact. And that's the same thing with your stakeholders, it's going to be approximately the case that 20% or even less of your key stakeholders will have the vast majority of your impact. So you want to think about which stakeholders have a truly significant impact on your organization's growth? Will they be key clients? Will they be very important employees? Are they critical suppliers, perhaps really important investors. So think about those folks who have a really significant impact on your organization's growth and developing. Recognize that another aspect of being a key stakeholder is that this person or organization can't be easily replaced. If they can be easily replaced, probably not key stakeholders, they're probably pretty easily replaceable by definition. So you want to think about those ones who can't be easily replaced, and those who have a truly significant impact. Finally, realize, the third aspect of being a key stakeholder is that the relationship is mutual between you and them. So you want to make sure that this is a mutual relationship, because most likely, they're not going to be a key stakeholder very committed to you. If the relationship between you is not mutually profitable, mutually beneficial, mutually valuable. Now, they don't have to be, you don't have to be a key stakeholder to them, you know, it can be a huge company for a fortune 500 company, let's say for which you are a small business, and you're working for them. And they can be a key client for you. But they have to really get a lot of benefit from you from your work to be a truly key stakeholder. Otherwise, they can always find something else, someone else and they will not be a reliable partner. So they should not be considered a key stakeholder. Then you want to engage them before you assess with them. So as you assess with them as you think about how to assess these key stakeholders that are eight critical questions, you need to ask eight questions about how you engage with your key stakeholders. Now. Otherwise, if you don't ask these questions that are way too many cognitive biases you will fall into. If you've been watching the wise decision maker show for a while, you know that cognitive biases are the dangerous judgment errors that our mind makes, just because of how our brain is wired. Due to the structure of the brain or evolutionary background. One of the most important problems cognitive biases, dangerous judgment errors regarding stakeholder engagement is called the false consensus effect. The false consensus effect refers to the fact that we tend to assume those others who are important to us share our perspective to a much greater degree than they actually do. You know, this is why in your personal life, you have a divorce rate of 40% plus in the United States. And of course, why about half of all startups fail within the first five years, and about 75% fail within the first 15 years. Because there's way too many assumptions being made within the startup about what's going on internally, you'll often see business partners fail business teams fail on this basis, and key critical clients, you will fail your relationship with them if you make too many assumptions about them. And if you assume that you really understand what they want, the same thing about investors, same thing about suppliers, same thing about your key employees. So eight questions you gotta ask yourself for effective stakeholder engagement first, what are their feelings, their intuitions, their values, their goals, their incentives around the issue on which you're engaging with them? Now, our feelings were the research I mean, you I often talk about feelings and people often get confused by Why talk about feelings? Well, if you look at the research on intuitions and feelings and emotions, you'll see that our decision making around any issue is primarily emotion driven. 90% of our decisions of our behaviors come from how we feel, not from how we think. So you want to understand their feelings and their values. Of course their goals are intertwined with feelings, and there are incentives. These will often be material incentives, but often not they can be reputational incentives. They can be status incentives. They can be relationship incentives, relational incentives, there can be emotional incentives. So think about their incentives, and they are not necessarily going to be material of the often they will be in business relationships, then think about what is their story about their rounds associated? So that's the second question. First question their feelings, values, goals and incentives. Second, their story, what is their story around this issue? What do they think about this issue? How do they feel what's their narrative around this issue? We human beings are pattern matching and storytelling machines. So we understand the world through patterns, there are various patterns, and we make up stories about how these patterns intersect with each other about how events interact with each other. So you want to think about what is their story around the issue about which you're engaging, and of course, the broader story around you on your relationship with them, then what's their identity, their sense of self is tied to this issue. Now, very often in professional relationships, what you'll see is that people's professional status, their identity, as let's say, for example, if you're working on health care, and there are people's identity tied to the issue might be someone who is working in health care might have a strong identity as wanting to save people's lives and improve their health. So very many people unfortunately, often too often look at only the material incentives, and don't look at their identity, their sense of self is tied to this issue. Finally, the fourth question regarding identity, this is somewhat different. So for question, this is transitioning to identity and an aspect of identity which ties back to the story. How are they the hero of their own story? So we talked about the story, their story around this issue, then you understand their identity, you understand their sense of self, not tie those things together? and understand how they are the hero in their own story around this issue. So whatever the issue is, people generally have a sense of being a hero, in their own story around any issue that's involved, they see themselves as good, noble, moral, ethical, so think about how from their perspective with their incentives with their feelings, values and goals, with their story around this issue with their identity and sense of self, how would they be the hero in around this issue? Whatever you're engaging with them on? Okay, so that's the first four questions. Next, you're transitioning more to the engagement and communication, think about? Why should they give their hero their sense of heroes, son status, hero in their own story, their sense of self, their values, goals, and so on? Why should they want to listen to you around this issue? What do they want? So what should they listen to your message? Think about these things? Given what you understand about them, their background, their story? Why should they listen to you? So that is a key question. That's the fifth question, then you got to think about what obstacles would prevent them from listening to you from listening to your message and doing what you want. So think about why they should listen to you. And then you think about why they shouldn't. What are the obstacles? That's the sixth question. Okay, going on to question seven. How can you remove those obstacles? So think about how you can remove those obstacles, and increase the rewards? So that's a great turning back to question five, why should they listen to you? So hopefully, there are some rewards. Because you know, if they don't get any rewards from listening to emotional relating for identity, material, whatever, then they're not going to do what you want. So you got to figure out what they should listen to you? What are the rewards for them listening to you? What are the obstacles? And then for question seven? How can you remove the obstacles? And how can you increase the rewards for them listening to you and doing what you want? So think about that? How do you frame your message? How do you frame your story? How do you give your own story in such a way that it removes the obstacles, the obstacles, they perceive, and increases the rewards they perceive? Because it's all about them? Of course, it's not about you. So this is about their perception. So you're tying it to them. And you get to share your story or your message in a way that removes obstacles and increases rewards. Okay. So that's kind of the, quote, The seven questions that you can analyze yourself. But the last question, eighth question, helps you go outside of yourself, because you really want to, it's a key stakeholder, an important issue, otherwise, you wouldn't be taking the time to do this. So you want to think about who you know, who can give you useful feedback on your answers to this pre engagement assessment. So those are the seventh engagement questions. And the eighth question is just as important. It's really not something you want to leave behind. You want to make sure to run your ideas by someone who can give you effective feedback on them because you are not the stakeholder. You are not your key client or their representative, you're not a key investor, you're not a key supplier, you may not understand all aspects of their identity, all aspects of their emotions, you may be falling into the false consensus effect. Another big one here is optimism bias. I tend to fall into this all the time, where I tend to be too optimistic that other people will do what I think that they should do, because it seems like it aligns with their goals. But I might be mistaken about what their goals are, what their identity is, what their sense of self is, what their emotions are, what their incentives are. So run this by someone who can give you useful feedback. Ideally, someone who represents a demographic to which this key stakeholder belongs. So that's how you got to be thinking about this. So those are the eight powerful questions you need to ask about stakeholder engagement, if you want to succeed with effectively engaging your key stakeholders. And this has been another episode of the wise decision maker show. Now there's a case study on how to apply that method of eight powerful questions to ask before effective stakeholder engagement in the blog that's linked in the show notes. So please make sure to check out this blog, if you want to see how this is done through the context of a case study on healthcare in particular. So check that out. There are several other blogs linked there that relate to effective stakeholder engagement. And that are going to be two books that I can recommend on effective stakeholder engagement. One is never go with your gut how pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. And that will be about decision making risk management, regarding stakeholder engagement and all other sorts of decisions. Then the other one is called the blind spots between us how to overcome unconscious cognitive bias and build better relationships. And that will be on how to cultivate effective relationships, which is fundamental, of course for stakeholder engagement. So check those out. Now also linked in the show notes which they'll be linked in the show notes, by the way, also linked in the show notes is a free subscription to the wise decision maker course. The wise decision maker course is an eight module course on making the wisest and most profitable decisions. So make sure to check that out at disasteravoidanceexperts.com/subscribe. And finally, I want to ask you to think about subscribing to whatever platform you heard this show on there you watch this show and we have a videocast and podcast. So please subscribe to it, click likely if you liked it. And if you think anybody might benefit from effective stakeholder engagement in your community, folks, you know in your network, please forward it to them and please share it on your social media and comment on whatever platform you've been listening to leave us a rating leave a review, so leave your thoughts we'll be happy to hear them. Alright, I hope this episode of the Wise Decision Makers Show helps you make the wisest and most profitable decisions and friends till next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai  

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts  

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Using the three social intelligence methods during a stakeholder meeting will help you learn the truth about your stakeholders’ needs, which will empower you to solve their problems and foster stronger relationships with them. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes the 3 key empathy-based methods to uncover the truth about your stakeholders.

Video: “3 Key Empathy-Based Methods to Uncover the Truth About Your Stakeholders”

Podcast: “3 Key Empathy-Based Methods to Uncover the Truth About Your Stakeholders”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article on the 3 Key Empathy-Based Methods to Uncover the Truth About Your Stakeholders
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Today, I want to talk about the three key empathy based methods to uncover the truth about your stakeholders. Everyone has a set of important stakeholders that they are influenced by. So these are folks who you want to influence yourself who you're influenced by. And you want to uncover the truth, the facts about them. Now, it's often difficult to do so because people might not want you to know and understand their motivations. Or they might not realize that you don't understand all of their motivations. So it's kind of hard to come up to someone and say, Hey, Bob, can you tell me all your motivations? What's driving you? How are you feeling, really feeling about our relationship, about what I'm the product that I'm trying to sell you, or the business deal that we're trying to do? Because people don't necessarily want to tell you that and because it feels awkward. And it's not really the way that you engage socially politely, at least in our society, with other people with how you communicate and how you elaborate your relationships. Maybe therapists can tell us that, hey, this is how you should do it. Ideally, in an ideal world, but we're not a met world. So you want to figure out effective methods to uncover the truth, the facts about your stakeholders, their feelings, their thoughts. And if you've been watching this show, for a while, you've been checking it out for a while following us for a while, you know that feelings determine our decisions, our thoughts, our behaviors, much more than logic and reason does. But at least 90% of what we do is driven by what we feel. So you want to figure out what other people feel, especially as it's really important. So feelings, remember, are really important, and we don't pay nearly enough attention to them. In order to figure out how to uncover the truth about your stakeholders, you need to use the techniques of social intelligence, social intelligence, that's going to be the key social intelligence is the strategic capacity to evaluate and influence other people's emotions and relationships. That's what it's about. So it's a type of intelligence. It's, of course, intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and achieve your goals in a wide variety of ways, using your mind using various aspects of your mental processes. social intelligence refers specifically to doing that in social settings. So you want to evaluate other people and influence them, specifically, their emotions. Because those are what drive behavior and thought patterns and their relationships with you and with other people. So in order to do so, then what you need to do is build trust. That's a fundamental skill, capacity of social intelligence. You need to be able to use the tools of social intelligence to solve problems, solve issues, people related issues, and also strengthen your relationships. That's a fundamental aspect of social intelligence. How do you strengthen your relationships, and those are all things that are really important to do with your key stakeholders. If you want to achieve your goals, whatever your goals are, with your key stakeholders, now talk about three steps for doing so. Three social intelligence based methods that are three steps following each other. And there are three methods that will help you achieve all of those goals with your key stakeholders, empathetic listening, the first step, the first method, echoing and mirroring, as after you've listened in the process of listening, and then curious questioning to get some elaboration and clarification on what your Keystone coders are sharing. First, empathetic listening, that is the first step you really want to hear them. And empathy, of course, refers to the ability of undergraduates to understand what other people feel. So the skill set, and there are a number of important components, sub skills within the skill set within this ability of really understanding and grasping what other people feel. So empathetic listening. As you do that, that is a fundamental aspect of understanding what other people feel. So you want to focus on as you're listening to your key stakeholders, of course, the content, so the content of whatever they're saying, the specific messages that they're trying to sell and you definitely more than a rational, logical things, but you also want to be focusing on what they might not be telling you but what they shouldn't be telling you. So something that might be Missing, that you think should be there. Those are also things that you want to focus on as you're appreciating the content. But just as important as the content will be the way they say it's the tone, the body, the tone, how they say it. So their tonality, if I say, I think Michael should take that project, versus I think Michael should take that project. Those are two different things. Those mean two different things, two very different things. But if I write it out, just if you look at the content, they mean exactly the same thing. tonality conveys really important meanings and shades of emotional expression, emotions drive our behaviors, thoughts, experiences, decisions. So you want to understand the tone that shapes the content. And of course, the body language. Are they as they're saying, smiling? Are they founding? Do they? Are they crossing their arms? Are they winking? There are various body languages, and those are just the most expressive ones leaning forward? Are they leaning backward? What are they doing? How are they saying it, so not simply the tone, but also what does their body convey? If their content is at odds with their body language, then you should suspect something, there's extensive research showing that it's very hard for people to control the content, the tone, and the body language, if those if what the content of what they're saying is at odds with what they're really feeling. And what they're really thinking is that if there's some internal conflicts going there, or if they're knowingly misleading, or unknowingly misleading, because people often don't know their own minds, their own feelings, especially they think they do, but they often don't seem gotta be paying attention to all of these things, in order to understand not simply their thought patterns, but what's lying underneath that their feelings, their emotions, maybe things are trying to hide from you, maybe things that aren't realizing themselves. And you got to be signaling that you're paying attention through focusing on all of these things, your key stakeholders want to know that you're actually paying attention to them. So through empathetic listening, focusing your full attention on them 100% of your attention on their content of what they're saying, the tone with which they're using, and their body language, will help signal that you're actually paying attention to them. And of course, a very effective technique of paying attention to them and signaling that you're paying attention to them is echoing, echoing whatever they're telling you. So echoing and then mirroring, so echoing and mirroring is a transition from empathetic listening, you should be doing this intermittently throughout your active listening, as the other person finishes making a point. So it should be done every minute or two, depending on how long winded they are. Maybe three minutes if they're really long winded. So I got to rephrase what you hear. So something like Oh, hey, Mary. So what I heard you say was this. And smile and nod. Just briefly rephrase whatever Mary is saying. It is done subtly, so that Mary feels like you're actively listening and that you're checking for understanding, using their jargon. So if Mary uses an acronym, use the same acronym repeated, if she uses certain terminology that's not commonly used. Use that, if she'll use a colloquial expression, try to weave that in whatever jargon they're using. You want to use that jargon that makes them feel that you're part of the group. So using their jargon, of course, you want to make sure that you understand the jargon and they're using. So that might be part you might ask for clarification, the first time you're hearing it, if you think you can't, if it's important to look for clarification, if you can't figure it out on your own, but you want to play cool, sometimes you might want to just look it up later, whatever jargon they're using, especially if it's in an asynchronous communication, like email, text, voicemail, and mirror their tone and posture. So don't simply echo what they're saying. But try to mirror how they're behaving. Don't exactly mirror them. So don't look exactly like they do at the moment they do it. But wait for a couple of seconds. You know, if they lean closer to you, then in a couple of seconds, lean closer to them. If they lean back, maybe in a couple of seconds, lean back, if they put their hand to their chin and go at some point in the conversation, not immediately, of course but when it's up appropriate for the same thing. Hmm. So this mirroring and posturing puts you in sync with each other, puts you in flow, and it helps the other person feel that you're connecting, and that you are understanding what they're really trying to convey. And then for clarification, what they do when you aren't sure about something, or you want to address a point of understanding of maybe contention, maybe disagreement, maybe, um, clarity, maybe confusion, you want to express curiosity. So use curious questioning, not in a probing or provocative way. But in a curious way, you want to find out your friends, they are curious about them. People like to talk about themselves. So make sure to focus on them. Make sure to not focus on yourself, use the eye language, not say, Oh, I'm curious to learn about why you feel that way, Michael? So talk about asking Michael about why he feels that way, say, Hey, can you please share about Michael about this, I'm really curious to learn more, that is a good way of approaching this, then you might envision what they might want to hear you asking them sometimes people will leave off a point. But they aren't really willing to talk about a point. So that's something you want to notice is notice what's not there and notice something that they might want to talk about something that feels like it should be talked about. But that's not an ultimate table, use curiosity to ask that sometimes it might help to just repeat the same last couple of words, they said, in a curious manner. So if they're talking about, you know, let's say how their sales are going down. And that's the last thing that they said, and say something like going down. And that will encourage them to elaborate on this topic, strong curiosity and non threatening way you're echoing immediately. It's kind of a combination of echoing and mirroring and curious questions. So it's showing you're paying attention, you're curious, you want to know more, and that it elaborates on this topic, then something to remember, and something to be careful about is considered asking the question indirectly, especially if you're noticing an area of disagreement or contention. So for example, if they're describing a meeting that they had with someone, and you think that that someone knew about the topic, is not going to agree with them that the meeting was more contentious than they might want to acknowledge. You might ask something like, oh, instead of saying something like, well of Susan, I'm pretty sure Ella would have disagreed with that. Can you please explain what happened because it doesn't sound like she was disagreeing with that. That's kind of coming off a little bit aggressive. You don't want to do that with your key stakeholders, you might say something like that anything about Ella's reaction surprise you or that elos reaction goes You're expected. Something like that. That's an indirect method of asking about the same thing. And it will get them to talk about it, because they will talk about the reaction surprise, and of course, then you can follow up with other curious questions. And that is a way of expressing curiosity without coming off as too aggressive to probing. So that's a good technique to use. So these are the three social intelligence methods that I want to share about, and if you use them, I'm very confident that you'll be able to greatly improve your ability to engage effectively with your key stakeholders by uncovering the truth about what they do and what they think. All right. This has been another episode of the wise decision maker show. And there's a blog in the notes as usual, that will help you see a case study of how this is pragmatically applied in professional settings that I think will be quite helpful to you. If you want to know the details and the in depth richness of how to apply this in professional settings. So check out that blog in the show notes. Also, check out the books on these topics that are linked in the show notes. The blind spots between us are how to overcome unconscious cognitive bias and build better relationships, talk about effective communication and relationship building social intelligence skills, and then never go with your gut. How pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters talks about effective decision making, risk management and strategic planning that relate Of course, to important stakeholders. So now, the other two books linked in the show notes make sure to check those out. If you liked this episode, please click like and Subscribe to our podcast or podcast, we convey this information both in the video and podcast form. So whatever whichever way you prefer to consume your content videos or podcasts, please subscribe to the channel. And please leave your comments on whatever you heard. So make sure to leave your comments I love to hear from you. Now, you can also follow us on social media, send us messages and we share a lot of useful articles and topics like this. Useful articles, useful videos, useful podcasts, memes, you name it, we got it. So please share that. Check that out. I want you to encourage you to sign up for the wise decision maker guide at disasteravoidanceexperts.com/subscribe. The course provides this sort of content, the articles, videos, podcasts and sends them out to you conveniently into your email inbox. So I hope you sign up for that. And of course follow us on social media as I mentioned. Alright, that's all I wanted to share with you. And I hope that as always, this episode of the wise decision maker show helps you make the wisest and most profitable decisions

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

The people close to you influence your spending choices more than you think. To make wiser shopping decisions, be aware of how your choices are influenced and commit to only purchasing things for their practical value. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes why your friends influence your shopping decisions more than you think.

Video: “Your Friends Influence Your Shopping Decisions More Than You Think”

Podcast: “Your Friends Influence Your Shopping Decisions More Than You Think”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here is the article: Your Friends Influence Your Shopping Decisions More Than You Think
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Guide, where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Today, I want to talk about who influences your shopping decisions, you might be surprised to know that your friends, your relatives, and so on people who are close to your tribe, so to speak, influence your shopping decisions much more than you think. And there's extensive research on this topic. So for example, let's talk about smoking. If your friends stop smoking, good friends stop smoking, you're 37% more likely to stop smoking, because they influence you with their behavior when they're talking about it, and so on. If your spouse stopped smoking, that's even better than your 63% more likely to stop smoking. Wow. So two thirds, sort of one third. And then two thirds essentially, unfortunately, goes the other way as well with bad habits, problematic habits. If your friend good friend becomes obese, then you're 57% more likely to become obese. And if your sibling, brother or sister becomes obese, you're 40% more likely to become obese. Not great news. But we can use that news to our advantage, we can understand how we make our shopping choices and make wiser shopping choices. Because we know how our brain works, and how it causes us to make both poor decisions and good decisions. So the first thing to understand about shopping, how others influence our decisions in shopping and other areas, of course, but we're gonna focus on shopping today, just keep in mind applies to other areas as well, is that we think of ourselves as rational beings. Now, if we're purely rational, we wouldn't be influenced at all by what our close friends do, or what our spouse does, or what our sibling does, regarding smoking regarding their getting obese, or any other decisions that have to do with their behavior with their shopping choices for anything else. If somebody else got a nice new car, we wouldn't be trying to compete with the Joneses, right? That's a very famous phrase competing with the Joneses. Keeping up with the Joneses. We wouldn't be trying to keep up with the Joneses. But we do because we're not rational. We're very far from rational. In fact, our intuitions, our emotions, our gut reactions actually determine about 80 to 90% of what we do in our decision making processes. It is 90%. Can you imagine that that all comes from our gut that comes from our intuitions that comes from how we feel rather than how we think. And that creates a lot of problems, of course, for good decision making, because what happens is called something called post factum rationalization. So after the fact, rationalization, where we create reasons in our minds, supposedly rational reasons, to justify our choices. So we create those reasons. And we feel like we made a rational decision, when we actually made a decision that was very much emotional, and very much influenced, surprisingly, so by other people around us, people who are close to that comes from how our brains are wired. Our brains are wired, not for the modern world, our gut reactions, our emotions, our intuitions are actually evolved for the savanna environment, that ancestral Savanna environment when we lived in small tribes of 15 people, 250 people, and we're hunters for hunters and gatherers. That's what we're about. That's what we evolved for. So we have very strong tribal instincts. And if we didn't, we are the descendants of those who have very strong tribal instincts. If we, our ancestors didn't have strong tribal instincts. If they didn't conform to the tribe, then they get kicked out of the tribe, and they die. And if they didn't have strong tribal instincts in the sense of trying to climb up the tribal hierarchy, the social status hierarchy, then they would not get the best resources, and they wouldn't get to reproduce. You know, maybe they've survived, but they wouldn't have many descendants. So we are the descendants of those who had very strong tribal instincts in terms of conforming to the tribe, and quite very strong tribal instincts in the sense of going up the tribal hierarchy. So that's something we have to understand about us. That's how our mind works, because we rely on those tribes for survival. And we still carry those instincts impulses within us. And that results in a number of dangerous judgment errors. These two types of tribalism, two aspects of tribalism, called cognitive biases. cognitive biases are the specific dangerous judgment errors we make because of how our brains are wired. Then that's what cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists like me study and we look at what are the errors we make, more importantly, for me, at least, how can we address those letters to make better decisions. One of the very important errors that we make in regards to our tribal impulse to conform is called the halo effect. It's like wearing a little Halo. So the halo effect, it's where if somebody you like somebody you perceive to be part of your tribe, if they have a certain characteristic, then you will tend to like all of their other characteristics. So if they have a characteristic that makes them feel like part of your tribe, then you will judge them in a more positive manner than they deserve to be judged by somebody who's a rational human being right, purely rational. And I fall for this as well. And it's very easy to fall for this. But you gotta know that in shopping, and smoking and obesity, and a lot of these things, you don't want to be doing that. You don't want to be making the bad decisions that sometimes your friends and even loved ones, like spouses and sisters brothers make. So you want to be careful about this halo effect, where you will tend to have too positive a view of the shopping decisions that those close to you make, and other decisions as well. Now, the other thing that you want to watch out for is called the social comparison bias. That's another cognitive bias, where we tend to be competitive with others who we see as part of our tribe, we tend to want to climb the social ladder, that's kind of about social status. So we're comparing ourselves to them constantly, without realizing that's how our brain works. That's why keeping up with the Joneses is a very powerful thing. Our neighbors, of course, Joneses hoo, hoo. That's what it's referring to. So looking at them, and seeing what they're doing, and our peers of various sorts in the workplace. And most importantly, our friends, our close friends, our spouse, our brothers, sisters, siblings, they very much influenced us. So we're constantly comparing ourselves with them. And unconsciously, emotionally, intuitively, and sometimes consciously, we are competing with them, we are in competition with them. So you don't want to let that you know, topping somebody else, by buying a nicer car, buying nicer clothing, buying a nicer house, letting you make bad decisions with your money for your shopping choices. So that's something to keep in mind the social comparison bias. Now, fortunately, you can use recent techniques that were discovered about how to address cognitive biases, to actually make better shopping decisions. One is to choose your friends wisely. Sometimes you'll have an old friend leftover from high school, who's kind of a, not the best person to have in your life. But they've been around for a long time, and you feel a strong sense of connection to them. But perhaps their life is going in a bad direction. And perhaps you're noticing that they're influencing you in some bad ways you're picking up some negative habits . You're still sharing those habits that perhaps you wouldn't want to share. And that you would not want that person in your life if you just met them right now. So consider making friends whose qualities you actually admire, including their shopping decisions and all sorts of other decisions, so that you are influenced in a positive way without realizing, because it can't always be thinking about Oh, how's that person influencing me? Am I suffering from the halo effect? Am I suffering from the social comparison effect, you would be spending all your time just thinking about these things, it's much better to make a specific decision to make friends whose qualities you admire, and then choose those friends and then let them influence you because they'll be most likely influencing you positively. And again, spending less time with the wrong crowd. Both of those things are really important. So not simply choosing good friends whose qualities you admire. But not spending time with people spending less and less time, let's say that way, with people who are not good for you who are bad influences. Then, one of the things that you want to be careful about and this relates, especially to the social comparison bias is fads. People get into fads all the time, their fashions made up of fads right. Or there's this cool new car, cool new computer, whatever it is that people make get into fads all the time and digital social comparison bias. They try to eventually top each other. So you're looking to compete with somebody else. So you want to be aware of fads and beware of fads. So be aware now of what they are, what's going on. And be wary of them. Be careful about them. Don't fall for fads because you're just falling for that intuitive social comparison bias that we all tend to fall for. It's too easy to do that. So that's what I want to share with you about how your friends and loved ones influenced you in a much broader way than you might think is happening. Here are the steps that you can take to address this influence. Alright, everyone, I hope you found this episode of the wise decision maker show illuminating. Please click like if you liked it wherever you checked out the podcast or the video cast way above. So make sure you if you like videos and you're listening to the podcast, check that out. And if you like podcasts, you know that you're watching the video, check that out as well. Whatever, wherever you're getting your content from your videos or podcasts, please make sure to follow us. And that will be great and it's in the notes so that in the notes to the podcasts or the video cast, you will see the podcast the video cast. So the other one, whatever you want to consume. And so you can follow that as well. Of course, I would love to hear your comments. So in the notes or in the reviews, please leave a review. Please leave your comments. I'd love to hear what you think because it helps me make better content for you and helps you have a better experience right. Now, something I want to share with you is that there's a blog on this topic, which goes into quite a bit more depth because the video can cite all the evidence on all the links. But that has much more information, case studies stories about this, I think you'll enjoy reading it. So check out the blog in the show notes. You'll learn much more about this if you pick up my book called Never Go With Your Gut, how pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. And that talks about all aspects of decision making risk management and strategic planning that I think will be quite helpful for you. And also particularly relevant to friends and relationships. You want to check out the blind spots between us on how to overcome unconscious cognitive bias and build better relationships, which focus on relationships, communication, collaboration, and so on all of these areas, I think you'll enjoy that as well. Both of those are in the show notes. Of course. Finally, you want to check out a free eight video based course eight video based modules that you can have for free so that's completely free and it's going to be something that I think you'll find really useful. It's called the wise decision maker course on making the wisest decisions. So check that out too. That of course is in the show notes and you can just get it by going to disasteravoidanceexperts.com/subscribe for the free eight video based module course the Wise Decision Maker Course. Alright everyone, I hope this episode as always helps you make the wisest and most profitable decisions

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on February 9, 2021

Bio: An internationally-recognized thought leader known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he is best known for Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He published over 550 articles and gave more than 450 interviews to prominent venues such as Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts. It also stems from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, LinkedIn, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

We greatly underestimate the dangers of the new COVID strains due to cognitive biases such as normalcy bias, hyperbolic discounting, and planning fallacy. We need to change our plans drastically to adapt to the new reality. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which answers the question: should you be worried about the new COVID strains?

Video: “Should You Be Worried About the New COVID Strains?”

Podcast: “Should You Be Worried About the New COVID Strains?”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article: Should You Be Worried About the New COVID Strains?
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. What I'd like to talk about today is the new COVID strains. You probably saw them in the news, the new strains that are arriving in the US and around the globe that originated in the UK, South Africa and elsewhere, including new variants that are discovered in Denmark, actually, the US. So there's a lot of new strains out there. And you've seen the news about this. And you're wondering, should you be worried? Is this something of concern? Or is this not something to really be worried about? Is this just something that the media headlines are making a big deal out of? Well, there are a couple of concerns that you should be focused about. One is are these strains vulnerable to the new vaccines that we have developed whether the Pfizer vaccine, the maternal vaccine, Johnson and Johnson that's coming along this Rosana vaccine? So all of these vaccines and of course, the Russian and Chinese vaccines, then are these new strains more deadly? And finally, are these new strains more infectious? So these are the three concerns, and the authorities have really been focusing on the deadliness and the vaccination aspects of things. They've been saying, hey, there's no cause for alarm. The overwhelming majority of the authorities are saying, you know, there's some cause for concern but not cause for alarm. These new strains appear to be mostly vulnerable to our vaccines may be a little bit less vulnerable, especially South Africa string seems to be maybe maybe 20 to 30% less vulnerable to our vaccines, but it's still the vaccines are overwhelmingly going to take care of them and they seem to not be that much more deadly. So okay, there is no cause for real alarm, however, much, much more concerning is the infectiousness, there. infectiousness, if they are more infectious, which it seems like they are, it will actually cause much, much more problems many, many more deaths than if they are more deadly, because the disease spreads more quickly, and that will overwhelm hospitals. So let's talk about the infectiousness because that seems to be something that really the authorities and the media are not paying nearly enough attention to. And that's getting hidden, just like in the early stages of the pandemic, the huge huge potential for explosion of COVID due to its really high infectiousness wasn't getting nearly enough attention despite warnings by myself and other future proofing and risk management experts were talking about this February, March. And this wasn't getting attention. This is a big problem. We slept and walked into the pandemic. And I'm really worried we're sleepwalking into a huge surge with Fox, with nothing nearly enough attention to the potential of these new strains for huge huge infectiousness. So let's talk about infectiousness . What is the problem there? Well, we know the UK strain is anywhere from 56 to 70% more infectious, that's what the research shows. And that's what a huge spike in the UK bears out. We have a huge spike in cases there. Each individual therefore infects 56 to 70% more people that's what the higher infectiousness means. South Africa strain means about the same thing is apparently even more infectious. Although we don't know the numbers. It was initially found in October, in South Africa. And it caused over 80% of new COVID deaths, COVID cases by the end of December, and of course, new COVID deaths as well. So that is a pretty quick take over that's about a two month period, we saw about the same period take over in the UK, about six to eight weeks before the new COVID strain became predominant in southeast England, which is the London area major metropolitan area of England. So this is something to really be concerned about. Actually, recently, there was a discovery of a new US based variant in Ohio, Columbus, Ohio, where I am right now by Ohio State University. And what they discovered was that it was a variant that had some similarities, some similar mutations to the UK variant. And it was quite a bit more infectious than the previous COVID variant. And they took over in the Columbus Ohio area, which is a metropolitan area of about a million people within three weeks. So pretty quick to take over. And of course if it's more infectious, it causes more cases and therefore more deaths. So this is something that we have to realize we are making bad mistakes around these topics. We're not really paying nearly enough attention to slow moving train wrecks like huge infectiousness, increase in potential for increase and clear increase in these new strains. I mean, if you look at the UK in late December, we have numbers for December, for looking from early December to late December. We saw cases double in the UK and in South Africa like cases, doubling It's huge, huge increase from December 10 in the UK 240 cases per day to over four to 506 cases per day on December 24. In the UK, it went from 82 cases per day on December 10, to something like 192 cases per day on December 24. That's a huge increase in cases. And there's a strong potential for that same thing happening in the US, and around the world anywhere, these new strains are becoming predominant. And we see them happening already in Denmark, Ireland, and Brazil and other areas. But we tend to ignore these slow moving train wrecks, even though we can clearly see the implications of the strains of these strains and the trends lines from the mathematical statistical trend lines from them, because of dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases. Specifically, I want to talk about three cognitive biases that are most problematic for us in addressing the new strains and the same problems that we had in addressing the pandemic in the first place. hyperbolic discounting normalcy bias and planning fellas, these are the three biggest ones hyperbolic discounting, what's that about? Well, we tend to ignore the long term way too much. We focus on the short term, what's actually going to happen right now. And we ignore the long term implications of looking at the future. And just drawing a line from how to the future seeing the clear long term implications. So we underestimate the eventual impacts of very, very clear trends, such as this new, more infectious strain in the UK, south from the UK, South Africa, and actually originating now in the US as well. So this is a really bad tendency. Another problem is called the normalcy bias, we think that the future will be much like to date, we don't expect major changes, we feel our feelings, our current reaction is to feel that the same number of cases that we have right now will be the same, approximately the same number of cases that we have in the future. And we don't realize that these new strains will make that absolutely not the case. However, that's just not how we feel. And we don't accept this information. Even though it's very clear, even though it's happened in other well developed countries, we don't accept this information. And we reject it, it's very tempting for you to reject this information that I'm sharing with you right now, because it's kind of unbelievable, hard to imagine that cases will double every two weeks. But that's what happened in the UK. That's what happened in South Africa. That's what is happening in Ireland and Denmark, it will happen here in the US and elsewhere around the globe, where the new cases predominate. And this is something that you need to anticipate and address. we underestimate the seriousness of these disruptions, how bad it will be for us, so their likelihood and their impact. And that's the normalcy bias. And finally, the planning fallacy. So planning fallacy has to do with, like it says, our plans, we feel that if we make a plan, the future will go according to plan. So let's say we make a plan for dealing with COVID. And we feel okay, that's what will happen in the future, we follow past experiences, the future will be normal. And we are not able to really easily change our minds based on clear new evidence and change our plans based on clear new evidence, we're not ready to prepare for and respond to major threats, major risks, major problems, like the new strains. So the hyperbolic discounting the normalcy bias, and the planning fallacy are the biggest problems for us in dealing with these new strains. Now, what can we expect here? So we've been talking about stuff here in the US, so sudden, Columbus, Ohio to cover in three weeks? What can we expect in the rest of the United States? Well, once they become predominant, just like in the UK, in South Africa, we can expect that with the same policies now, nothing changed in the UK and South Africa. They didn't have any major policy changes, they just got the new strains. And so seeing there were no major weather changes, just these new strains, nothing changed. So if we don't do anything, then the number of cases will double just like it did in the UK and South Africa every two weeks. That's what happened there. That's what will happen here. So two to three months after the strains were discovered around six to eight weeks in the southeast of England, around to two ish months in South Africa. That's what happened, major case, surgeon cluding, up to doubling including doubling more than doubling actually in South Africa every two weeks. So we can expect the same thing in areas where the new strains they cover if we don't do anything, so by April 2021, they were discovered here, but in December, late December, according to experts, they probably got here by mid November, partially because the US has a much worse tracking system for new strains than the UK which was able to catch them much earlier. So got here by mid November, likely hundreds probably 1000s of cases by now. So we can expect them to take over by March April 2021. So that's what will happen. And the implications are really bad and really horrendous. And we're not prepared at all to deal with implications. This is a sad, sad, tragic situation. But we're not prepared. And we're not taking steps to be prepared looking at what's happening in the political spectrum and the business spectrum. So we had compared to what was happening in the UK in South Africa, in December, because we have the numbers for that. We had a similar situation from December 10 to December 24, there were just over 200,000 cases per day in the US. And of course, there will be a Christmas spike and the New Year spike. And we see that already happening right now, where now by mid late January, the cases are topic 250,000 per day on Sundays. So that's the Christmas spike. That's the New Year spike where people didn't listen to public health guidelines and went and celebrated and traveled. Very sad. But that's what's happened. So what will happen when these cases start doubling 400, so going from 200,000, then to 400,000 cases per day in two weeks, and then 800 cases per day for weeks, you're not doubling from the 200,000, you're doubling from the new number 400,000. And then 1600 cases, is 1600 100,000 cases in six weeks. So going from 400,000 to 800,000 800,000 to 16 100,000, which is 1.6 million in six weeks. That's pretty terrible numbers, isn't it? Yeah, that's pretty depressing. And that's, I mean, I, I feel really bad about this. I'm very sad, I'm very frustrated, you can probably hear this in my voice. But we're not paying attention to this very clear trend lines will have extensive shortages. Once that happens, because of panic buying naturally, panic buying will happen. Of course supply chain disruptions, people more and more people will be sick. And there are lots of sick employees. So that'll be bad. Now, even worse, is the overwhelm of the medical systems. I mean, a number of states, California, Texas, Alabama, others, hospitals are already way overloaded, turning away patients, making people wait for a long time until somebody dies or leaves the hospital for a sick bed. This is really bad. What will happen when their patient load doubles in two weeks, and then quadruples in four weeks, and then and then so on and so on and so on. How horrible will that be? I mean, our medical system is already strained right now, it will be overwhelmed, it will break it, you know, this terrible outbreak in March in New York City. And my parents, I am from New York City and my parents still live there. My dad got COVID. Actually, he barely made it. So I'm very glad that he recovered. He's one of the lone callers, he still has lung serious lung issues from COVID, his lung scarring and so on. So that was really bad. But that will seem like a nice summer drizzle compared to the tsunami that's threatening us in April of this year. So this is really, really, really bad. Now, you might wonder, Well, someone do something about this. I mean, shouldn't the government step in when someone does something about this? Unfortunately, now, this doesn't look likely. So we have the case bump right now from Christmas and New Year, which is already hiding the impact of these higher infectious I mean, in Columbus, Ohio, as I mentioned, the new strain that's originating the US and it's pretty similar to the UK variant to COVID pretty quickly from the in December to early January. But that was hidden by the Christmas and New Year bump. And so the authorities haven't really been paying attention to this, which is very sad and tragic. Health officials are right now focused on vaccines. So they're focused on the vaccine saying the new strains are vulnerable to the vaccines. That's great. But we have such a slow vaccine rollout, very slow going really, really slowly, much slower than promised by the authorities and promised by the federal government. So we can anticipate no more than 25% of Americans being vaccinated by April. And that would be great if that happens. 25% I'd love to see 25% you know, 100 million people vaccinated by April, that would be great. But you know, I, I'm a little skeptical it will happen. I really hope it does. So in addition, you can think about Okay, vaccination, so vaccination is one thing, but what about lockdowns? lockdowns, help Well, look at what's happening. We already have the Christmas bomb. The holiday bomb cases went up from 200,000 to 250,000 per day. Has governors instituted lockdowns from December to January now they have not instituted any more lockdowns California had a lockdown in December didn't do have anything more of a lockdown. In fact, some states are opening up and we have football games and other games where with mass the fan presence in the stadiums, so states are opening up instead of locking down this is Stupid This is dumb. But this is exactly what's happening. And this is what will keep happening. Unfortunately, they will not see what's happening. They're reluctant to pause lockdowns there. So governors are the ones who are responsible for it. But there's so much politicization, so much protests, and so much economic pain, understandable. But they're reluctant to impulse, even smart targeted lockdowns, closing down bars, closing down the restaurant suit, you really should not do any indoor dining. Right now, in the pandemic, this is ridiculous. You should also not sit in igloos, which are essentially carrying indoor dining outside. Now you really need to close those down. But they're not doing that. So you're seeing many people who are not even complying with restrictions that are there in California, where bars are indeed and restaurants are indeed closed down. But many people aren't complying with these restrictions in bar owners, restaurant owners and people who are going to them. It's sad, it's ridiculous, but that's what's happening. So you need to do something. If you can't rely on the government in this situation, you need to take action, both as a private citizen and as your member of your household and to the extent that you have a leadership role in your organization, as a leader. So private citizen, what can you do as a private citizen for your household, you want to ensure supplies of consumables, so make sure to get that there will be panic buying, you can anticipate that in March, April, you want to get ahead of that, I recommend that you don't empty the store shelves for others go to online sources get things from online sources, mass distribution will be cheaper for you to buy in bulk, and you won't empty store shelves for others. You want to minimize risky activities that involve things like traveling. Traveling is pretty risky, both to deter COVID. And just to various kinds of injuries you can get while traveling. Various winter activities like skiing aren't good at all right now, you don't want to go to hospital while hospitals are overloaded. And you might catch COVID. And you also don't want to do things like major household repairs. So please don't do that. Get professionals to do that, if they are really needed. But don't use power tools. If you can help it, you want to implement a strict lockdown for your household right now. I was surprised to find out in Late Middle Age January, that the new US variant that was already present was dominant in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. And I'm very glad that once I learned about the new strains and late December, that my wife and I and the CO principal of she's the Agnes Vishnevkin, the CO principal of disaster avoidance experts, my training consulting and coaching company, on future proofing, we instituted a strict lockdown. So I'm very glad that we did that because it would have been quite a bit more likely to catch COVID because the new strains have already become predominant. So we're not going out to even do minor shopping, ordering in getting delivery. So really staying safe. If possible. You want to insist on working from home, and really push your boss if and to allow you to work from home. If not consider a transition career, which will allow you in a couple of months where the surge will become really bad to work from home. Encourage friends and family to protect themselves. Give them this information, forward them this podcast this video, let them know about the situation, encourage them to take the steps they need to protect themselves. Be ready to deal with poor decisions made by other people. This is really important to other folks all around you, your neighbors, friends, colleagues, peers will make poor decisions, you want to be prepared to deal with that. Whatever steps you need to take. And finally really think psychologically, to prepare psychologically we'll have the darkest days of COVID are truly ahead of us. We'll get things much worse before they get better with mass vaccination available by late summer, which will address the new strains. But in the mid to late spring, you know, second to third quarter of 2021 it will be really bad. So you want to prepare yourself psychologically for the trauma of mastiffs. really prepare yourself, prepare yourself psychologically, it will get bad you want to be ready. Then as leaders, to the extent that you have a leadership role in your organization, it's your responsibility to help your team prepare, that includes preparing for themselves as members of the household. So make sure that they are not unable to perform their job functions, because the household isn't prepared. So given this information for them this podcast, let them know that this is what's happening right now and get a team meeting, tell them to prepare for this urgently. Then encourage your team to take advantage of any mental health resources you offer. I hope you're for some mental health resources as part of the organization. So encourage them right now to take those steps and get themselves ready. Prepare for higher rates of COVID and burnout in your team so that you can talk to your HR department and dissipate that definitely some people get COVID more people burn out because the situation will be really bad in this country. They'll be distracted, it'll be bad. Get some cross training in place, whatever policies you need, of course, get your team to work from home as much as possible right now, get them to incident strict pandemic lockdown, and really get them to work from home. You know, your state may be opening up, your state may be doing things that don't follow that official policy guidelines, go for strict pandemic lockdown, you want to revisit your business continuity plans to prepare for the major surges, major disruptions in the second and third quarter of this year. That includes supply chain disruptions. That includes disruptions to your stakeholders, to your vendors, to your clients, all sorts of disruptions. And finally, if you take these steps, you'll get into a really great competitive position. So be prepared to take advantage of lapses by your competitors who are going to stumble, because they're not prepared for this really bad last search, and you can seize market share from them. So be prepared and ready for that. Alright, so this is what you should be doing about these new COVID strains. And indeed, you should really be worried because their much higher infectiousness will be devastating for this country and the globe. Alright, well, I hope you've benefited, if not enjoyed this pretty depressing episode of the wise decision maker show. But the goal is to help you make the wisest decisions, even in a situation that is as bad as this one, where you have to choose the least of all evils. So please choose the least of all evils and make some wise decisions about these new strains. There's a blog with much more information about this in the show notes, please check out the blog. Please click like on the show if you've liked it. And please leave your comments and reviews. We'd love to hear from you. read your comments. And your reviews are incredibly useful for us in order to improve the content and encourage other folks to listen to this, talking about other folks who want to let them know about these new strains. So make sure to forward them this podcast, this video, whichever you're watching it on, or listening to it, we have both a videocast version and a podcast version, some audio and video version. So you can check those out. There's gonna be in the show notes. The video version will have the podcast, the audio cast, the audio cast will have the video cast version, check those out and follow us on whatever channel you're listening to this, you're watching this YouTube, iTunes spreaker or whatever. Now, there's going to be much more information about this topic in my book called resilience, adapt and plan for the new abnormal of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, and there's going to be a link to it in the show notes. So this book is a disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash adapt. So if you want to know how to be ready for the last stage and for the post COVID recovery, get the book. And in general, if you want to improve your ability to make the wisest, most profitable decisions, check out my other book linked in the show notes. Never go with your gut. How pioneering leaders make the wisest decisions and avoid business disasters. Disaster avoidance experts have come forward slash never good. Also check out a free resource the wise decision maker course free eight video based modules on making the wisest decisions. And as part of that the first module is an assessment to help you learn about what are the most dangerous judgment errors in your workplace these cognitive biases so check that out at disaster avoidance experts comm forward slash subscribe that's all free. And of course it's linked in the show notes. Alright everyone, I hope you've valued and benefited if not enjoyed listening to this pretty sad information about these new COVID strains and they hope this episode helps you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Till next time, my friends

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts February 16, 2021  

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and addressing cognitive biases. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, Fortune, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training on change management, decision making, and risk management strategy. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Startup founders can defeat mental health challenges and avoid burnout by paying attention to their mental health, seeking help, and standing up to pressure from major investors and Board members. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes the dangers of mental health challenges for startup founders.

Video: “The Dangers of Mental Health Challenges for Startup Founders”

Podcast: “The Dangers of Mental Health Challenges for Startup Founders”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article on The Dangers of Mental Health Challenges for Startup Founders
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. What I'd like to talk about today is the dangers of mental health challenges for startup founders. Now, when you think about startup founders, you probably think about glorious people, if you're not a startup founder yourself glorious people making bajillions of dollars from their startups, how many startup founders are actually not making bajillions of dollars, but even those who are, are often in a situation of mental health challenges, and I remember working for as a consultant and a coach for a startup that was valued over a billion dollars $1.4 billion. its founder had a lot of challenges in terms of mental health, burnout, stress, anxiety issues. And of course, most startup founders are running organizations that are quite a bit smaller than this. I started up my own consulting coaching and training company called Disaster Avoidance Experts three years ago, and it has six people right now. So I'm a startup founder in that regard. And it's not making a bajillion dollars. So that most startup founders are in my position. And I work as a coach, and a consultant for many startups. So I understand the kind of challenges mental health challenges that folks experience who are startup founders, and they don't get nearly enough support acknowledgement for these mental health challenges that are really needed, they really need the support, but they don't really get it and it's sad, and the causes of these mental health challenges. So let's talk about the causes. And then the way to address this, the causes of these mental health challenges come from really long workweeks. I mean, when I started my organization, I was doing 70 to 80 hours a day easily just starting up. And I've moved closer to work life balance, what more in the 48 hour range right now per week. But most startup founders are working very, very long hours. And for a very long time for several years, if not longer, they feel that they need to put all their energy into the startup. And that causes them a lot of trouble and disbalance, anxiety, depression are often common, they have to make many decisions, and making many decisions causes anxiety, fatigue, depression, anger, frustration, uncertainty, really negative feelings that are under a lot of emotional pressure. They're doing a lot of emotional labor, they're supporting their people who are in the startup, they're trying to convince investors to invest into the startup that can try to convince employees to work for pretty low wages where the wages are made up of stocks in the startup. So percentages in the startup, that's the shares, you know, these are hard things to do. And so they are doing a lot of emotional labor. They're making a lot of decisions, complex decisions daily. And so there's a lot of pressure on them, the pressure is especially to raise funding while managing daily operations. So this combination of raising funding, the biggest stress I've seen for startup founders, actually in raising funding, when I'm working with them, as a coach, that our advisory board is pressuring them to raise funds, their board of directors, pressuring them to raise funds. And often they really want to focus on doing the thing, their daily operations are a big challenge for them. A big, big problem in addressing these mental health challenges is the lack of healthy discussions around these mental health challenges. There's a stigma in intrapreneurial circles and investor circles around you talk around startup founders talking about mental health. I mean, you mentioned mental health to an investor for a startup found there. And you mentioned it to an angel investor or mid stage investor. And they will tend to back away from that startup founder, because, you know, the investment that they make isn't to the startup founder as much as the idea of the startup, and they don't feel that they should invest into someone who has mental health challenges. That is a very bad idea. Of course, very bad preconception prevents startup founders from talking about their mental health challenges and getting the support they need. And of course, fellow entrepreneurs are also going to have stigma toward other startup founders who have mental health challenges. And this is a big, big problem. Now, you sometimes hear it kind of implicitly referenced in a conversation about founder burnout for a startup founder burnout, or work life balance, but it's not really directly addressed mental health challenges, anxiety, depression, all of these sorts of things, things that you can certainly address through various interventions by yourself, but it's great if you get professional help therapists, psychiatrists, psychiatric medication, therapy for these sorts of issues. Use now to address these mental health challenges. So talking about discussing them, you want to model transparency about mental illness. So to model my transparency, I have an anxiety adjustment disorder that I gained. As a result of putting in so much time and effort into starting up my organization, I felt a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress, a lot of pressure. And it contributed to me developing an anxiety adjustment disorder. And that has to do with me feeling anxiety. And the way it manifests is very strong physical fatigue. So I went to have a therapist get some therapeutic help, I also take psychiatric medications daily. So that's been really helpful. So you want to model transparency around mental illness. If you do not currently suffer from mental illness, which is wonderful. You should encourage others to talk about it on the team, on the team within the startup, if you're an investor in a startup, you should talk to them. And tell them it's okay to talk about this totally fine. If you are board member, if you're influencing a startup in some key way, model transparency, and then learn how to support troubled colleagues, you know, you don't need to be a therapist or psychiatrist to learn skills for how to support folks with mental health challenges that are easy tips, easy tools, easy techniques that you can use to address these. And there's a blog that's going to be in the show notes that you can use to address these challenges. So talk about much more with these details, and then find the stigma around mental illness but making it modeling transparency and talk about the stigma, say, hey, there's a stigma, just like I'm talking about right now. And it's a bad thing. It's a problem. Here's why it's a problem. People don't talk about this, then they burn out, then the whole startup crashes. And I've actually seen that. And once I participated in a situation where I as a coach encouraged the startup founder to talk about his mental illness, his anxiety as a result of the board, pressuring him to fundraise, fundraise, and he was getting more and more anxious and frustrated and depressed as a result of this. But he didn't want to reveal this to the board, because he thought that the board would move away from him and would either seek to have him removed, you know, fire him or something like that. Because I mean, he had some shares, but not the mature large majority of the shares. So they would remove him or the investors wouldn't invest money. And, you know, he was near the breaking point, when they finally convinced them to talk to the board about it. And the board was very understanding, they were supportive, they said, okay, you know, your focus on operations, we'll do more of the fundraising. So they're totally understanding, but it was kind of too late already, he was already so burned out, he just couldn't last. And you know, he left the nation, sold his shares, you know, a couple of months, left the organization, and the organization found there after him. So that was not a good situation, because the team was kind of not the same without him. And he, there was no driving spirit and to blame the board for not catching the sometimes there was a lot of conflict and tensions, he didn't want to be in that situation, fight the stigma, gain transparency about the situation. And I kind of blame myself in part for that situation from encouraging him stronger to go earlier to the board and discuss this topic. That was a bad situation, you don't want to be in that situation. So these are the kinds of issues that mental health challenges for startup founders cause. So you want to again, be aware of the stigma around this and model transparency, have healthy discussions, get professional help, of course. So do all these things, learn how to support other folks in startups with mental health challenges as well. And that's how you can address mental health challenges for startup founders. All right. I hope you've benefited from this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show. If you've liked it, please click like, and please follow us and whatever when you hear us or watch this, we have both a videocast version and a podcast version, both are going to be in the show notes. So follow us on YouTube on iTunes, spreaker, wherever you check this out. Now, I also would like you to leave a review and a comment and or a comment on the show to let us know what you thought of it, what you thought was good, what you thought was bad, we always seek to improve. We'd love to hear your feedback. It's incredibly helpful for us in our goal to constantly improve what we do. Now, if you are curious about this topic, as I mentioned, there's going to be a blog with much more information about this in the show notes. Check out my book on this topic called the blind spots between us how to overcome unconscious cognitive bias and build better relationships and that talks about relationship building including mental health issues for startup founders and all sorts of professional settings. It's going to be a disasteravoidanceexperts.com/blindspots which is linked in the show notes. And also check out my other book for me: good decisions in startups situations and all sorts of other situations. future proofing your company called never go with your gut. How pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters and disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash nethercott and linked in the show notes. And finally, here's a great free resource, the wise decision maker course it's an eight video based module course free course. And the first module is on assessment on dangerous judgment matters in the workplace, which you'll find very helpful, I think. So make sure you make the wisest decisions possible by getting this course and using the assessment to gain awareness of your own dangerous judgment better, it's going to be a disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash subscribe, and also linked in the show notes. All right, I'll see you next time and in the meantime, the wisest and most profitable decisions to you, my friends.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts February 23, 2021

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and addressing cognitive biases. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, Fortune, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training on change management, decision making, and risk management strategy. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Maximize the value that pessimists and optimists bring to your enterprise by helping them work together well. Optimists should generate half-baked ideas and give them to the pessimists, who would select the most viable notions and finish baking them into full-fledged plans. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes the secret of getting optimistic and pessimistic employees to collaborate effectively.

Video: “The Secret of Getting Optimistic and Pessimistic Employees to Collaborate Effectively”

Podcast: “The Secret of Getting Optimistic and Pessimistic Employees to Collaborate Effectively”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article on The Secret of Getting Optimistic and Pessimistic Employees to Collaborate Effectively
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the wise decision makers show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Today, I'd like to talk about how you get people who are optimistic and pessimistic to collaborate together effectively in the workplace. And most of us are one type or the other, optimistic or pessimistic now, I am pretty optimistic. That means I see the world as a mostly friendly place, a hopeful place, the future is bright, the glass is half empty, the grass is greener on the other side of the hill. By contrast, my wife is a pessimist. She sees the world is mostly full of threats, mostly full of risks, she is risk averse, whereas I tend to be risk blind. She sees the glass as half empty, and she sees the future as mostly dark and she sees the grasses yellow on the other side of the hill. Those types of personalities again, most people are one or the other. they very rarely are balanced realistic results from too dangerous judgment errors, cognitive biases. Now, if you've been watching, check me out listening to the wise decision maker show for a while. You know, that's what we talk about these dangerous judgment errors that come from how our brain is wired. So neuroscience shows that we have a lot of dangerous judgment and errors. I talk about them extensively in my books like never going with their gut, how pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters, the blind spots between us, how to overcome unconscious cognitive bias and build better relationships, and other books. So those are two books that you can check out. I talk about cognitive biases, and two very common ones, cognitive biases that are diametric opposites of each other. This one is the optimism bias. So the optimism bias has to do with us perceiving the having a positive view of future risks and rewards. So that's what it's basically about, we see the future as mostly a positive place, we see the reality with the current reality, the current world is mostly a positive place. And so we tend to be risk blind, we tend to think that the rewards are bigger than they are. And we tend to think that they are smaller than they are. And that's again, I'm saying we because I am an optimist. Most business leaders are actually optimistic. Most entrepreneurs, I started the disaster avoidance experts, which is a boutique consulting, coaching and training firm in the risk management and decision making strategy. And that's why I started in part because I'm an optimist, because I saw the future as mostly a friendly place. Even though about half of all startups fail within the first five years and three quarters fail within the first 15 years. I know the statistics on that. So I had to, despite that I decided to start it. And hopeful that the business will not be one of those that fails within the first five years and the other 50% or the 75% fail within the first 15 years so let's hopefully not, but intrapreneurs. So intrapreneurs tend to be pretty optimistic. and business leaders, those are the top of the business tend to be pretty optimistic. So the startup founder CEO, I'm pretty optimistic. The pessimism bias is the opposite cognitive bias, it's the opposite of the optimism bias, you tend to see the future as more risky than it actually is less full of rewards, you tend to see the rewards are smaller, and you tend to see the risks as large and of course, in the present to sales find a lot of people who are pessimistic in the number two role in an organization. So my wife was a pessimist and is the chief operating officer of disaster avoidance experts, for example. So that role helps hold the leaders feet to the ground and more of a strategy, big picture. And she's kind of the more implementer douleur, of helping address some of the two grand designs that I have about the business and lots of great ideas that may unfortunately go nowhere. So optimists and pessimists, that's commonly the difference between them. optimists tend to generate new ideas. I'm great at generating new ideas. You know, I have 28 years before breakfast, and I think they're all brilliant. I learned from my better experience. They're not all brilliant. But most optimists who are not aware of these dangerous cognitive biases that they suffer from the optimism bias. They feel that their ideas are brilliant, and therefore the thing that they're brilliant, and therefore they claim that these ideas are brilliant, and they push these ideas hard. That's what happens to optimists most often. pessimists, by contrast, are critical of these new ideas because they perceive these new ideas as risky, sometimes more risky than they actually are. So they pessimists are not great at generating new ideas. But they're great at finding the risks in these ideas. So they feel threatened. They feel anxious about these ideas coming from optimists. And that is the source of a lot of conflict. Whereas optimists you know, they think that pessimists are just naysayers will never allow good ideas to go forward. They shut down the brilliant ideas brilliant in quotation marks of optimists. And that's definitely a challenge for optimists like myself to feel that they're brilliant ideas are being shut down by people like my wife and business partner or of course in any sort of collaborative project. pessimists by contrast, they think that optimists are going off half cocked, always coming up with half baked ideas. And that is a big, big challenge where pessimists simply feel like they have to be critical. They have to be Mrs. No or mister No. So they have to be kind of holding down everyone's feet to the ground and saying, Okay, are we sure we want to go there, figuring out all the risks, all the problems. That's the role that pessimists generally take on. Unfortunately, they don't work together, they just fight each other. That's not a good recipe for success. You have a lot of team conflict, a lot of struggles, at the leadership level between number one number two and other members in the C suite between team members, some of whom are optimistic, some of whom are pessimistic, that is not a good mode for collaboration. Instead, what you need to do is learn each other's strengths. What are your strengths? Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Generally speaking, optimism and pessimism are seen as weaknesses. But really, what they are is different strengths. When you use them correctly. You want to use the strengths of each personality to be stronger together. So optimists, for example, as I mentioned, are great at generating ideas, that stress strength, like I said, 20 years before breakfast, I think they're all brilliant pessimists, by contrast, our greatest optimizing ideas, right now that that's not the case, in most situations where they're not optimizing, they're shooting down babies, and optimists are defending their ideas. And that is not a great dynamic, a much better dynamic is for pessimists, to serve as Devil's advocates, to improve ideas rather than shoot them down. So once you want to mix up the process of collaboration, you want to create balanced teams, where you hire and promote people who are different from you. Because what you'll have then, is a balance of optimists and pessimists. Where what how they should work together is you have if you're an optimist, you have 20, brilliant ideas before breakfast, right? You think they're all brilliant, then you need to give up ownership of these ideas. You can't keep ownership of them. It's something I learned, based on the research on this topic, that you really can't keep ownership of them, you got to give them to the pessimists and say, Hey, here are 20, half baked ideas, and you got to frame them as half baked ideas. You can't say these are brilliant ideas, because pessimists will generally see so many holes in your ideas. And you will not see those holes, because you are an optimist. So you got to frame that as half baked ideas, even if you feel that a brilliant frame them is half baked ideas. And what the pessimist will do is that makes it safe for the pessimists that reduces the anxiety and the worry, you know about the ideas being already ready, and that they can take the time to improve them and address all the problems. And of course, giving up ownership addresses the anxiety of the optimists that have brilliant ideas will be shut down because they're no longer their ideas. They're just ideas that they're passing on as notions as half baked potatoes to the pessimist and the pessimists or the pessimist team members, if you're doing this as part of a team rather than a two person dynamic. The pessimists team members or team member will then look for these 20 ideas and say, Well, you know, these, these 17 just won't do. But these three may be half baked potatoes that are worth finishing baking. And they're not koratala generating new ideas because they inherently see the flaws of each idea, bigger flaws than they actually are. But they're great at judging ideas, evaluating ideas, and then implementing them. So that is a great strength of pessimists judging ideas and implementing them. You don't want them to do the brainstorming, don't force them to do brainstorming that will not work well for them. But they're great at the stage of criticizing ideas. So you want the optimist generating ideas. You want pessimists to be criticizing ideas. And then you want to have those balanced teams. So the problem I've seen so often is where teams are hired based on you liking other people who have your personality, whether you're an optimist or pessimist. As an optimist, it's very tempting for me to hire other optimists like click with them. Well, you know, we work together and bounce supposedly brilliant ideas off each other. And think about what would happen if I had a team of optimists, let's say six people. So disaster avoidance experts group currently employs six people. So all six of us were optimists, then we'd have 120, brilliant ideas before breakfast. And we'd be reinforcing each other's ideas and only be running in 120 different directions. That's one of the main reasons that actually startups fail. But you're pursuing too many projects, you're not focusing enough on the most profitable, least risky, most rewarding projects. By contrast, by making sure that I hire some pessimists, I have a team that is actually able to filter the ideas of optimists like myself, and focus on the projects that are the highest reward for lowest risk. So you've got to have those balanced teams. And the same thing for pessimists, you can't have a team of pessimists, you will not be generating nearly enough new ideas, nearly enough new ideas, you won't be nearly creative enough. Now in some fields, that may be fine. If you're, for example, in the field of accounting, you may not want to be generating new ideas, just Just do your accounting pessimists are a good area for that. Or if you are kind of if your role is sales. If you're a salesperson, that should be mostly an area for optimists, because getting turned down for sales is a hard thing. And you need that optimism to carry you forward. And you can create lots of new ideas and some of the monsters are going to do that. But most teams, you've got to have balanced teams and hiring people who are different than you if you want to succeed and make sure that you have optimists and pessimists collaborating together effectively. And that's the secret to doing so. Hope you've enjoyed this episode of the wise decision makers show. Now, as always click like if you liked it, please share it with your friends if you know some optimists or some customers who can benefit from this show. And make sure to follow us on whatever venue you've heard us. We have both a video and a podcast version video cast the podcast version of the show. So they're going to be in the show notes. Check out the video. If you've heard the podcast, check out the podcast if you heard the video. Make sure to follow us wherever you prefer to get your media. So do that. Check out the blog that's linked in the show notes. It has a lot more information on how optimists and pessimists can collaborate together effectively, including some case studies, which will be helpful for explaining what it looks like in a team setting. Also, check out the two books I mentioned. Never go there gut, how pioneering leaders make the wisest decisions and avoid disasters, wise business decisions and avoid disaster? So check out that book that talks about of course, how do you make good decisions? How do you manage risks and plan strategy? The other book that I mentioned is called the blind spots between us on how to overcome unconscious cognitive bias and build better relationships that talks about communication unconscious bias relationship building. Those two books are all very relevant, both very relevant for optimists and pessimists collaborating together effectively. And for a free resource, check out the free free resource course eight video based module course on making the wisest decisions it's called the wise decision maker course it's going to be a disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash subscribe again, disaster avoidance experts.com forward slash Subscribe for a free eight video based module course on making the wisest decisions. And the first module of that course is an assessment on dangerous judgment errors in the workplace, which I think will be really helpful for you to figure out which of the dangerous judgment errors or cognitive biases there's over 100 of them, you're most vulnerable to so check that out. And, as always, I hope that this episode has been illuminating, enlightening and profitable for you. And I'm wishing you the wisest and most profitable decisions, my friends

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on March 2, 2021  

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and addressing cognitive biases. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, Fortune, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training on change management, decision making, and risk management strategy. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

A strategic pivot will enable your company to survive and thrive during the COVID pandemic and in the post-COVID world. Start by challenging assumptions about your internal and external business model. Then, revise your strategy and determine next steps to operationalize these changes. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes how to do a strategic pivot to address COVID and the post-COVID world.

Video: “How to Do a Strategic Pivot to Address COVID and the Post-COVID World”

Podcast: “How to Do a Strategic Pivot to Address COVID and the Post-COVID World”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article on How to Do a Strategic Pivot to Address COVID and the Post-COVID World
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the wise decision maker show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Now today I want to talk about how to do an effective strategic vote to address COVID. And the post COVID recovery COVID will be around for many more months, we have the new strains that are going to be a serious problem with both their increased infectiousness and especially the problem of some of the newer strains, the South African one, the Brazil one similar ones, with some vaccine immunity, that they are somewhat vaccine resistant. So they'll still be around for a while that we'll have to deal with COVID itself. And we also have the process of post COVID recovery as COVID becomes less powerful, less prevalent. After we have widespread vaccination, we will still be dealing with recovery where again, some vaccine resistant strains will still be causing some outbreaks, they'll still be problems. So that's going to be a post called, that's going to be a recovery after COVID slowly gradually transitions from being a pandemic into being what's called an endemic disease, meaning just present just like the flu that is present. And there is going to be so post COVID recovery, there will be a complex, ambiguous, uncertain transition, and there's going to be an economic recovery. So that will be part of the post COVID recovery that you want to be thinking about. So that's going to be a couple of years of many, many months, many months of COVID, then a couple of years of the post COVID recovery, and then living in a post COVID world which will be very different in many ways than the world before COVID. So that's something that you want to be thinking about the world after COVID will also be quite different. And so you want to strategically pivot for that you want to pivot your organization to not simply survive, but thrive through many months of COVID through the post COVID recovery, transitioning gradually, slowly ambiguously from a pandemic into an endemic disease, and then the post COVID world itself. And that strategic pivot is something that you really need to be working on effectively, the first step to working on your strategic pivot is to get buy in from the leadership team. So you as a member of the leadership team, however, whatever your role is, you need to get buy in from members of the leadership team itself on doing an effective strategic pivot. Now, in order to get their buying, you need to convince them of the need for a strategic pivot, just like we talked about earlier, about COVID being around for many months recovery, how to be complex, uncertain, ambiguous, gradual couple of years. And the fact that we'll never go back to pre COVID reality, I mean, work from home, for example, will still be around to a much, much, much greater extent, after the whole post cover recovery several years from now, way much more work from home than before COVID. And virtual meetings will be much more present. Personally, people will be meeting much more virtually, because it saves time. It's more efficient, it's more effective than in person meetings, and many other things. And just these virtual things are just a couple of dynamics I wanted to highlight. So you need to adapt, and you need to convince your leadership team that they need to adapt to a post COVID world in the long term. And that is part of the strategic pivot to buying. Once you get buying, as you're working on the strategic pivot itself, the first step is to challenge your business model assumptions that challenge those business model assumptions, which I see the large majority of organizations functioning with their business model assumptions. They're just changing things on a day to day basis. They're not changing them strategically. They're looking at operations. And okay, when COVID treating this as an emergency, let's deal with day to day stuff. They're not taking a strategic look at how to transition their operations for not simply many months of COVID, but the couple of years of the post COVID recovery and the post COVID world. So what you want to do is explore the problems and opportunities that you have had recently. Both problems and opportunities don't want to simply deal with problems, there are a number of opportunities that you can pursue in this environment. And you want to see which of these opportunities have external ones, the internal ones and which of these problems again, external ones and internal ones will still be around. I mean, there are some that are one time things, but there's some that will still be around in the show. term of the COVID itself. So the many months of COVID, that's going to be something you want to think about, you know, short dish term, let's use the phraseology, short term, many months of COVID, you know, let's say through the end of 2021, then continuing for the post COVID recovery, let's say a couple of years after that, you know, fruit 2023. And how many of them will remain in the post COVID world in the foreseeable future, let's say, you know, give us the timeline horizon of until 25, low until then five year horizon for 2025. So that's easily predictable, you might have what you might be thinking about for, let's say, 2030 is another way that you can be thinking about which ones have the motivation, it's hard to predict more than five years out. But you know, you can try predicting 10 years out, but it's definitely gonna be very, very hard for you to predict more than 10 years out. So thinking about that pulse COVID world, it's a good orientation to look at the five years from now, no more than 10 as a challenge business model assumption, so you have that discussion with the leadership team challenging business model assumptions. So that's kind of the first step of the strategic pivot after getting there by and then after the challenge business model assumptions. You go back, each of your leadership team members goes back to gather internal information from their direct reports. So the leadership team goes to their direct reports and gets feedback from them. So it's not simply You know, one than done with a challenge business model assumptions, you get feedback from your direct reports on the outcomes of the discussion on challenging business model assumptions, share with them the outcomes, you know, what happened, what are you thinking about challenging those assumptions, and get their feedback so that you get information from the organization itself, that's really helpful. And your direct reports should of course, talk to about these topics, to their stakeholders, whether it's, whether it's clients, whether it's vendors, whether it's investors, your team members may be dealing leadership, team members will maybe they're dealing directly with investors, all sorts of folks like this to get feedback from them on these issues. So specifically, you want feedback on how to pivot for many months of COVID, that short term for 2021. gradual and complex recovery. So giving it a couple of years for 2023 doesn't mean that it will be for 20 to 23. But just the many months of COVID is the crucial thing, and not in 2021. But you want to be thinking about Okay, maybe that will be around that thinking on average, then gradual and complex recovery might be for 2023, but it might be shorter or more likely longer. And then the changing post COVID world is more easily predictable for 2025. You know, it's harder to do so but you know, you can try to make it last for 20 to 30. So gather internal information, then you want to have a full strategic retreat, a two day strategic retreat. So two full days after we gathered the information for your leadership team, so two full days of your strategic retreat. First day is devoted to strategy. So it's the first day, the first day you want to do a strategic shift for the monuments of COVID. than the gradual complex recovery and the post COVID world, you might want to make sure to face head on difficult issues. I've done this strategic retreat for over 10 companies already. And it's very tempting to not face head on the difficult issues that you have to deal with weather issues like how to change your culture from people still have essentially an office culture of transposed on remote work to actually culture optimized to remote work to having let's say, your customers that you still targeting the right customers, if you are thinking about many months of COVID, both COVID recovery, and that new world after COVID and many other things, channel orient toward the long term goal. So you want to really be thinking about what's going to be going on in the long term, said the end of 2025. In the long term, you can try setting 2030. But let's say you said 2025, but post COVID world that's going to be your long term goal. What do you want your company to look like, paint a narrative and paint a story? What do you want your organization to look like? What does it look like at the end of 2025? So you want a clear narrative of vision, essentially, that is what you want. So paint a vision, a narrative of those long term goals that you want to see a company that plays in the post COVID world in the end of 2025 or if you want to be a little bit more ambitious and In a situation that's more ambiguous, uncertain, and of 2030, what does your company look like, at that time? So paint that clear narrative, paint that clear vision and of 2025 and of 20 2030 and up to 2030. That really the world after COVID and what it looks like for your organization. So look at those outcomes, think about, what is it? What is your organization like? How is it different than it is right now? Then what backward to the current day? So what backward from the end of 2025, or end of 2030? backward to the current day? So, we'll: What does it take to get there? What does it mean to get to that vision? What kind of steps do you need to take, and of course, make sure to address the complex recovery. So which will be going on, let's say, approximately, from end of 2021, two end of 2023, and the many months of COVID, which will be approximately going on through end of 2021, depending on the situation where the vaccine hesitancy and vaccine resistance strains and new strains and things like this. So that's the first day of the strategic retreat. And that's devoted to your strategy more broadly, the second day will be devoted to operationalizing your strategy, so implementation, thinking about how do you implement these things, you want to decide on changes that you need to survive and thrive for many months of COVID, for the complex, ambiguous post COVID recovery. And in the post COVID world for 2025, let's say, or 2030, see one, decide on the changes that you need to achieve these goals in your internal structure in your internal culture. So those are two different things, your internal structure, organizational structure, staffing, and so on your internal culture policies, norms, behaviors, how you interact with each other, then your external partnerships, then, of course, it's going to be your clients, your vendors, your investors. So thinking about all of those sorts of things, your community stakeholders, perhaps political leaders, depending on how you're engaging with them. And then think about your budget, your finances, how do you need to address that? Where do you need to redirect restricted, if you're going to be serious, which you really should be about having people work from home effectively, doing things like providing them with money for working from home environments, and various other tools, many things like this, then your staffing, how they need to change your staffing for that long term orientation and the 2025 end of 2030. With that transition, the many months of COVID boss COVID recovering, and any new initiatives, you very likely have to take a number of new strategic initiatives for that situation to be brought into place effectively. Then, you want to look for another part of that operationalization once you make a decision, these major changes are to explore how various future scenarios might impact these changes. So what are the future scenarios and future scenarios with COVID? There might be more optimistic scenarios with the new strains, vaccine resistance, vaccine uptake, and less optimistic one. So you want to explore that. You want to explore things like various economic outcomes with the recovery, some recovery might be longer and more problematic. It might be shorter, various situations like government initiatives that might impact did various things in your market that might impact it. So think about the broader context. And then think about your specific context of your industry. And of course, your specific company, what are the potential threats and opportunities that might be present in all of those scenarios. So think about the threats and opportunities in a variety of scenarios, both in the broader context, and more specifically in your industry. And then more specifically for your company, depending on what's going on in your company in your organization. What are the potential threats and opportunities in all of these scenarios, and make plans to avoid the more dangerous threats, so make plans that would cause you to avoid these threats or address them effectively, if they do arise? Some of them you can avoid right now by taking steps to prevent them from happening. So for example, you can decrease work from home burnout that is going to harming retention, productivity, lowering brow, various lowering worsening health other issues, and you want to make steps to avoid missing opportunities. So a lot of those scenarios will have opportunities that you can take advantage of or you can miss out on depending on whether you take steps right now to prepare for them. Some of them you can take steps to bring about right now. And some of them you can just make a plan to seize if they do occur. So you want to develop roadmaps after doing all of that. So you do that to address threats, murky opportunities. And then the next step to operationalizing. It is developing specific roadmaps for yourself or your company, for your organization, for your leadership team, for communication on this end for operational changes, how will you communicate about the strategic shifts, and the operation shifts to your team members? So communication, and that's going to be part of the component part of what we're talking about here. And the other part is, how will you implement operational changes? So that's what you want to be thinking about implementation of your communication strategy and implementation of your operations changes. Then I'll do another part of the second day, operations day is deciding on the next steps. What are the actual specific next steps you will do? You talked about and broadly, the upgrade strategy for communicating and operationalizing it, but you want to get specific and talk about the specific next steps that will happen as a result. So determine the next steps and the terms and decide on what resources will be required for these next steps. You don't need to decide, you know, all the next steps because they're somewhat ambiguous, but you want to determine the immediate next steps. And more broadly, you want to decide on the resources required for not simply the immediate next steps, but more broadly, the steps for implementing communication for all of these sorts of things. For each of the steps that you take, identify success metrics, what does success look like for each step? What does it mean for you to accomplish the steps for your organization to accomplish that step, then which team members and leadership team members will be involved in each step? So if it's sales, you know, it's going to be sales, marketing, maybe your operations team things like this, your budget, obviously, the CFO will lead it and have a couple of folks involved. So one, team members will be accountable for the step, if it's a deciding to shift your target your target market to expand another category, you might put your marketing person in charge of that, because you want to enter new markets, you'll need to market and of course, sales team members need to be as the sales team leader needs to be on the team, not necessarily leading it, depending on the structure in your company, marketing would probably be leading it but you could have sales leading it to depending on how you operationalize things. And the operations person would want to be on top of it, maybe r&d, your research person, depending on the kind of organization you're in. And then you want to prepare a report on the strategic pivot for your board of directors. Of course, that's a major thing, patriot initiative, major changes. So talk to your board of directors and prepare a report on the strategic pivot to the Board of Directors, then how will you follow up? How will you follow up to make sure that this strategic pivot is implemented and actually effectively achieves its goals? I would recommend following up in whatever forums you currently have. You have weekly team leadership meetings, follow up on that if you have something like bi monthly ones follow up on that if you have one on ones of various sort, follow up on that most organizations have weekly leadership team meetings. So I would recommend that you have to follow up with each team member accountable for next steps describing what they're doing for the next steps. And then I recommend that you at certain points, do a half day event, not a full two day event which you did for the strategic pivot itself, but a half day event where you assess how well the strategic pivot went. And you update the strategy or the implementation of the strategy because you know, you don't know what you don't know right now, you don't know how well the strategy will go. So you want to have half day events where you have time for your leadership team to discuss and assess the strategic pivot all aspects of it, and update the strategy as needed, or update some implementation as needed. What I recommend you schedule it for is one month. So after a strategic pivots strategic retreat itself, then in a month, you want to have David to address set, assess the strategic pivot of the day the strategy or the implementation, then you want another one three months after the original strategic retreat, and then another one six months after the original strategic retreat for the strategic pivot. So that would be my recommendation for how based on helping lead over 10 companies in strategic pivots how you would do an effective strategic pivot to address COVID, the remaining months of COVID and then the post COVID transition and the reality of the post COVID world. Alright, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the wise decision maker show Please subscribe to us follow us and whatever channel you've gotten this videocast from or this podcast from. We do have both a video and a podcast format audio format. So you both are going to be in the show notes. And, again, follow us, subscribe to us. And please click like to indicate that you've enjoyed this content and leave your review. Leave your comment to show us what you think of it on iTunes elsewhere, wherever you're getting it. It's really helpful for us to have your comments because it helps us provide much better content for you. There's going to be a blog in the show notes with much more information about this topic. So check that out as well. Alright everyone, I hope you've benefited from this episode of the wise decision maker show. And as always, until next time, I wish you the wisest and most profitable decisions, my friends

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on March 9, 2021  

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, Fortune, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training on change management, decision making, and risk management strategy. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Have you or your employees been feeling work-from-home burnout and Zoom fatigue these past months despite the supposed convenience of working from home and using videoconferences to meet?

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Or simply read onward!

Do you find yourself increasingly stressed and tired out even though you no longer have to deal with a commute and other chores associated with going to an office daily?

When the COVID pandemic swept through the country last year, companies rushed to roll out a slew of measures to keep their businesses running. One of the most disruptive, although it was a wise choice that saved many lives, was transitioning employees to working from home.

As productivity tools streamlined virtual operations processes and Zoom calls became the norm for meetings, workers quickly tried to adapt to the new abnormal in the workplace.

I say tried, because for many, the novelty of this scenario was short-lived. All too soon, employees found themselves overly tired and disgruntled, burned out by the very tools and processes meant to help them. Workplace stress eventually took its toll.

Throw in all the other stressful personal and professional circumstances that come with this pandemic and we have a recipe for what is called work-from-home burnout and Zoom fatigue.

Is Work-From-Home Burnout All About the Job?

It’s true that burnout and other mental health issues have long existed in the US pre-COVID. However, there’s no denying that there’s been an increase in cases due to the turmoil brought about by the pandemic.

Recent research shows that depression and anxiety have been on the rise since the pandemic started. Even more alarmingly, the study registered a consistent negative mental health score among Americans for the ninth month in a row.

There’s also the bleak reality of joblessness in the US after the country’s labor market stumbled at the start of the pandemic and then continued to struggle as the virus continued to spread. As employees remain hyperaware of employment uncertainties, some tend to work with little consideration for physical or mental health just to ensure they feel secure in their job.

All these moving pieces can only essentially lead down a disastrous road to poor mental health and burnout, which harm individual employees and companies alike.

Let’s take the case of Matt, the CEO of an insurance company with a staff of 1,300, who had to find out the hard way just how serious work-from-home burnout can be.

Matt had already been hearing some complaints from employees as early as May that managers were putting too much pressure on them and increasing their workloads. Many were also asking for some form of flexible scheduling as they struggled to share workspaces with spouses, their children, and other family members. All too soon, a growing number of employees also started to complain to HR about the poor communication and collaborative skills of some of their colleagues.

The COO and head of HR dismissed the bad feedback, assuring Matt that these were just adjustment pains which would go away as the employees got used to working from home. Since he also had his hands full with other major projects and issues, Matt took them at their word and didn’t delve further into the situation - which turned out to be a big mistake.

Work-From-Home Burnout in the Time of COVID

By mid-August, the growing resentment among the employees started to boil over, leading to serious infighting. Team members who were top performers pre-COVID declared that they were mentally exhausted and started showing problematic behavior.

As the days passed, more and more complained of feeling burned out, accusing the company of blurring the lines between their work and personal lives. That doesn’t mean they didn’t like some aspects of working from home. In fact, an internal company survey indicated that about 30% preferred to work from home permanently; of the rest, 50% wanted to work remotely more than half the time even after the pandemic ended. It wasn’t the virtual nature of work that caused problems, it was how the company structured the work that led to problems.

After the leadership team failed to address the problems on their own effectively, Matt decided to contact me in early October upon learning about my work through my webinar about how organizations can adapt to the changes brought by the pandemic. When he called me, morale and retention rates were dropping quickly.

This issue clearly impacted company performance. Some angry clients called demanding an explanation for why their inquiries and concerns were being left unattended. Sales dropped in areas like life insurance, at a time when their competitors showed steady or even improving sales.

It was clear that the company urgently needed help.

Not an Emergency, But A New (Ab)Normal

When I met with Matt, the COO, and the head of HR (virtually, of course), we discussed how the virus isn’t going away anytime soon. Even with the successful vaccines, it will take many months before we can all go back to a semblance of how our work lives were before the pandemic. That’s especially true given the new COVID strains, some of which are more infectious and deadly, and less vulnerable to our vaccines.

Matt even told me that they would love to figure out how to satisfy employee preferences for mostly-remote work after the pandemic, if the current issues could be addressed. The lease was coming up for renewal in December 2021, and the leadership felt that they could save significant money by moving to a much smaller location. Moreover, as in many organizations, the lack of a commute and other time savings led to higher employee productivity.

Another benefit: if many employees worked from home permanently, they could then hire employees from anywhere, greatly expanding the talent pool available to them. Likewise, they could save money on salaries for employees who lived in lower-cost-of-living areas.

Yet they couldn’t wrap their brains about how to address the work-from-home burnout. Without jumping this hurdle, both their short-term plans and their long-term ambitions couldn’t be realized.

Many leaders are experiencing a similar situation at this time. My experience helping 9 companies- five startups, three established middle-market ones, and a business unit of a Fortune 300 company - do strategic pivots to adapt to COVID illustrated that work-from-home burnout represented the biggest internal threat of such pivots.

The problem stems from companies failing to adapt internally to the impact of COVID and the post-COVID recovery. The vast majority failed to anticipate the long-term consequences of COVID, and had to make an abrupt shift to their employees working remotely.

Everyone was in emergency mode, and adapted their existing ways of interacting in “office culture” to remote work. They focused, naturally and appropriately, on accomplishing the necessary tasks of the organization. However, they left behind the social and emotional glue that truly holds together internal teams and gives employees a sense of fulfillment and energy.

That’s fine for an emergency, a week or two. Yet COVID is not an emergency. It’s a slow-moving train wreck, which will last until at least the end of 2021 if not longer.

Moreover, it already has and will permanently shift many of our habits, norms, and values. Invariably, in all the companies for which I did strategic pivots, internal surveys illustrated results like Matt’s insurance company. In other words, many if not most employees preferred to work remotely more than half the time or even permanently. That’s a huge shift from previous surveys where a small minority wanted to work virtually, both within internal surveys and external surveys.

What companies need to do is to stop thinking of COVID as an emergency situation to be handled via operational tactics. Instead, they need to approach COVID and the post-COVID world as our new abnormal reality, and use a strategic approach to survive and thrive in this new world.

That includes a strategic re-evaluation of your internal structure, culture, and norms for a much more virtual environment for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, using office-style culture to conduct virtual work is simply forcing a square peg into a round hole. You can do it if you push hard enough, but you’ll break off the corners, in this case the social and emotional glue that bonds your employees into a company culture. That peg will do in an emergency, but in the longer run will wobble and eventually break.

Recognize the 14 Problems Leading to Work-From-Home Burnout

Start the re-evaluation by recognizing the challenges brought by remote work in the age of COVID. Combining my expertise in emotional and social intelligence with research on the specific problems of working from home during COVID, I’ve identified a series of factors:

1. Deprivation of our basic human need for meaning and purpose. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the vast majority of us don't realize we aren’t simply experiencing work-from-home burnout. We’re deprived of the fulfillment of basic human needs of meaning and purpose that we get from work. Our sense of self and identity, our narratives of ourselves and the sense of meaning-making we have in our lives, are tied to our work. That’s all severely disrupted by shifting to remote work.  

2. Deprivation of our basic human need for connection. At heart, we human beings are tribal creatures and long to feel connected and belong to a community. Our work community offers a key source of fulfillment of this sense of connection for many of us. We work together, we support each other, we celebrate each other’s triumphs and support each other through losses, we connect to something much bigger than ourselves. Work-from-home cuts us off from much of our ability to connect effectively to our colleagues as human beings, rather than little squares on a screen. This deprivation builds on being cut off from family members outside of our immediate household, our friends, community gatherings, and even our former outside hobbies and entertainment.  

3. Deprivation of building trust. In office settings, it’s easy to build trust. You meet by the watercooler or over lunch in the breakroom and chat about what you did last weekend, your passion for the local sports team, your kids’ latest accomplishments, your vacation plans, your hobbies, the latest dumb thing a local politician said, and so on. Such social grooming activities offer a critically important opportunity for people to get to know each other as human beings, developing relationships and learning to trust one another. There’s a reason teams that start off virtual, but later meet in person at a company, work together substantially better after doing so: they have a sense of each other as human beings, not simply names on emails or tiny faces in videoconference windows. Such face-to-face meetings lead to much more collaborative relationships, better communication, and decreased conflicts. By contrast, teams that shift from in-person settings to virtual ones gradually lose that sense of shared humanity, leading to more tensions and stress.  

4. Deprivation of mentoring and informal professional development. A critical part of on-the-job learning stems from informal mentoring from senior colleagues. It also comes from the observational professional development you get from seeing how your colleagues do their jobs. Losing this mentoring has proven especially challenging for younger employees.  

5. It’s not simply “Zoom fatigue.” Have you ever started your remote work day at 9 AM sitting in your home office chair, had a series of meetings, and finished it at 5 PM feeling much more exhausted than if you’d had a similar series of meetings at work? This experience has grown to be called “Zoom fatigue.” It’s a real experience, but it’s not about Zoom itself, or any other videoconference software. The big challenge stems from our intuitive expectations about such meetings bringing us energy through connecting to people, but failing to get our basic need for connection met. In-person meetings, even if they’re strictly professional, still get us to connect on a human-to-human level. And of course, most meetings have some social components. By contrast, our emotions just don’t process videoconference meetings as truly connecting us on a human-to-human gut level. Yet our gut, usually without our conscious awareness, still intuitively anticipates videoconference meetings to bring us energy and connection. It’s inevitably disappointing, resulting in a feeling of drain, exhaustion, and stress.  

6. Forcing a square peg into a round hole. Many companies try to replace the office culture glue of social and emotional connection through Zoom happy hours and similar activities that transpose in-person bonding events into virtual formats. Unfortunately, such activities don’t work well. Similarly to other videoconferences, we have intuitively elevated expectations. We end up disappointed and frustrated by failing to have our needs met. Happy hours are even worse than regular work meetings in this regard, since we can’t easily do what most employees report as the most fulfilling part of happy hours: separating from a broader group to have a one-on-one conversation with a co-worker.  

7. Lack of skills in virtual work technology tools. You might be surprised to learn that many employees still only have a rudimentary grasp of the technology required for effective virtual work. They learned the bare minimum they needed to know to get by in the abrupt transition to working from home, and then failed to advance their knowledge going forward. That’s especially the case for older employers, including some mid-level and senior managers. At first, they perceived virtual work as an emergency measure, avoiding putting in the time to learn how to use technological tools most effectively. Over time, it became increasingly embarrassing to admit one’s lack of ability and to request professional development. This problem leads to lowered productivity and frustrating experiences for them and for those with whom they collaborate. It also increases cybersecurity risks, since these employees frequently fail to take the steps necessary to protect their work-from-home setup from hackers. For example, a frustrated senior executive with low digital literacy couldn’t access his company’s virtual machine from his home office, and took down his firewall, a basic security no-no.  

8. Lack of skills in effective virtual communication. It’s notoriously hard to communicate effectively even in-person, which is why many experts made a good living before the pandemic helping leaders and teams improve their communication. Effective communication becomes much more difficult when in-office teams become virtual teams. One of the biggest problems stems from much more communication shifting to text through collaboration apps such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. As a result, much of the nonverbal communication is lost, leading to a huge increase in miscommunication. That’s especially challenging since a key purpose of nonverbals is to communicate our emotions, and moving to virtual work has sorely endangered our emotional connection and mutual understanding. Phone calls and videoconferences help address these problems to some extent. Still, even videoconferencing doesn’t convey nearly as much body language as in-person meetings. When you have 8 people in small boxes on your laptop screen it’s hard to read their body language well. Also, you only get the body language of facial expressions, and miss the 90% of the body that’s not on camera.  

9. Lack of skills in effective virtual collaboration. In the office, face-to-face interactions help employees notice problems and nip them in the bud. You pop into each other’s office or run into each other in the hallway or share a meal in the cafeteria, talk briefly about the project you’re working on together, and catch potential problems while getting on the same page about next steps to solving them. Unfortunately, this just doesn’t happen in virtual settings. There’s no natural way to have these casual interactions that are surprisingly vital to effective collaboration and teamwork. There are particular challenges around people-related problems. Body language and voice tone are especially important to noticing brewing people problems, and virtual communication provides us fewer opportunities to notice such issues.  

10. Lack of accountability. In-office environments allow for natural ways to hold employees accountable. Leaders can easily walk around the office, visually observing what’s going on and checking in with their direct reports on their projects. Observing interactions around the office and people’s body language helps them read whether employees are on top of their work or if they need support and encouragement to improve their performance. In turn, the sight of supervisors walking around reminds team members to focus on their tasks. So do the daily interactions with their colleagues in the office, where team members passing each other in the hallway or popping into each other’s office can ask “John, when do you think you’ll get me that marketing brochure draft,” holding each other accountable. It’s much easier to ignore an email with that question than someone stopping you in the hallway or standing in the doorway to your office. You’ll need to replace that accountability with a different structure for remote work. It should enable accountability up the chain of command and peer-to-peer accountability for people at the same level, within teams and across teams to those in different business units.  

11. Poor work-from-home environments. Some employees might have access to quiet spaces and stable internet connection, while others may not. Given the restrictions brought about by the pandemic, overhauling work spaces will most probably take significant time and resources not available to many. That’s especially the case since many employees have a tactical rather than strategic approach to the pandemic, and since most employers unfortunately fail to provide funding to help their staff set up home offices.  

12. Poor work/life boundaries. Ineffective separation of work and life stems from both employer and employee actions. A surprisingly high number of leaders expect and reward their subordinates for responding to messages and otherwise working after hours. In other cases, employees work after hours on their own initiative, without explicit or even implicit prompting from leaders, often due to a desire to secure their jobs during the pandemic. In the long term, doing so causes lowered productivity, increased errors, and eventual burnout.  

13. Pandemic-related mental health challenges. Most of us spend a majority of our waking hours working. However, there are matters that are not seen behind personal closed doors. Especially given the deprivation of our basic human needs, employees are dealing with much more anxiety, depression, trauma, or grief as a direct or indirect effect of COVID. These effects range from death in the family or feeling fearful about a loved one’s well-being to losing access to favored hobbies and social life. Yet, it’s harder to be empathetic toward those you can only see on a small screen and can’t easily connect on a human-to-human level, and many employers fail to address this challenge.  

14. COVID-related pragmatic challenges. While companies have been able to shift work from the office to the home, employees can’t just move their home lives elsewhere. People working from home also have to contend with interruption from family members, such as a partner needing support or kids at home who need their parent’s attention. The challenges are especially tough for working mothers.

Conclusion

Work-from-home burnout and Zoom fatigue are much more complex than they appear. Dealing with the 14 problems of virtual work in the pandemic requires not just handling it as an operational, day-to-day matter.

Instead, you need to implement a wholesale strategic shift to reframe your company culture and policies  from the “emergency mode” of working from home to remote work being the new normal. That includes not only the many, many months of the pandemic, but after the pandemic as well, with many staff working full-time remotely while others work in the office a couple of days a week. That’s how you can ensure that your company culture thrives in the pandemic and the post-pandemic recovery.

Part 2 of this series shares the 21 steps you need to take to defeat work-from-home burnout and Zoom fatigue for your company, and relates how Matt’s company did so successfully.

Link to Part 2 of this series on work-from-home burnout and Zoom fatigue

Key Takeaway

Work-from-home burnout in the pandemic can lead to serious mental health issues and lost productivity. Leaders can help their team members by identifying the root causes and making a strategic shift to a virtual work culture...> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• What symptoms of work-from-home burnout or Zoom fatigue are the biggest issues for your company?

• Which of the 14 problems leading to work-from-home burnout do you think you should tackle first?
• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?

Image credit: TimKvonEnd/Pixabay

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on March 16, 2021.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, Fortune, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training on change management, decision making, and risk management strategy. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

When a threat seems clear to you, it’s hard to believe others will deny it. Yet smart people deny serious risks, even obvious ones, all the time.  

A case in point example comes from my experience helping a mid-size regional insurance company conduct a strategic pivot to thrive in the post-COVID world in January 2021. While doing a pivoting audit, I observed the underwriting department failing to address serious long-term risks for a number of industries resulting from the shifts in habits and norms due to the pandemic.

For example, a number of well-known companies committed to having all or many employees work from home permanently, ranging from innovative tech companies like Dropbox to traditional companies such as the insurance giant Nationwide. This growing trend changed underwriting risks for a number of industries dependent on in-office work. It’s more risky and less profitable to insure providers of commercial real estate, office furniture and technology, office-based services, and so on.

Given that 35% of consumers reported developing a new passion for cooking in the pandemic, we can safely assume that restaurants will not return to their pre-pandemic state. The rise of virtual fitness spells trouble for the future prospects of everything from yoga studios to gyms. With many people growing to like and even prefer virtual conferences to in-person ones during the pandemic, a cloud hangs over the long-term fate of the event industry. Moreover, given the long-term and potentially-permanent anxiety that people developed around crowded places during COVID and the growing popularity of the online entertainment industry, in-person entertainment such as movie theaters make for worse risks even after the pandemic.

Unfortunately, the company’s underwriting department proved resistant to clear evidence of such trends. With the department’s performance evaluation based on how many policies they approved, the Chief Underwriting Officer (CUO) did not want to adjust the company’s underwriting strategy according to what he termed “theoretical problems.” He argued that all the trends associated with the pandemic would be reversed shortly afterward, and that we would go back to our world of January 2020.

Such denialism in professional settings happens more often than you might think. A four-year study of 286 organizations that had forced out their CEOs found that 23 percent were fired for denying reality, meaning refusing to recognize negative facts about their organization. Other research shows that professionals at all levels suffer from the tendency to deny uncomfortable facts. Scholars term this thinking error the ostrich effect, after the (mythical) notion that ostriches stick their heads into the sand when they encounter threats.

The ostrich effect is one of over 100 dangerous judgment errors that result from how our brains are wired, what scholars in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics call cognitive biases. These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health to politics and even shopping. Fortunately, recent research has shown effective and pragmatic strategies to defeat these dangerous judgment errors.

Cognitive biases represent a critically important yet greatly underappreciated source of risk, creating a strong imperative to practice effective cognitive bias risk (CBR) management.

To Overcome Denial of Serious Risks, Do Not Start With Logic or Arguments

Our intuitive action to overcome risk denial involves confronting people with the facts and arguing with them, but research suggests that’s usually exactly the wrong thing to do. When we talk to someone who believes something we are confident is false, we need to suspect some emotional block is at play. Unfortunately, despite extensive research about its importance in professional settings, too many organizations still fail to provide training in emotional intelligence, including how to deal with colleagues whose emotions lead them to deny reality.

A number of factors explain why people may hold false beliefs. For example, research on the confirmation bias shows that we tend to look for and interpret information in ways that conform to our beliefs, preferences, and incentives. Research on a cognitive bias called the backfire effect shows that when we are presented with facts that cause us to feel bad about our performance or other aspects of our professional or personal identity, we tend to dig in our heels and refuse to accept them.

In some cases, presenting the facts to people actually backfires, causing them to develop a stronger attachment to their incorrect beliefs, as scholarship shows. Moreover, we express anger at the person bringing us the message, a phenomenon researchers term shoot the messenger or the MUM effect. There are many other mental errors that inhibit professionals from seeing reality clearly and making good decisions.

So even if a CUO has clear evidence that previously low-risk candidates for insurance have transformed into more risky ones, it’s tempting to deny that reality, especially given the reward structure for underwriting. That’s the reason why so many underwriting departments have been delaying and obstructing the integration of the mounting risk of climate change into their policies, including the CUO at the company for which I consulted. Such problematic CBR management poses a serious threat to the future of insurance companies.

To Deal With Denial of Serious Risks, Use EGRIP (Emotions, Goals, Rapport, Information, Positive Reinforcement)

How do you deal with risk denial and the cognitive biases that prompt it? Rather than leading with facts or arguing, I developed a much more effective, research-based, and easy-to-remember strategy called EGRIP, an acronym that stands for Emotions, Goals, Rapport, Information, and Positive Reinforcement).

Step 1: Model Their Emotions

Some might ask: if emotions are the problem, shouldn’t the solution be to suppress them? After all, we’ve all heard that emotions have no place in business.

Let me be clear that emotions are not the inherent problem. They are fundamentally important to the human experience, including in the workplace. We need both reason and emotions to achieve our professional and personal goals, according to the research.

Instead, your goal should be to show emotional leadership and try to figure out what are the emotional blocks inhibiting others from seeing risks reality clearly. Use curiosity and subtle questioning to figure out their values and goals, and how these tie in to their perception of self-identity. During a discussion, focus on deploying the emotional intelligence skill of empathy — understanding other people’s emotions — as a way to determine what emotional blocks might cause them to stick their heads into the sand of reality. Focus especially on empathetic listening, a vital skill, to both grasp how they feel and later show your understanding to them.

Having spent over 30 years in the company, and over a decade in his current role, the CUO became well-known as strongly attached to “the way we do things around here.” Such emotional investment has its upsides, especially in more heavily-regulated industries such as insurance, where innovation breeds compliance threats. Yet in times of disruption, this attitude poses serious risks for successful adaptation to new situations.

This emotional attachment combines several cognitive biases. One, known as the sunk cost fallacy, causes us to grow emotionally attached to our previous investments, such as our pre-existing clients, policies, and processes. We don’t want to cut our losses and stop throwing good money after bad even when, objectively speaking, cutting out losses would be much better for us financially. After all, if we cut our losses, we have to admit we’re wrong. And the egocentric bias, our tendency to be excessively self-centered and have too high opinions of ourselves compared to reality, inhibits our ability to admit we’re wrong and need to update our beliefs. Finally, the status quo bias refers to us resisting change – even if we don’t know whether the change is good or bad – due to fears about uncertainty and instability. While not much of a problem during times of stability, the CUO’s status quo bias obstructed adaptation to this time of change.

Another emotional factor stems from the CUO’s skepticism toward altering underwriting policy based on climate change risks. The CUO felt it would be bad for business profits - and his department’s ability to deliver results - to revise the underwriting methodology to incorporate this threat. He frequently expressed a worry that climate change risks are overblown.

To support his points, the CUO had his staff look for information denying climate change, even though there’s an overwhelming scientific consensus backing substantial human-caused climate change. Searching for such evidence that he wanted to see, despite it not corresponding to reality, illustrates the impact of two related cognitive biases. First, belief bias: when we believe a certain conclusion desirable, we interpret evidence in such a way as to fit that conclusion. Second, confirmation bias: we look for evidence to confirm our beliefs.

He’s not alone among insurance leaders in minimizing climate change risks. Despite the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) encouraging insurance companies for over a decade to address this issue, less than half of all firms responding to a 2018 NAIC survey on this topic report having a climate change risk plan; over 20% have not taken any steps to manage climate change risks.

It was only in 2019 that the company’s claims department, especially its Chief Claims Officer (CCO), successfully led the charge to overcome the CUO’s reluctance to integrate climate change risks into underwriting policy. Such tensions between claims and underwriting occur frequently, since the performance evaluation of the claims department stems from its ability to minimize claims payouts; the less risk, the less payouts, leading to claims departments showing strong and sometimes excessive risk aversion.

Once again during the COVID strategic pivot audit, the CUO brought up how bad it would be for business to adjust underwriting policy based on risks he felt overblown. Just like for climate change, he had his team look for biased evidence that everything would go back to normal. The predisposition to believe that everything will proceed normally, and the future will be much like the past, is called the normalcy bias. It often leads us astray during times of major disruption.

By contrast, the CCO strongly pushed for more heavily weighing the risks of industries negatively impacted in the long term by the pandemic. The CUO and CCO engaged in harshly-worded exchanges more than once in my presence, and I’m sure did so much more in private settings. So, we can safely assume that worries about the performance of his department played a strong role in the CUO’s risk denial.

Here, we see the horns effect, a sense of dislike for those we perceive as opposed to our in-group. The underwriting department forms one in-group within an insurance company, and the claims department another in-group. They have institutional incentives to oppose each other; these institutional incentives frequently develop into a sense of personalized animosity between these groups and their leaders. In many cases, the claims department automatically opposes whatever the underwriting department supports, and vice versa, regardless of the issue at hand.

Step 2: Figure Out Their Goals

Next, you’ll want to figure out the goals motivating their emotions. What goals does the false belief inhibit for them? The goals might be personal or professional; the person might or might not realize these goals. You want to continue using curious questioning to understand, at least in broad strokes, their aspirations.

While talking to the CUO about his goals and aspirations, he expressed a strong desire to grow the company as a whole, and his department in particular. He resented what he felt as the unnecessary increases in threat assessment for climate change, and saw the COVID-related industry trends in a similar light.

He also wanted to leave a positive legacy behind him tied to the department’s traditions and customs. Intending to retire within five years, the CUO did not want to see the department suffering any major changes. He perceived his department’s work as the core of what the insurance company did, and felt passionate about defending his legacy against the winds of change buffeting the company.

Step 3: Put Yourself on the Same Side By Building Rapport

Next, you’ll want to communicate to them that you have shared goals and are on the same side, building rapport. Doing so is crucial, as scholarship shows, for effective knowledge sharing in professional environments.

Practice mirroring, or echoing in your own words the points made by the other person, which helps build trust. You’ll also want to deploy what you learned earlier in your empathetic listening to show you understand how they feel, without necessarily agreeing with the accuracy of their assessment of the situation.

With the CUO, I empathized with his desire to grow the company and especially the underwriting department as a praiseworthy aspiration. I echoed, without saying he was correct, his frustration with the claims department, which led the charge on reducing underwriting risks for climate change and COVID-related trends alike. We discussed, and I commended, his desire to leave the legacy of a strong department that provides an anchor in the storm of change buffeting the insurance industry.

Step 4: Lead Them Away From False Beliefs Through Sharing Information

After placing yourself on the same side, building up rapport, and establishing an emotional connection, move to the problem at hand — their emotional block. The key is to show them, without arousing a defensive or aggressive response, how their risk denialism will lead to them undermining their own long-term goals, a research-driven approach to CBR management.

Highlighting our shared goal of the growth of the company and the underwriting department, I pointed to the positive flip side of addressing the threat of long-term industry adjustments after COVID. While permanent remote work threatened commercial real estate and products and services for the office, it promised a brighter future for private real estate construction, and products and services targeted at work from home. Similarly, businesses producing products and services aimed at virtual fitness and entertainment, as well as at-home activities such as cooking and DIY projects, deserved an improved risk assessment. In other words, the pandemic spurred trends that had as many long-term winners as losers.

The CUO told me he didn’t think of it from this perspective before. He focused on the loss to underwriting from incorporating pandemic-related future developments, not the gains. In doing so, he fell for a cognitive bias called loss aversion, our brain’s tendency to weigh losses much more heavily than gains. Loss aversion poses a particular challenge for risk-oriented industries such as insurance.

Knowing the CUO to be highly competitive, I challenged him to find other industries that would benefit from long-term COVID trends. He felt excited about that prospect, and wanted to dig in right away. Finding ways to approve more policies was his kind of challenge!

At that point, I reminded him of the flip side of the coin. Celebrating the winners also meant acknowledging the losers, as part of a broader shift in underwriting. I highlighted how doing so would strengthen his department going forward by building up its competency, so critical in our increasingly disrupted modern environment, to adjust flexibly its underwriting as various forces created new winners and losers. While that competency wasn’t part of the department’s current customs and norms, wouldn’t he want that to be a legacy that he leaves behind? Besides, it would help get the claims department off his back.

After much discussion, he agreed this was the way to go, both regarding the pandemic and more broadly. In fact, he realized he should also look for the winners of climate change, such as infrastructure-hardening companies, as the 2019 underwriting changes only addressed the losers.

Clearly, the CUO’s challenge here stemmed in large part from his framing of the situation. The cognitive bias known as the framing effect refers to our evaluations of the situation depending on our perspective of the broader context. If we’re presented with a negative framing – losing out on underwriting business – we see the situation as negative, and try to avoid it. However, a more positive framing – the opportunity to gain underwriting business from pandemic winners – prompts us to see the bright side of life, and welcome that outcome.

Keep that in mind when you’re presenting challenging information to others. If you want them to reject a situation or decision, frame it negatively; if you want them to accept it, frame it positively.

Step 5: Help Them Associate Good Feelings With Changing Their Minds Via Positive Reinforcement

Conclude your conversations with positive reinforcement for those accepting the facts about risks, an effective research-based tactic. The more positive emotions the person associates with the ability to accept hard truths as an invaluable skill, the less likely anyone will need to have the same conversation with them in the future.

In the case of the CUO, I applauded him for changing his mind. Then, I told him of how research shows that strong leaders welcome learning negative information and updating their beliefs toward reality, so that they can fix the problem effectively; in turn, failing to identify negative facts is a sign of a weak leader. Knowing that case studies often speak as strongly as research findings, I shared about how top CEOs, such as Alan Mullaly at Ford, succeeded due to multiple course corrections. My goal was to help the CUO incorporate a new character trait into his perception of what makes a good leader.

Many beginning practitioners of EGRIP feel tempted to ignore this last step. They got what they wanted with the previous four steps, why do the extra work? They fall into the empathy gap, the dangerous judgment error of underestimating the impact of other people’s emotions on their decisions and behaviors. Emotions determine the large majority of what we think and feel. If you care about making sure that the person you help convince of the truth becomes more committed toward true beliefs and changing their mind based on new evidence, you need to work hard on this important step.

Conclusion

Our typical methods of dealing with the frequent occurrence of smart people who deny risks is wrong. Don’t lead with facts, reason, and logic. Focus on their emotions above all, as it’s their emotional block that inhibits them from acknowledging reality. Use the 5-step research-based strategy called EGRIP to 1) discover their emotions; 2) then their goals; 3) build up rapport; 4) provide information to change their mind; 5) finally, offer positive reinforcement for them updating their beliefs to match reality. It’s not as easy as trying to argue, but it’s much, much more likely both to change their mind and to preserve and even strengthen your professional relationships.

Key Takeaway

When dealing with smart people who deny serious risks, focus on their emotions, help them acknowledge reality, then positively reinforce their acceptance of risks…> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• Do you have a difficult time dealing with smart people who deny serious risks?
• How do you plan to show a person denying risks that you’re on the same side?
• When was the last time you applauded someone for welcoming, and fixing problems related to, negative information?

Image credit: victorvote

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on April 6, 2021.  

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic(Changemakers Books, 2020). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy,Time,Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace” and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules.

Work-from-home burnout in the pandemic can lead to serious mental health issues and lost productivity. Leaders can help their team members by identifying the root causes and making a strategic shift to a virtual work culture. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes why work-from-home burnout and zoom fatigue are a lot more complex than you think.

Video: “Work-From-Home Burnout and Zoom Fatigue is a Lot More Complex Than You Think”

Podcast: “Work-From-Home Burnout and Zoom Fatigue is a Lot More Complex Than You Think”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here’s the article: Work-From-Home Burnout and Zoom Fatigue is a Lot More Complex Than You Think
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. And today, what I'd like to talk to you about is work from home burnout, you've probably heard a lot about work from home burnout during the pandemic, it's not an easy issue, and it's something that a lot of people have been struggling with. And of course, zoom fatigue is a related issue where people feel fatigued and drained from doing zoom, conferences, meetings, and other sorts of video conference activities. Now, you might be surprised to find out that work from home burnout and zoom fatigue, are a lot more complex than people generally think they are. So I want to talk about in this episode of the show about specifically how complex they are, because you need to understand the causes of work from home burnout and zoom fatigue, in order to take any steps to address them. So let's talk about the causes so that you can understand them. And then with an understanding of them, that will really help you address work from home burnout and zoom fatigue. Now, thinking about work from home burnout, zoom fatigue, we have to go to the very beginning of the lockdowns in the US in early March. And of course, around the globe, you know, earlier they happened in China and so on. In February, they happened in Italy. In March, they happened in us and in other highly developed countries and Europe in the North Americas. And what happened was, there was an abrupt shift, it was very abrupt companies, unfortunately, did not really do a good job, the large majority of companies, not all of them, Dropbox and Google, and Twitter did a better job than others in forecasting the problem with a pandemic and having a slower shift to working from home, where they had more of a couple of weeks to do this. But the large majority of companies that do not forecast how abrupt and problematic the pandemic would be, despite warnings from me and a number of other risk management forecasting, future proofing experts. And so they may have to make a very abrupt transition to working from home. And once they made the strictly abrupt transition, which was very disruptive and lots of problems, lots of challenges. Not going to go into the details of that. There's another episode I have on those topics, they actually found that working from home has a number of benefits that they didn't consider, they thought that working from home would be much more difficult, you know, there was only something like 4% of the US workforce, for example, was working from home. And employers were pretty skeptical that work from home can be widely used. But once they had to do it, they found out that it was actually quite effective, there was actually heightened productivity not lowered productivity, they found that people were more productive as a result of working from home after getting over some of the initial hurdles. So that was definitely a benefit for them. And of course, people didn't have to do the commute that also really helps in productivity. So there's lots of benefits in working from home. And if you can keep working from home, you can keep employees out of the office and greatly shrink your footprint. And that will cause the year that will save you a lot of save costs. So that's great to employers, we like that. Because you don't have to have all the real estate that you're currently doing can even go completely remodeled. Or you can just keep, you know, 10% of your real estate for various necessary functions, accepting documents, having occasional in office meetings, of course, I'm talking about after the pandemic once it's safe. However, there is a serious problem which is growing burnout. burnout is a serious, problematic issue due to working from home soon fatigue. And so companies have been finding that a few months into the pandemic, people have been increasingly complaining about work life balance, burnout issues, and it's getting more and more problematic. So working from home burnout, zoom fatigue is just an issue, even separately from the pandemic needs to understand and address work from home burnout and zoom fatigue, if you want to effectively have employees work from home regardless of the pandemic of fire for after the pandemic, if you want to keep that happening. So that's something that really needs to be addressed. And that problem would work from home. burnout and zoom fatigue is an adaptation of existing office culture to remote work. You probably might not have thought about that. But really, once we transitioned to a job transition, what happened was that companies adapted their existing ways of being in Office culture, to the way that they functioned in remote work and work from home. Now, that's fine for an emergency, once, one week, two weeks, but not in the long term, our company is focused on and shifting during the transition to working from home. And this is crucial, what they really focused on what leaders really focused on was getting the necessary tasks of the organization done, whatever you're doing, whatever products you're making, whatever services you're making, you want to get those necessary tasks done. And that's what they figured out that's been a high productivity and all those things, that's great, you're getting the tasks done. Good, you're that that's good, right, that's what you want. You're getting those tasks done. However, they left behind in the office as part of the office culture, the social and emotional glue, that truly Bond's people together, that culture, the office culture, where people feel connected, they feel loyal, they feel energized. That's the social and emotional glue of community belonging and connection they left behind. Because they didn't really focus on that, understandably, they focused in that emergency quick shift, and that the abrupt shift and getting the emergency tasks done. And so that's when they adapted their existing office culture to remote work, they hope the social and emotional glue would carry over. But it doesn't really do so very well. So that is a huge, huge underlying cause of what's been going on. And so it's not as simple as simply, you know, work from home burnout and thinking about it, as you know, zoom fatigue or something like that, it's not as simple as that. It's much more complex, you have to understand the causes. And you have to understand how we function as human beings, some of the things that make us function effectively as human beings, in professional settings, in order to address effectively work from home burnout and zoom fatigue. And that's something that's not really understood very well, because you have to understand how our brain functions, you have to understand the cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, psychology, all this behavioral science stuff. Most people aren't really experts in they naturally, we naturally make things work in office settings, because we are interacting in person. And that is a natural way that humans have evolved to interact. Now our natural interactions when you think about them, how do we interact in the office, we interact as a group as a small group. And that has to do with how we evolved as human beings, what our brains are wired for, we are not evolved for the modern environment. That's not what we evolved for. The modern environment with the Internet, and so on has really been around since the 1990s. Right? we haven't had time to evolve for that we are evolved, actually, our gut reactions, our intuitions, our emotions, the way we interact with each other naturally, are actually evolved for the savanna environment, when we were hunters and gatherers living in small tribes of 15 people, 250 people. And so, especially in those small nuclear teams, that we have teams of six to eight people, that's what the typical team is six to eight people, you know, it grows and it grows less and less manageable. After eight people, you definitely wouldn't want to go over eight, definitely going to want to go over 10. But ideally, you don't want to go over eight and six, four to six is the Goldilocks zone of the ideal number of team members. So that's kind of a small nuclear unit. And then the larger organization, your division, your department, you know, 15 to 150 people, and then your interactions with the larger organization if you're in a larger organization. And that's natural for us in the office environment. We are evolved for that. It is naturally that community, that team, that tribe holds that social and emotional glue together. But that doesn't naturally happen in the office in virtual activities. That just doesn't happen. That's not what they're about. And organizations have not really figured that out. They have not looked at this strategically, they have not looked at the science of this. They have not looked at the best practices on this question. They just tried to use operational tactics to address how problems related to work from home burnout and zoom fatigue. Now they try to okay address this is the tactic that we're going to try to address us to address this problem. That does not work well. Unfortunately, those operational tactics because what you need to do is have a strategic approach, you need to strategically shift to viewing work from home as a new normal, and as you shift to that, seeing it as a new normal. That's when you can make an effective difference and actually address the problem. Problems leading to work from home burnout and zoom fatigue. Otherwise, you're just forcing a square peg into a round hole. If you're trying to use the traditional previous natural, the natural transition, the abrupt transition of office culture which you adapted to remote work to working from home, that's you're forcing that square peg into a round hole. And you're just going to, you know, you couldn't make it work. If you force it hard enough, which the vast majority of companies did, they made it work. But they broke off the corners of the square peg, which is in this metaphor, the social and emotional glue that holds our office culture together that holds teams together, tribes, communities, so that's been broken off, unfortunately, and you know what you're forcing, forcing that square peg in with the broken off corners into the round hole. And that's going to hold for a while, but it's not going to be nearly as effective and it's going to be wobbly, and eventually it's going to break off, people are going to burn out. That's not something you want to do. So to address this problem, you need to first understand the variety of causes leading to work from home burnout. And the first I want to highlight is that we are deprived of that basic human need for meaningful purpose fulfillment. That's something that has been really taken away from us when we move from office environments, to working from home environments. Now, when you work from home, you don't get those narratives, that sense of self, that sense of identity that's tied to the workplace. People feel there's extensive research on this and feel connected and fulfilled and have a sense of meaning and purpose, from their work to some more than others. But there's definitely a general tendency where we feel a sense of on average, if we care about our workplace, we feel fulfilled, we feel a sense of meaning from how we work with a sense of purpose, from our work. And it's tied to those patterns that we have in the workplace, and the actual physical space. And more than that the community that we have with each other in the workplace. And so when we shifted abruptly to working from home, that's all been severely disrupted, all been severely disrupted by the shift to virtual work. So that's one of the problems. One of the 12 problems that I'll talk about, in this episode that you need to address. If you want to address work from home burnout and zoom fatigue, because that sense of human being and purpose, that sense of fulfillment is protective against work from home burnout, it helps protect us against burnout. And so we don't have that protection nearly as much anymore, we're not nearly as fulfilled, don't have nearly as much meaning and purpose. And so we don't have that protection against burnout. The second problem, we have a basic fundamental need for connection for that tribalism for that connection of two other human beings. And we get a lot of that from work. That's our work community, our work tribe, it helps us get our need for connection, met and fulfilled. Now work from home unfortunately, cuts us off from that in person, tribal community in in the savanna environment, there was nothing like zoom calm video conferences, or email exchanges, or text exchanges, or, or slack or Trello, or Microsoft Teams, whatever you're using, do go to Asana, Mondays, whatever you're using to connect with each other. As work collaboration software, the natural connection came from that tribal environment, you see each other, you connect with each other. And so we're not wired to feel connected by video conference by we be seeing people in little squares, in that zoom video conference or whatever technology or using Microsoft Teams video conference, you know, Skype, whatever you're using, we're not wired to be connected by those sorts of GoToMeeting. That's not something that's connecting to us naturally, intuitively. So we're not wired to be connected by FaceTime just because we don't do it. And not to mention that the many more interactions between us happened by email happened within those collaborations, software's that I mentioned, like Microsoft Teams and Asana, and so on. And those are even less connecting than video conferences. So that is a big, big problem that we don't get our need for connection met. And of course, that connection is protective against burnout, we feel connected, we feel fulfilled, and that helps protect us against burnout. So we don't have nearly as much of a sense of connection and so don't have nearly as much protection against burnout. The third problem out of 12 is that we are deprived of building trust, that trust setting, the trust is natural. When we interact in office, in the office setting you chat with each other, you build relationships with your fellow human beings, your fellow co workers, members of your team, you meet in the break room, as you're both getting some coffee, some tea, whatever, having lunch, you chat with each other about your kids about what's going on, for what are your plans for the weekend, about the local sports teams and having fun and what whatever things what's new in your life, right. And so that's natural, that's intuitive for us to build that interaction, just like it was for our ancestors in the tribal environment, when they talked about various things that were important to them, you know, what kind of mammals that they hunt recently, or something like that. So that builds trust that helps us see each other as human beings. And it helps us feel connected to each other and trusting each other. Of course, that doesn't happen within virtual settings, it's much, much harder to do that sort of connection to do that sort of interaction, that trust building activity. When you're in virtual settings, it's certainly completely unnatural in the collaboration software, those Microsoft Teams, Trello, and so on. And honestly, in video conference meetings, it is just much harder to connect with each other. And chatter just doesn't feel nearly as naturally they'll have, of course, all those informal interactions where you meet in the office and the hallway, and so on. So that trust, of course, is protective against burnout, that sense of connection, that sense of trust, where you trust each other, it helps protect against burnout, and it helps protect against Team conflict, which happens much more because you don't have trust it or you don't have a building of trust, you have less trust, and that team conflict also causes more burnout as you can imagine. Now, problem four, there's a deprivation of informal and formal mentoring, and informal professional development. So what does that mean? What am I referring to? I mean, you might have a formal mentoring program, but it's much harder to do in the form of working from home when people aren't used to it and are not as connected. But it's also there that informal mentoring that people get from, given to each other, for especially senior colleagues to provide to junior colleagues in the workplace. It's critical for that learning in the workplace at mentoring from senior colleagues, formal and informal, where they tell you how to do things. And of course, I'm talking more about junior colleagues here in terms of professional development, people who are not as experienced in a certain job in a certain professional, certain career. And that doesn't necessarily apply only to people who are freshmen in college, it might apply to people who are fresh in a new job and the new role, it might apply to people who are switching. So there's that mentoring from senior colleagues, more experienced ones in this role in this activity. And there's also professional development in formal professional development, where you observe your colleagues, you know, sales professionals, observing hearing each other on the phone with outbound calls and inbound calls. You just see what other people are doing in meetings, and so on. So being able to see those things to see your interactions with others, your seniors call your colleagues interacting with each other, helps you learn how to do things, and not having that learning, that definitely contributes to burnout, because you're not as confident, not as productive, not as effective. And that causes a lot of problems. Problem five out of 12. It's not simply zoom fatigue. Now you think about zoom fatigue, it's a widely phrased term use term where again, drain due to video conference meetings. Now, it's not that zoom fatigue doesn't exist. I'm not saying it's not a real phenomenon. It's a real experience, but it's not due to zoom itself. What other video conference software, what happens is, our emotions, our intuitions or reactions, gut reactions, they intuitively we expect to feel connected just like we would in a work meeting in a professional meeting, or in a one to one, whether it's a professional meeting, team meeting of a whole team for something like that, or a one on one meeting with a colleague, we intuitively expect to feel connected. But our emotions don't process the video conference software nearly as well as we would in a real meeting. We don't feel nearly as connected to the other person, whether it's a one one or two the other people if it's a team meeting, and so we're left feeling disappointed and drained, disconnected, disillusioned, that experience contrary Have you that experience is what we call zoom fatigue. And that experience contributes to burnout. A related problem is that we're forcing a square peg into a round hole. When we're trying to use Office style connecting activities like zoom, happy hours, to virtually interact with each other. What is happening was part of that office culture, when you brought that office culture into remote work. What companies and other organizations overwhelmingly did is they transposed in person events, like happy hours, and various other bonding events into virtual formats. And that this doesn't work well, unfortunately, just doesn't work well, because of our expectations, our gut intuitions expect to feel connected, they expect to feel satisfied, and it's inevitably disappointing. It doesn't meet their needs. So I mean, think about zoom happy hours, right? How are you going to have that chat with a colleague, where you go off in the corner and chat and catch up and so on during a zoom happy hour, you're not going to do that, it's, and that's just one example. And that builds that up. So you're not able to do lots of activities that you would otherwise. And that builds up on top of the fact that your small squares in a screen and you can't really see effectively each other, you can't effectively connect with each other, you don't feel a tribal connection, so you don't feel as satisfied and fulfilled. Now, those problems are depravations. There's also lack of skill problems, lots of folks lack skills and virtual work acknowledged and they're kind of embarrassed, especially senior experienced people, they're kind of embarrassed to admit that they don't know some technology aspects of things. And that causes lower productivity, of course, where they don't acknowledge that there are some functions of zoom that they're not familiar with. Or though collaboration software, Trello, Microsoft Teams, all of these activities, they might not know a lot of the technology that they should, these kind of back ends operational issues with the technology, they're not don't have as much digital literacy, as they ideally would. And that causes definitely lower productivity problems, lower productivity of all sorts, and a frustrating experience with colleagues with whom they need to collaborate. And that, of course, leads to burnout, where you're using tools, you're frustrated with them, companies may not be giving you training, you may not be aware of what you don't know, and you feel frustrated, because you don't know these things. And so this is definitely a challenge, especially for more experienced, senior folks who may not be as digitally literate, so that causes more burnout. Now, another problem is that we lack skills in effective virtual communication. Virtual communication is hard. Real communication, that's not fair. In person. Communication is hard, of course. So it's hard to effectively communicate in person, right? There's a reason that before the pandemic communication trainers got tons of money, communication professionals got tons of money to help people communicate effectively, it's hard to communicate in person already. And so it becomes quite a bit harder when you're moving to virtual teams. So that's a big problem that needs to be addressed. Now, we also lack skills in effective virtual collaboration. Virtual collaboration is related to virtual communication with virtual communication. Lots of people don't know how to do various things on zoom to make themselves more effective. For example, eye contact, when you're on zoom, lots of people put their cameras on the side. And they're looking at the screen, the cameras looking at them on the side, it looks like they're not paying attention. It looks like they're not connecting with you. Even those who do put their cameras in front of them. They often zoom, when they're speaking, when they're doing presenting or any speaking of any sort, they are not looking at the camera, they're looking at other people who are on the screen in front of them. So it looks like they're not making eye contact. And that's really challenging for when you're trying to influence people when you're speaking, you're trying to influence people. That is a big problem for your effectiveness and communicating. And that's a big problem for your effectiveness in collaborating virtually when you're trying to collaborate with your team. That is really difficult. So communication is one problem. And another big problem is there's lack of a causal interaction, where you meet with each other in the hallway and you chat and address a problem that you have where you want to address an issue or even notice an issue. It's harder to notice things. It's natural in the office, to have that in interaction where you casually after a meeting, maybe you want to address something it's natural to do so in the office, it's much less natural in virtual settings to do that, to have casual interactions of various sorts that solve a lot of problems. Now, not only that, you also are not able to see other people's body language and not hear other people's tell nearly as well. Of course, when you're in small squares on the screen, a lot of body language is hidden, you can only see the face. And it's you know, sometimes with bad lighting and bad the microphones, which a lot of people have, unfortunately, you are not able to notice tone, shallow things changes in tone that indicate conflicts, tensions, anxieties, you're not able to see body language, you can only see the face and not very clearly. And again, that's a problem. And now that's only that's in video conferences. That's the best best case scenario. Lots of interactions, most of the interactions don't happen in video conferences, they happen in collaboration, software, Trello, whatever Microsoft Teams, and that makes it even harder to notice conflicts, it's very hard to do so. And that causes a lot of challenges that contribute to burnout. Another problem, there's a lack of not simply skills, but a lack of accountability. in office environments, allow easy accountability, form leaders and from peers alike. If you're a leader, you can walk around and see who looks disengaged, who looks apathetic, who looks anxious, who looks in like they're there's some sort of problem and you can check in with them quickly on certain issues, and see what's going on and address them or during a meeting when they seem disengaged or something like that body language body down during a meeting. Similarly, as appears, you can pop into an office and say, Hey, Mary, where's that report that you will, we're going to get to me yesterday. So if somebody pops into your office, it's much harder to ignore them than it is to ignore a message on slack. Right? So that is, in those virtual environments, leaders find it much harder to notice, accountability issues where people are not being accountable, and hold them accountable. And peers have a much more difficulty holding their peers accountable. Another issue that I already alluded to a little bit before is poor work from home environments. That's a big problem that causes burnout for people, many lack things like quiet spaces, I mean, how often is a meeting disrupted by pets of family members, especially kids, or loud noises of some sort, or other people lack quiet spaces. I mean, maybe how many people had more than a year into the pandemic are working from their kitchen tables, way too many people lack quiet spaces. A lot of people lack a stable internet. I mean, this is a problem where they don't have a stable internet, there's a lot of video conference meetings where somebody goes in and out, because they don't have stable internet access. And that's a big problem. And a lot of folks don't have resources for good equipment. Many don't even know what good equipment means. I have. I mean, as a color consultant, and coach and trainer, I often present a consultant coach for executives, and especially in training, you know, women's consulting and coaching, I can bring this up. But in a training session, when one of the executives in the training has a poor microphone or poor lighting, poor video, it's not really something I can bring up, it's not a relevant topic that would not be appropriate for me to bring it up. But you know, when I can only hear 1/3 of what somebody is saying who is a prominent executive, that's not great. That makes it much harder for that executive to engage with their subordinates to engage with their peers and to engage with higher executives. And they just don't bring it up to your peers, your subordinates, higher up executives. It's not something that they bring up easily, because you know, they don't, it would be awkward to bring up. And a lot of people don't realize that having a not sufficiently quality microphone is a problem. not sufficiently quality lighting video is a problem and various other problems with their laptops, and so on. They don't have good equipment, they might not be aware that they need better equipment, and many simply don't have the money easily available, especially with the financial challenges of the pandemic for good equipment. And the last problem out of 12 that causes burnout is work life balance. So work life balance boundaries, specifically, not simply just work life balance manually, there's unfortunately way too many leaders expect subordinates to work after hours. And they deny them requests for flexibility there will study, for example, in the UK, published in late February 2021, that showed that about 70 requests from foreign women for flexibility were denied of various sorts. And that's a big problem, various sorts of issues, with some flexibility not being given, but especially problematic, is expecting subordinates to work after hours, answer messages, collaborate duty meetings of various sorts, some employees do so work after hours on their own initiative, because they're scared of being fired in the pandemic. This is a tough, challenging environment, and lots of folks are worried about their future. And so they're not doing things that would protect themselves that would predict them in the long run. And they're working more of their own initiative. So the long term consequences of the expectations placed on subordinates to work after hours, the lack of allowance for flexibility when employees ask for flexibility, and have employees themselves working longer on their own initiative, and lacking those work life boundaries is profound. There's definitely lower productivity, extensive research showing that it's lower productivity in the long run, even though it might look like you have higher productivity in the short run. It's kind of like sleep deprivation, it when you are going on four hours of sleep six hours of sleep, instead of the eight hours of sleep on average, that everyone should be getting, you know, the research suggests adults should be getting seven to nine hours of sleep. And you definitely don't want to get less, on average, most people, including most likely you should be getting eight hours of sleep with some variance, you should not be getting less than seven hours of sleep in any regular way. And especially less than six hours of sleep. But there are some people who go four to six hours. And they say I'm fine, I feel good, I'm doing great, I'm productive. And they're indeed working well. Well, they might be working the same amount of time, but they're much less effective and efficient. They get less done in that work. And they make more errors. And so more errors because of sleep deprivation, more errors, because people are burned out. So just just that work life boundary where people are working more, and they're doing more things causes them to make more errors, because they're doing less quality work. It also causes worse health. So which is especially problematic in the pandemic. But even outside of the pandemic causes worse physical health and worse mental health. People are more anxious, more depressed, more stressed. That's kind of mental health. And people have various other various physical ailments, like ulcers and mood, various sort of stomach problems, various sorts of infirmities that come from being overworked. And of course, that causes decreased retention, because in the long term, longer term employees who are not given flexibility and especially who are forced to work after hours, where there's that expectation from leaders, they are going to be leaving companies and they are leaving companies, there's you know, there's a reason there's increasingly poor retention, where retention is going down in the pandemic, with work due to work from home burnout and some fatigue. So that's the last of the 12 problems that I wanted to share with you that causes work from home burnout and zoom fatigue, that those 12 problems and especially that profound issue of not treating work from home burnout and zoom fatigue as a strategic issue instead of treating it as an operational issue, that abrupt transition, and that transposing that, putting those square peg of office culture into the round hole of remote work. That's the biggest fundamental cause of work from home burnout and zoom fatigue. So it's a lot more complex than you might think. Alright, everyone, this has been another episode of the wise decision maker show. I hope you found it beneficial, please make sure to follow us on whatever you've checked us out whether it's on YouTube for the videocast version of this or in iTunes or various other podcasts. For the podcast version of this. Click Like please share it on social media, when shared with your friends and whoever else you think would benefit your bosses if you want to benefit from work from them. Addressing work from home burnout, and zoom fatigue, there's a blog with this information that's linked in the show notes that you can check out has a lot more information. Make sure again to follow us to subscribe and leave your comments and reviews we'd really appreciate hearing from you. That helps us make much better content. Alright everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this again and look forward to seeing you next time on the Wise Decision Maker Show and in the meantime, the wisest and most profitable decisions to you, my friends.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on April 13, 2021  

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace” and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules.

Protect your organization from the disastrous effects of work-from-home burnout and Zoom fatigue by a strategic shift toward virtual work being the new normal rather than an emergency measure. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes how to defeat work-from-home burnout and zoom fatigue.

Video: “How to Defeat Work-From-Home Burnout and Zoom Fatigue”

Podcast: “How to Defeat Work-From-Home Burnout and Zoom Fatigue”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here is the article: How to Defeat Work-From-Home Burnout and Zoom Fatigue
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. And today, I'd like to share with you about how you can defeat work from home burnout, and zoom fatigue, working from home burnout and Zoo fatigue with this pandemic, there have been so many more people working from home, and suffering from some fatigue, we'll talk about what sylvatic is, if you haven't heard of that term, the work from home burnout has been a tough, tough thing for so many people. And we'll talk about how you can defeat it for your team, for yourself, for everyone in your workplace. And if you're a solopreneur, just individually for yourself and not for your team. So that's what we'll talk about how to defeat work from home burnout and some fatigue. So the first thing to understand about work from home, our burnout, and zoom fatigue is the typical approaches toward how the people typically deal with work from home. Well, at the beginning of the pandemic with other lockdowns, what happened was that folks just adapted their existing ways of working at home working in the office, their office culture, to remote work, that's what everyone did. They adapted their culture of working from home working in the office, the office culture to remote work. And they didn't think about the differences between working from home and office culture working in the office. So they used operational tactics to solve challenges that they encountered, whether it was work from home burnout, or any other challenges, technological challenges, collaboration challenges, they just use tactics, day to day tactics in operational tactics means just day to day stuff. As a challenge comes up, we'll address it, another challenge comes up, we'll address it. That's how it was approached. Because everyone wanted to just deal with the pandemic lockdowns folks weren't prepared that just fat quickly changed to working from home. And then think about the broader issues, the broader challenges with transitioning from the office to the home place. That's fine for emergencies. Now for a week for two, to have that transition, just focusing on the tasks themselves, getting them done focusing on that, and as any challenges come up dealing with them operationally. But it's really bad for the long term. And of course, the mme MC is for the long term. And it's not simply the pandemic, now that people have been working from home for a while, employers have been widely figuring out that hey, work from home is not too bad. And so have employees, employees and employers, from an employee perspective, it gives a lot more flexibility and comfort. And you don't have to have the long commute, there's less stress in many ways. Well, for employers, they of course, have seen that many people working from home actually have more productivity than they had in the office, two or more hours per week on average, gaining productivity, which is great, that's a great grain in productivity. And if they can get more employees to work from home, of course, they get to not least expensive office space. So that's great for their savings or not using up a bunch of office services, whether you know, it was big office copiers, other things that you need in the office, janitors, security and so on. If you're going to shrink your footprint by 90, or even fully remotely a number of companies that want to fully remote large ones like Dropbox and so on, and a number of other ones have gone to lots of their positions have moved remotely, including that simply technical technology companies like Dropbox, but Nationwide Insurance a long time with companies found 1926. So of all time companies and your ones have been deciding to make a number of permanent shifts to working from home. But they have not really figured out they've not considered all the aspects of moving from their office culture to remote work, and they've tried to fit their existing office culture to remote work. Unfortunately, that's like forcing a square peg into a round hole. You know, you can do it, but you'll break off the corners and the square peg. And then you know, it'll wobble a lot if you force it into the round hole. And eventually it'll break because you're keeping the aspects of the work that need to be done the tasks, but you're leaving behind the social, the human glue, the community glue that bonds us together that emotional glue that bonded us in to the office culture, when you're switching to how to working from home without adapting that call those cultural elements effectively to the remote setting. So this is a typical problem. These are the problems of the typical approach to working from home. you're failing to address the basic differences of working from home and even though people on average are more productive at working from home and they like it more. They Like the flexibility, you know, I've seen so many worked with a number of companies that are transitioning to mostly or permanently working from home throughout, not simply the pandemic, but even afterward. But even the pandemic in a number of companies are thinking, Okay, we'll work from home during the pandemic, which is still going to go on for a long time. And they're not thinking about, they're thinking, Hey, this is great, you know, we can, ideally, permanently move to a number of positions or all positions to working from home, not having to have that expensive real estate, having more productivity, of not having to have a lot of expensive Business Services, office services that they have to use. But they've been finding that it does lead to more burnout. Definitely issues with retention, morale engagement. So burnout is problematic. it harms productivity, from the perspective of collaboration, individually beat, people are more productive. But as a team, there's definitely more tensions and challenges with teamwork, but people are not as able to collaborate together effectively. So work from home to have effective work from home, you really need a strategic approach can't just address operational challenges can do it by day to day tactics, you need to have a strategic shift and a strategic approach to working from home. And again, this is whether you're a team leader, or a team member, or a solopreneur, individual professional, you need to have a strategic approach to working from home. So there are a number of ways of solving the problems that are associated with working from a home, I'll talk from the perspective of leaders, but you can apply to yourself as a solopreneur, or a team member, the kinds of things that you really want to do. And to the extent that you're a team member, encourage your leaders to adopt these approaches. So solution one, to the problems of working from home, you want to gather information on what exactly are the problems in your company, all companies have some differences, many, many similarities, which I'll talk about, but also some differences. And you want to customize the approaches that I'm talking about here to your company. So your first part of the step of your solution will be gathering work from home, interpreting information, diagnosing the issues with your company, using a number of surveys and focus groups, and using one on one interviews. These various tool surveys, focus groups, and one on one interviews will help you diagnose the specific issues that your company is experiencing that your team your organization is experiencing with working from home since the first solution, the second one is you want to develop metrics and baselines. As you're thinking about developing surveys. And for me in doing reviews, doing focus groups, make sure that you get both quantitative data and qualitative data, quantitative data and qualitative data. So for the surveys, especially, you want to structure them so that you get clear metrics, so that you can do interventions and measure that before and after impact. So that you have a survey, talking about, let's say, you know, how engaged you feel? How good is your collaboration with team members? How, what are your work life boundaries? and a number of other questions that there is no, there's going to be notes, in the links in the show notes. For more information about the kind of survey questions you can ask. But you want to structure the survey to get clear metrics so that you establish a baseline, use that baseline for your first evaluation. And then as you do interventions to improve the experience of your team working from home, you can use the survey, run the survey, again, monthly or so as you're going through these interventions. And see how the metrics are changing from the baseline. So people had, let's say, certain work life boundaries that they felt a level of satisfaction of six out of one for 10. As you're with one low 10 high as you're improving their ability to have good work life boundaries, are they moving from six to seven or seven to eight? So you want to see that? What about how they're collaborating with others, if they say we are foreign collaboration, which I've definitely seen a lot of things like that kind of in the lower scores, unfortunately, in collaboration, because it's hard to collaborate when you're working from home and virtual communication as well. You know, five on effective virtual communication, are you moving from that four and five to those sixes and sevens and overtime, ideally, eights and nines and even 10s. So you want to see that happening. Now, the third thing here, we're going into more of the behavioral science, the cognitive neuroscience of the topic, what is actually going on within us that is causing a lot of problems and working from home. Well, what happened is that work as such, you know, going back before the pandemic when people were working in the office, it satisfies a whole bunch of our psychological needs. And this is, you know, might feel soft, might feel, you know, squishy topics, but humans are soft and And in order to get humans satisfied and prevent burnout, and to get them engaged in collaborating effectively, you need to realize that in the office work naturally fulfills our needs. We are tribal creatures, and we need to engage with other people in order to feel fulfilled and satisfied. We're also creatures driven by a sense of meaning and purpose. And we need to have a sense of meaning and purpose in the kind of things that we do, the kind of activities that we accomplish in the office, in order to really get dissatisfied and protect ourselves from burnout and fatigue of various sorts and collaboration problems. And that's been lost. That's been a lot of that has been lost in the transition to working from home the meaning and purpose, the connection with a community. And most employees are not aware of this, most employers aren't aware of this, they don't understand how work met the basic psychological needs of their employees and employees don't understand how it met their basic psychological needs. And they kind of didn't have to when it would just happen naturally, in the office, of course, it would have been much better. And I did work with companies on developing meaning and purpose in the workplace and sense of connection. But it was not as necessary, really, in the office, it wasn't as critically important when you were in office, because especially in the kind of smaller companies that happened more naturally in larger companies that required more work when you have that complex tribal system. But most employees are not aware of how the transition to working from home disrupted all of that, and how it's very difficult. So this disrupted satisfaction of our needs. And that's why we workers feel unfulfilled, much less fulfilled, by working from home, their meaning and purpose, their sense of connection community with others, their sense of trust, their sense of collaboration, it's unfulfilled, and they're confused about it, they're not sure why is this so challenging. And of course, they're associating that with the company with their workplace rather than the circumstances. And that is a problem that you don't want to have happen. So you want to educate employees about this topic, as one of the early early interventions. You know, once you gather that, surveys, the metrics, the baselines, educate your employees about this topic, it's incredibly important to do so. Next, what you want to do, you want to cultivate a sense of meaning and purpose in the workplace. So talk about meaning and purpose being incredibly important in the workplace, that sense of identity, that sense of who I am, why I'm here, why I'm doing what I'm doing, what is driving me what is meaningful about this, for me, people have done that. Now more naturally in the office, they have associated that sense of meaning and purpose with the place with the working there, and with the people they're surrounded by. so driven by people motivated by people driven by the place motivated by the place, they have an association of the context of work with meaning and purpose, with satisfaction with accomplishments, that's how a lot of that is greatly disrupted. That's all greatly disrupted when you move to work from home. So you need to change that. You need to help your employees and yourself develop that sense of meaning and purpose. In working from home intentionally, it's much, much harder to do so because the context of the home is not something people associate with working. It's not something they associate with driving their accomplishments and achievements, that accomplishments and achievements. They associate that mainly with the workplace, most people associate their accomplishments or achievements, what's driving them is a powerful force with the workplace. So they need to change that you need to help them change that context, that thinking to associate working from home with meaning and purpose. The first step is to use an evaluative tool. And there are a number of evaluative tools, one's going to be a link in the show notes. To set a baseline of meaning, set a baseline of meaning and purpose for your employees, then engage in a number of self reflective activities or meaning and work from home that is a science based strategy. to actually develop work from home, you want to have meaning and work from home, you want to have self reflective activities where people do various forms of journaling, various forms of self reflection on how working from home, in the company in the nonprofit, whatever organization you run, that helps them develop their sense of meaning and purpose so that they shift the context of their previous meaning and purpose in working in the office to their new context of working from home however temporary or long term or permanent it might be. Then the second step here is to connect work from home to something bigger than themselves to develop a sense of meaning and purpose. That can be part of that will be the work community and we'll talk about that next. But you also want to associate that with something bigger, some bigger and drive some bigger goals and bigger values. What does the company stand for? What does your nonprofit organization stand for? What is the goal that you're trying to achieve and accomplish? Now, you've probably done that pretty well, when people are in the office reinforcing the culture, the values, the mission, but that's much harder to do when people are working from home. And they don't feel nearly as connected to the company's values, their organization's values, culture mission. So that needs to be something that's worked on from people in their home, in their homes. And they need to have that association with the value system culture of the organization in which they work, connection to something bigger than themselves, what are they serving? What are they doing, that the next one, connected to the connection to something bigger than yourself if they cultivate mutual connections to the work community, and that not only helps fulfill your sense of meaning and purpose, but also your desire for a tribal connection. Humans are our gut intuitions, our emotions evolved, not for the mother environment, but for the savanna environment when we lived in small tribes, that 15 people, 250 people. So that's very important for us to have that connection to other people to help me see that connection. And our workplace for most people, is our main tribe. You know, of course, the family unit is our nuclear tribe, for the large majority of people. But that's not the bigger tribe. I'm not talking about the nuclear family, I'm talking about the tribal sensibility, who is your community. For most people, their work is their main community. And that's been largely disrupted. By working from home, it's very hard to connect to each other for small boxes and screeners at a video conference. And even worse, of course, for collaborative software, which is incredibly needed. I hope you're using collaborative software like Trello, Asana, Microsoft Teams Slack, much better than email. But it's very hard to connect effectively to other people through it to really feel they're human beings, and for them to feel that you're a human being. Now that discontent leads to emotional training. What happens with the video conference especially, is that we expect if you're connected, I mean, think about work meetings are sport, social functions, those happy hours in the workplace, not zoom, happy hours, you feel connected, you chat to others, you feel that there, oh, this is part of my tribe, you know, I know this person, I know what's going on in their life, I'm connected to them. They like me, I like them, I support them, they support me. But when you have those same interactions, in a video conference, then it just doesn't work very well, at all, our gut intuitions, our emotions don't feel nearly as connected to those professional meetings by those happy hours. We have an expectation, our emotions, our intuitions have a high expectation for feeling connected, because we are used to it from the office. But we don't feel nearly as connected. So we feel drained. You know, you can be much more drained when you're just sitting in, in your home office and having meetings all day, throw zoom, then when you're at work and having those meetings all day at work. And you wonder why that's so weird, you know, nine to five, doing the same thing. I mean, I don't even have the commute when I'm going to work and going back. But you just have so much more drained because being with other people having those meetings for most people, except extreme introverts. For most people, it's at least somewhat energizing, it's somewhat energizing, it helps you give that sense of connection, it helps you feed off the positively off the energy of other people and they feed off your energy. So you bounce positive energy off each other. And you help each other feel more energized, feel more motivated, feel connected, feel engaged, feel like you're part of the tribe, doesn't really happen nearly so much on a zoom professional meeting, or especially on the zoom happy hour, there was an interesting bad for actually helping connect people. So you need to replace that office culture style bonding activities, zoom happy hours, professional team meetings, much of that does not work well, especially the happy hour, especially when we have expectations for happy hour activities that connect us that really are not connecting. So you really need to do away with those. Sorry for those who like to zoom happy hours, the vast majority of us down. You want to replace that office style culture bonding with native virtual formats where people don't have expectations. We don't have those native Intuit we don't have those intuitive expectations of satisfaction with native virtual formats that are virtual in nature and don't aren't associated with Office culture, but they help us feel connected. So it's much better than Having a high expectation and being disappointed. A couple of examples that you want to use. One is a text based morning update. So each team in your collaboration software, whether it's Trello, you can use a Trello card, whether it's Slack, or whether it's Mondays, or Asana or Microsoft Teams, they can use a channel they are with everyone, whatever it is, for your team. For a surf team of six to eight people, of course, that's what I'm talking about, you usually have a team and you have a number of conversations going on, let's say in Microsoft Teams. And you can establish additional channels to converse about other topics. So you want to have a channel specifically devoted to just personal stuff, nothing work related. And on that channel every morning, everyone who comes signs into work. So the first thing they do is essentially checking into work on the check. Meanwhile, other people saying hi to other people, this is a morning update, it takes about five to 10 minutes to do, where what you do is you share five things about each other. How are you feeling? Overall? What's your mood right now? Then, what are you planning? what's been going on with you at home? Then what are you planning to do at work that day, and one thing, share one thing about you that most team members don't know, that is something that you can easily do takes less than five minutes to do that part, share that, and everyone can see it. And then you respond to three other people. And that takes again, a couple of minutes. So this whole thing, you know, takes five to 10 minutes depending on how extensive you want to be. And that gets you really engaged with others because you not only share about yourself and you humanize yourself, you remind your team members that you're a human being. But you also see their updates, what's going on with them with their kids with their faith based groups or values based groups, what's going on with their vacation plans, you know, hopefully, safe and socially distance vacations, and other sorts of things like this, well, what are going on, maybe they're doing their spring planting or something like this. So what's going on and share photos, if you can share videos, those are great for humanizing each other. So that's really important, and that should be obligatory, all team members must do this. This is an obligatory step. Then the other thing you should do with the same channel is personal chats. So that's a personal chat where you can personally chat, you can also establish separate channels, that depends some teams like to do it on separate channels, some team likes to do the text based morning update in the same channel. It also depends on what kind of collaboration software you're using, but you want a channel or a Trello card or something like this for personal chats as well. And that's completely optional. People can use that or not use that just chat exchange with each other and share something that's going on with them, you know, things that are just life stuff, nothing about work. So that's a personal chat. And that gives a nice balance of an obligatory humanizing activity with the morning update, and those personal chats that people can do voluntarily and you'll find that the more extroverted people use the personal chats, more and more introverted one humans use them less and that's totally fine. Next, virtual communication so we're going on to professional development, psychosexual psychological needs with address now we're going on to addressing professional development, communications and torturously hard, which is why even before the pandemic, people in communication training made a lot of money, and it's even harder to communicate effectively online. Yet, people yet companies, individuals are failing so badly as investing into professional development in this area. This is a mean like one of the biggest, biggest opportunities for improvement, communicating effectively, virtually, again, it's so much harder than doing it in person where we obviously are used to doing it. But companies aren't investing in these organizations, individual professionals aren't investing. And that's just silly. You know, for example, I'll give an example in your zoom video conference. When you are looking at the other person on the screen. Did you know that you're not looking them in the eye, in order to look them in the eye, you need to look at the video camera. So you look in the video camera, not on the screen. Look in the video camera not on the screen. It looks really different. When you look in the video camera, the other person can clearly see that you're looking at them, you're looking them in the eye. Whereas if they're looking at the screen, they're looking at you but you're not then you're not seeing them as though they're looking you in the eye and that is really bad for influencing people you want that eye contact eye contact us I'm credibly important for us to influence people. I'm sure you know that you've gotten some in person communication training where you know that eye contact is very, very important in your handshake, eye contact right to basics. Well, now handshakes right now in the pandemic, but eye contact, so important, and what failing abysmally at eye contact, you know, your sales team, people are not doing iconic. I mean, I've spoken to so many top sales managers, and a number of companies who did not know about this before I talk to them and who are like, Oh, so we're failing to make sales, because of this simple thing that we're not able to do what people obviously, if you're inside the company, if you're not interacting with people outside the company, you're still selling your ideas, you're still trying to influence them, and persuade them to do something, as a leader as a team member. And if you're not having eye contact with them, you're much less capable of persuading them. That's just one example. The other example much, you know, more obvious, is failure to see people's body tones and language, that their body, you're only hearing what they're saying, You're seeing their face, sometimes. I mean, let's say lots of our communication right now is happening through Trello, Microsoft Teams, other sorts of things. And that text based communication is not conveying body language, not conveying tone, it's very different things. If I say, I think Michael should take that project, or if I say, I think Michael should take that project. Those two sentences mean very different things because of the nuance of the phrasing and the tone that I'm using. But when written down, they mean the same thing. And that doesn't really convey what you're trying to convey: those undertones emotional undertones, that convey so much that body language that conveys so much. And even if you're doing a video conference, of course, you're not seeing other people's body language nearly as much as you're only seeing their face, and their face tells quite a bit. But it often doesn't because you're not seeing the body, you're not seeing other things that they're doing. And the towel may not be coming through very clearly at all, lots of people have surprisingly surprisingly bad microphones, even tiny, professional people, top leader who can easily afford, you know, 40 $50 microphone, you know, get yourself a Yeti microphone, get yourself a good quality microphone, but people don't. And that's ridiculous. And he can't hear you can barely hear them. They're using their inbuilt microphones, or something like that, or their headphone microphones, which is not nearly good enough for top quality for conveying your message effectively. And that causes a lot, a lot of miscommunications, misunderstandings that can blow up quickly, and cause a lot of problems for teams, when you're working within a team internally within a company. And externally, when you're working with everyone, from your vendors, to your clients to your investors. That idea, you want to provide training on effective virtual communication, I can't tell you the number of companies that are not doing this. And that's very silly. But related to that, you want to provide training on effective virtual collaboration. Again, lots of trainers made money by training people on teamwork before the pandemic in office and when it's much more natural for us to work as a team tribally. But right now companies aren't investing in this and organizations aren't investing in this individuals are not investing. This is ridiculous. We're used to that collaboration office setting. You know, we build up trust with each other naturally, we meet in the break room and you know, have lunch together and just chat about our lives and what's going on. And Whoa, how are you feeling? We meet in the hallways, and we can resolve small problems, issues, challenges pretty quickly. That doesn't happen in virtual settings. Most employees don't collaborate effectively, they don't don't know how to collaborate effectively in virtual settings, how to communicate effectively, how to collaborate effectively, that everything from technology, issues of not knowing all the technology of Microsoft Teams, Trello, Slack, whatever, to simply how to communicate, and how to delegate tasks effectively, in office, in work from home settings, how to hold other people accountable, you know, it's much easier to ignore somebody sending your slack message than it is somebody standing in the door to your cubicle. So this poor collaboration really harms people's morale, the retention of people in your company, and their productivity as part of a team individually, people are more productive, but team productivity is really hurt by this poor collaboration. And there's training that you can do an effective virtual collaboration. I'm so surprised how few organizations do training and effective virtual collaboration. Then, a couple of other things you can do. You want to initiate virtual mentorship. This is a really effective technique, you might have had mentorship before in the office. And a lot of that has slipped as people transition to working from home. This is specifically virtual mentorship, you want the program of virtual mentorship, where you pair up junior staff, with senior team members. So focus on pairing up those junior staff with senior team members, which provides them with another way to socialize with each other and have that connection. So as the specially important in these times to have that connection, that one, one connection, so giving them that opportunity. And of course, senior staff members can mentor younger ones in the workplace and doing the work. And that's one of the biggest things that employees report being lost and harmed is their ability to get mentoring from others. And that is a big, big problem. So you want to deliberately create that virtual mentorship. And that older staff will mentor younger ones on what to do things in the company, and so on, as well as the internal culture norms, politics, all that stuff. And don't tell me don't have politics in your organization, pretty much everyone does, unless you're a solopreneur. And then junior staff. And this is a hidden little dirty secret that a lot of older staff, senior staff don't know how to do technology very well, unfortunately, unfortunately, but this is true. And they don't take the time to invest into learning how to do technology very well, this harms them. And this, this is really damaging. But this is the case, when they have junior staff with whom they're mentoring. junior staff can notice that and say, Hey, did you know you can do this an easier way and that the and the senior staff can more easily accept that from junior staff because they're helping junior staff with other things. So it kind of feels like a reciprocity arrangement. There's a reciprocity arrangement. So you want to make sure to do that virtual mentorship for junior staff and senior staff alike burn the fitting both, then you want to establish digital co working, digital co working is a surprisingly effective technique and not done nearly enough. What you want to do is replicate the benefits of shared cubicle space. That's the benefit of digital coworking where in cubicle space, you can easily chat to somebody in the next cubicle or come over to them briefly in the thermal cubicle a little bit further away and chat to them if you know about what's going on with them. What so what are the issues? Some you want to answer questions or just you know, chat about socially very briefly, hopefully not taking up too much of somebody's time. But you know, a couple of minutes about what's life? How are you feeling all that stuff? So, digital coworking allows you to replicate the benefits of working alongside team members in solving word problems. And actually benefiting from listening to them. Just observe observing them work, to the extent that you can do that in some ways. And also chatting to them and bonding to do that team of 60 people should do a video call for one, at least one hour daily. Ideally, more depends on what kind of work you're doing. But ideally, more than one hour daily, where you have microphones turned off, speakers turned on and video optional. And you can of course, and should of course turn your microphones on to bond with each other, you know, share about something in your life, what's going on chat a little bit briefly of chat about work stuff, what's going on, ask questions, answer questions, do all those sorts of things. So that's very effective. That's a really effective technique that digital coworking bonds team members with each other's minds that their human, helps them feel connected, very, very valuable, and of course, helps them solve work problems, addresses some of those collaboration challenges, as does the virtual mentorship. This is especially helpful for those who are in positions like sales, where sales team members can use that to hear each other. You can have one sales team member the time have their microphone turned on, especially a senior sales team member when they're doing outbound or inbound calls to customers. And you can hear what other team members are saying to customers and learn from them and or give them feedback on how they can do better. So with a number of specific departments in the in your organization, you know, I'm the sales floor, I have to tell you sales teams so often tell me Sales Team Leader, so that's the biggest thing they miss that sales, floor interaction, learning from each other engagement and mutual motivation for doing sales and the wins, celebrating the wins, and so on. That is something you can replicate with digital co working and that's really effective and that applies to a number of specific departments in your organization. Then, let's go on to other things that you can be doing. You really want to fund people's remote work technology. office space limitations have been problematic for many people, many people don't know, they work in their kitchen table or a walk in closet. You know, it's true people do. And they the they don't have a quiet space, they don't have a quiet office, the technologies where they've had mentioned not having a good microphone, not having a good webcam, not having good setups, not having good equipment, not having good technology, that is a big, big part that having good internet connection, I mean, how many people's WiFi is bad and drops out and they have to drop out of a meeting because of bad WiFi, that should never happen, you should always be plugged into the Ethernet. And there are ways to get Ethernet extended, but it costs some money. So you want to help your employees with these technology, office space limitations by providing funds for government home office setup, whether it's the internet connection that I mentioned, various equipment, technology, not simply a good laptop, not but also microphone, camera, all that sort of thing. And furniture, so furniture for working from home, all those sorts of things, maybe a standing desk, because you know, it's not really healthy, I use a standing desk, I've been using that for like, seven years now, ever since the research showing how unhealthy it is to actually sit the whole day. And we're when we're working when we're working in the office, and we have meetings or so on, we're at least walking from place to place where when we're working from home, we can sit in the same chair, nine to five, just except getting up and getting lunch. It's not great, not healthy. So you want to provide appropriate furniture, comfortable ergonomic furniture, ideally ones that facilitate the best health like standing up for working from home, then, this is another thing that you really want to be thinking about. A lot of people are not getting nearly as much benefit from meetings, as you think they are. Because of this disappointment, the zoom fatigue, we expect to be connected, and we're not. So whether those virtual happy hours, you want to completely eliminate them. And you want to reduce unnecessary team meetings, partially because you're already doing digital co working well. So if you see lots of leaders feel the team meetings are important for them to connect with their team members. But if you're doing digital co working, which you really should, you will already be connected much, much more to connecting the meetings. And it's something that you meet and that you don't have that expectation of being connected. So you don't have the zoom fatigue from those digital co working because you don't have that expectation of connectedness. I mean, you don't rationally have that expectation. So emotions and intuitions that cause zoom fatigue. And so if you have those microphones off speakers on video, optional digital coworking for at least an hour a day, you spend much more time together, much more connected, and you will be much less drained. Then if you have those, you know, weekly team meetings or something like that, you don't think that things are urgent that you need to communicate, you want to only schedule important meetings. And those shouldn't happen more than once a month if you're a regular team, you know, once a week for leadership teams, because you need to coordinate. But generally speaking, once a month or less for regular teams, when topics need to be really hashed out. That's what you want to schedule meetings for, sort of hashing out those topics, you know, once a month for the regular team to set its strategy for the next month, next month or three going forward. Right? That's cool, but don't have them more often. For reports, when you want to get team reports, you want to use synchronous communication. So have team members, get you written reports and send them to each other. You can also have them do video reports, those are more connecting and more engaging. And what you can do is don't do software transcription very cheaply written or video reports. That will then be sent out with the written reports for anyone who prefers the transcribed version and which is easier to catalog and search and so on for yourself. But the video reports are especially useful I find because they humanize each other to each other conveniently and much less draining for team members because they can watch those video reports or read the transcribed slash written reports on their own time. So much more convenient, much less draining. As a leader, however, you want to make sure to do a weekly check in with each of your direct reports. So system weekly, do a weekly check in on what's going on. That helps ensure trust and accountability for yourself with the team members. If you're a team member that helps assure that you have trust and accountability with the team leader. So make sure to do that. Assess your direct reports weekly in weekly meetings. These should not be very long. You know, this is just again, don't do this in team meetings. Don't do team meetings with a check ins do individual one things that's more connecting less training and There's going to be less awkwardness. And people will be freer to talk about things that are might be challenging to talk about the team setting, this should be 15 to 30 minutes, regularly 15 minutes if it's if there are more issues to talk through, can go up as long as 30. But I've usually see them be 15, even 10 minutes video conference. So what you want to check in is the status of their work, of course, naturally, then their work life balance, because that's really important for addressing burnout, and their well being, which is also important for addressing burnout. So those are the things that you want to check on non, in your weekly meet in your weekly meetings with your direct reports. As a leader, it's critical for you to support work life boundaries, that's one of the biggest issues that causes burnout, poor work life boundaries. Now, many, many leaders way too many expected employees to work after office hours, they send messages in collaboration software, and after work hours. And they ask their employees, why they didn't respond to them after work hours, when their employees respond to them during work hours. That's so bad, that's so harmful, it's very damaging. For people, it means that they have to be on, you know, 24, seven or whatever. It's, it's really, really bad, that you do not want that situation, you want them to separate work from life. So work from life boundaries, if they don't do that, that really harms them. And that contributes a lot to burnout. So they don't have that expectation. In fact, you want to encourage them not to do that. There are many fearful employees who don't complain about these things. And they even take initiative on themselves. They're afraid of losing their job and the pandemic, this economic downturn, they see their boss working after hours. And even if their boss doesn't directly say, Hey, you know, you should respond to these messages, even after hours when the boss sends them an email, there's a sense, there's an expectation, they feel that, well, if they don't work after office hours, and they don't quickly respond to the boss's email after office hours, that will send them back and the boss will feel that they're not as productive an employee, that's not a good thing, that they're not as loyal, you don't want that situation, you want to reinforce saying that, you know, if you want to work after office hours, as a leader yourself, if you choose to do that, that's okay. But you should make it very clear that you have no expectations, and people will not not get brownie points if they work after office hours. So you should reinforce those boundaries. Be very, very clear about that. Also, separately as an additional bonus, you want to encourage flexible work schedules when possible. So the typical work schedule is nine to five, what ideally you would do is establish a common time when everyone has to be at work something like 12 to three. And that's when you would do your digital co working, let's say from one to three, that's only if you don't want to if you don't know where you can do one to two, or if you're doing two hours, 123, something like that. So you give people flexibility when they work that gives them flexibility for working from home accommodating things with their kids, with their family members with activities that they want to do or need to do. So that helps them have better work life balance. And that's something you should contribute to encourage. This is key to avoiding burnout, a lot of research has shown that work life balance is so important to dressing burnout. And finally, as you're integrating these changes, don't rush them, don't put them in all everything at once. That's a problem, you want to put them in slowly over time. So don't rush these things. Use the results of the survey to see what are the most important things for you. And always whatever the results of a survey, I strongly recommend that you start with educating people about their basic psychological needs. Because if they're not aware of these things, which of these issues which the vast majority of them are not, then they really can't address these things on the survey, right? They can't say that that's an issue they're suffering from See, start with education about basic psychological needs, and then proceed to the most urgent steps of the other things based on the internal surveys, what seems most urgent of everything else based on your internal surveys. So that's what you want to do. Then you want to examine the survey results over time. So I told you do the metrics to the baseline, start the intervention with education, then the urgent steps, and then rerun the survey every month, see how your interventions are doing and see where you want to build on next strategizing next step each month with the leadership teams on the kind of next step intervention that you'll be doing to address and overcome work from home burnout and zoom fatigue. Alright everyone, I hope this has been enlightening for you and that has helped you make work better decisions about work from home. burn off in some fatigue. There'll be much more information in the show notes. So click on the show notes. There'll be various links to various resources on defeating work from home burnout on zoom fatigue, make sure to click like on this show and to follow us on whatever channel you've been listening to us when there's a videocast. There's a podcast podcast on iTunes and other podcast channels. You know, the video cast is on YouTube. So check that out. Make sure to follow us and subscribe, whatever the relative, whatever the relevant things are in each one. And please leave a review on iTunes. It's so important for us to get the word out to other people and for us to know what helps you have the best experience so that we can produce the best content for you similarly on YouTube, please leave a comment and share with us your thoughts about this episode. And again, what you'll gain from it, how we can make it better. That's very important and valuable. Alright everyone. I hope this has proven useful to you. And I will see you on the next episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show. In the meantime, as always the wisest and most profitable decisions to you, my friends.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts April 20, 2021

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace” and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules.

Protect yourself from poor COVID-related decisions by being aware of cognitive biases - particularly the normalcy bias, attentional bias, and planning fallacy - and making strategic plans that can prevent your gut reactions from taking over. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes how not to let cognitive biases control us when dealing with COVID.

Video: “How Not to Let Cognitive Biases Control Us When Dealing with COVID”

Podcast: “How Not to Let Cognitive Biases Control Us When Dealing with COVID”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here is the article: How Not to Let Cognitive Biases Control Us When Dealing with COVID
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Today, we want to talk about how do we not let cognitive biases these dangerous judgment errors in our heads, not control us when we're dealing with COVID COVID-19 the pandemic, it's very easy to make bad mistakes and many people actually made pretty bad mistakes around the pandemic, even from the start of the pandemic have gone onwards as well. But let's talk about the start of the pandemic. Elan Musk, one of the most famous entrepreneurs in the world, one of the richest people in the world, founder of Tesla, SpaceX and so on. He tweeted that the Coronavirus panic is dumb on March 6 920 20, when COVID was taking root here in the United States. And that got a lot of likes, got a lot of retweets. 1.7 5 Million Likes over 100,000 retweets because he's very popular and that of course, caused other many other people who listened to him to make bad decisions around the coronavirus pandemic. And then just a short while later, in a couple of weeks after the declaration of the National Emergency here knighted states on March 15. On March 19, so four days after that he tweeted that based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in the US by the end of April. Well, you know, since that time, there have been around 8 million cases. And we're now close to being done. And that's a bad problem. He made a bad mistake, bad prediction. So many people who are dropping yours who trust Elon Musk listened to him. They listened to him and they made bad decisions in turn because of his advice. So that's new money, you know, maybe new money more entrepreneurial, more likely to make mistakes. What about old money? You know, people like Goldman Sachs investment bank, very famous, very prominent. One of the key things that they do is give advice to their clients on how to invest. So they estimate US GDP growth. And they estimated US GDP growth in the second quarter of 2020. So the second quarter of 2020. They made an estimate on February 24. February 24. So it's the middle of the first quarter. The second quarter would start on April 1, they are mid late second first quarter on February 24, when the coronavirus pandemic was spreading widely in Italy and shutting down a number of cities. They said that it will be 2.7% growth of US GDP in the second quarter. Now, only a couple of weeks later on March 15. They changed their estimates from 2.7% growth to 5% decline 5% decline, that's a huge change. That's a 7.7% change in three weeks. That's pretty bad. But only a few days later, on March 20, they made another prediction that it would be a 24% decline 24% decline. So it went from a 5% decline to a 24% decline. That's a really bad 19% change, you know, really, really bad. Obviously, better estimates. Obviously, Goldman Sachs made some bad decisions around the pandemic. Lots of people made bad decisions, and most were caught unprepared and still continue to make some bad decisions around the pandemic, because they underestimated the threat and still continue to underestimate the threat of the pandemic, the consequences of the pandemic. So they were caught unprepared. And they had to turn to their business continuity plans, that emergency business continuity plan, so I chose to turn to them, even though these plans are not a good fit for the situation. I mean, I'm someone who's a future proofing expert, and risk management expert. I've done a lot of business continuity plans and the typical business continuity plan is not a good fit for this sort of situation. Why is that? Because they're great for emergencies. emergencies like one to two week emergencies when there's a hurricane when there's a blizzard. That's great. That's what they're fit for. But COVID-19 is not an emergency. That's not what it's about. It's a major disrupter. And that's how you should think of it. That's how it needs to be thought about some major disrupter of our lives or worlds. It changed our path going forward. It's not a short term emergency. It's a slow moving, high impact long term train wreck. It's a marathon, not a sprint. So relying on business continuity plans that are meant for a short term emergency led a number of companies into serious serious problems and led a number of people who live in the emergency to continue with your plans business continued plans into a number of serious problems. What we have to understand is that as a result of this major disrupter of COVID-19 This is a path changer. It is very much about changing the world will not go back to what it was the world will change forever, even after the pandemic You know, we'll have years of a pandemic, by the time it's over, of course, you know, it's already been over a year and it will be definitely much further before the pandemic is over. It will Chim in the main many months. And that's the pandemic here, the US globally, where we don't, where there's not nearly as quick a vaccine or logical will still be longer, will have changed people's habits, this pandemic will change people's values, their desires, their norms, their behaviors, will never go back to the world of January 2020, no matter how much we might want to. And that's something that we need to fundamentally understand about the pandemic, and the kind of bad decisions, these cognitive biases that we make around it. And this is not easy to hear. You know, when I first found out about the pandemic, when I was researching it, trying to figure it out, it was very painful to me. I struggled with this information and it was really hard. And my clients, those with whom I work with the retainer they made, found it really difficult to accept this nugget of information that's really unpleasant and information about the pandemic. But what helped me and what helped them get over the hump is that it will be so much more painful for all of us in the long term, if we don't accept and adapt to the pandemic, and then the major disruption for our path forward into the post COVID reality, as well as still the main months of COVID remaining. So that's what we need to really be thinking about. The pandemic again, is a slow moving threat. And we as human beings, we just make bad decisions about these slow moving frets. Unusual Fred slow moving ones. Because of how our brain is wired, our brain is not wired to deal with such slow moving frets. Our brain is wired to deal to have the fight or flight reflex, our gut reaction is to greatly underestimate such threats. We face friends in the moment and we make decisions about them in the moment, we did not respond well to raise these slow moving train wrecks sort of threats. Because our gut reactions are based on the savanna environment. That's what they're about the savanna environment, we had to face threats that were immediate. Though they were quick, we had to make that quick response. You might have heard of it as the fight or flight rate as the saber toothed Tiger response. You want to jump from you. It's better to jump at 100 chapters than to miss that one saber toothed tiger. So that fight or flight reflex causes us to react quickly to immediate threats, which is great for saving our lives, but not react well to threats that are slow moving train wrecks like the pandemic. And this leads to decisions that endanger our businesses, our careers, our households, all sorts of things. And here, we need to understand why this bad advice is common. This bad advice comes as a result of these dangerous judgment errors in the savanna environment, the evolutionary background called cognitive biases. cognitive biases are the specific ways that our brains go wrong. Our brain goes wrong in specific ways. And these dangerous judgment errors describe the specific mental processes that cause us to make bad decisions. And they come again, as a result of our evolutionary background and the structure of the wiring of the brain. Now the fight or flight response to threats was life saving for those hunter gatherers that was great in that environment. Because the risks they faced were those immediate intense in the moment risks like saber toothed tigers, but in the modern world, that's not the kind of risks we face. The risks we face are complex, ambiguous long term, they might come from a smart note, phone notification about a disease that came up somewhere in the middle of nowhere China right in the middle of the chain. So that is something that we have to realize the kind of intuitive responses gut reactions that we have to threats are not well adapted for the pandemic, or most other modern world threats that are slow, high impact threats, high low percent low probability, slow moving high impact for us, so that these major disruptors, and they're specifically three dangerous judgment errors, three dangerous judgment errors, that we need to watch out for these cognitive biases. By being aware of these cognitive biases and knowing about them and understanding them. We will prevent them from controlling us when we respond to COVID and other major disruptors, so three dangerous judgment errors, cognitive biases, the normalcy bias, the planning fallacy and hyperbolic discount. Let's talk about each of them in turn, the normalcy bias, what does that refer to? Well, our intuition is to assume that everything will keep going normally, everything will be fine, everything will keep going. As it has been gone in the savanna environment. That was a pretty safe assumption that only really major changes would be just the change of the season. Spring, summer, fall, winter, right? That's the major change, life would be pretty much the same throughout all this period. That is not a safe assumption in the modern world. Think about the 2008 2009 fiscal crisis. not a sad thing that would have been applicable in the civilian environment. And it fundamentally changed our lives, our economy going forward, the rise of the smartphone that really changed things that really changed dynamics for a number of businesses and for our everyday lives. And of course, the covid 19 pandemic, we cannot assume that the future will go as it has gone in the past, we are facing more and more disruptions in the modern world. And we can't fall into this normalcy bias. We can't forecast the short term future based on the short term past, I mean, the next few years, our intuition has to feel like the next couple of years will be like the last. And that's not a safe assumption. It underestimates the likelihood and the impact of major disruptors. So by being aware of the normalcy bias, that will help you watch out for areas where you might be falling for it, and help you address it. So that's one out of the three dangerous judgment errors. The second one is the planning fallacy, the planning fallacy, we tend to assume that the future will go according to plan, you might have heard the phrase, failing to plan is planning to fail failing to plan is planning to fail. It's a very famous phrase, it's well known. It's very misleading. A much more effective phrase is failing to plan for problems is planning to fail. Failing to plan for problems is what I teach my clients failing to plan for problems is planning to fail. So you don't want to simply make a plan think that everything will go according to plan, you want to specifically plan for problems to come up because when we just make a plan, we intuitively don't put in nearly enough steps to address problems and the risks that would come up. And then we underestimate the resources that we will actually need to accomplish our plans to accomplish our projects, whether it's time, money, social capital information of various sorts, we don't anticipate that well enough. And many people in the COVID pandemic have not changed their plans nearly quickly enough, and have not adapted to the future of the post world of the post COVID pandemic, they think that everything will go back to the world that it wasn't January 2020. Like that, when the pandemic is over. First of all the pandemic will have a slow rolling change as it goes from COVID to the post COVID world and we will never go back to January 2020. So you can't be thinking that way. That's the second one of the three dangerous judgment dinners. The third one is hyperbolic discounting. hyperbolic discounting. It's a fancy name for a hyper extra bollock for hyperbolic extra discounting of the future. Because we perceive the short term future as more important than the long term future. That's our perception. That's our feeling. And the savanna environment, that was a pretty safe assumption. But just because you couldn't rely on the future now, if you killed the man with it was going to be pretty hard for you to save all the meats, the better eat as much of it as possible, get it prepared, smoked, because you couldn't freeze it, so that you couldn't carry stuff you couldn't invest into land, right? That's not something you could invest, and you can't invest into your professional career, what are you going to become better x chipper or something that's not gonna work out for you. Now, in the civilian environment, you really needed to be short term oriented. In the mother environment, of course, you can invest in your professional development, taking courses, you know, getting coaching, getting various degrees, getting an MBA, or something like that. Also, of course, you can invest in property in your land and your house, and so on other fixed investments, and you could invest in your organization, your company to build that up better. And you can, of course, put money in the savings account. But that's not what it feels like we don't intuitively recognize that that's something we should be doing. We undervalue the future, the long term future compared to our immediate short term desires. So we prioritize the short term to the detriment of the long term. And we underestimate the long term outcomes and impacts of various events, like the COVID pandemic. So a lot of people greatly underestimated the long term impact of the COVID pandemic, the duration of it, and they are really underestimating what the consequences of the pandemic will be even after it's over. And that's something that you can't fall into that trap. So again, by being aware of hyperbolic discounting, that will help you address it. So these are the three dangerous judgment errors that you should not let control you when you're dealing with COVID normalcy bias, thinking of the future will be much like the past the planning fallacy, making a plan and thinking that everything will go according to plan and hyperbolic discounting, discounting the long term outcomes and impacts of events right now. discounting the long term future at the expense of the short at the desire to prioritize the short term future by being aware of these problems, you will not let them control you when you're dealing with COVID. So that's what I want to share about how to not let cognitive biases control you when you're dealing with COVID-19 Please make sure to like and follow this wise decision maker show. We have a video cast in the podcast, so whatever you got it. If it's a video cast on YouTube, if it's a podcast and iTunes or something like that, leave a review, leave a comment. We'd love to hear what you think, but really helps us make the show better and it helps other folks decide whether they want to check out the show or not. And please share it with your friends on social media everywhere. And make sure to look in the show notes. There's a lot more information about these topics and other resources that you can check out. Alright everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then the wisest and most profitable decisions to you, my friends.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on April 27, 2021  

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace” and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules.

When dealing with smart people who deny serious risks, focus on their emotions, help them acknowledge reality, and positively reinforce their acceptance of risks. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes why smart people deny serious risks and what to do about it.

Video: “Why Do Smart People Deny Serious Risks (and What to Do About It)”

Podcast: “Why Do Smart People Deny Serious Risks (and What to Do About It)”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here is the article: Why Do Smart People Deny Serious Risks (and What to Do About It)
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Today, I want to discuss why smart people, perhaps people like you, those, you know, deny serious risks and what you can do about it. So that's gonna be the topic of today's show. Risk denialism. Now, smart people deny risks very often, surprisingly, often, you'd be really shocked by how often they happen. So for example, talk about smart people, smart people, presumably are in top leadership positions. And there is a correlation between people's top leadership positions, intelligence smarts, various exams, and so on. So, when you see the research on this topic, for example, there was a study of 286 organizations that fired their top executives. These are mostly companies and nonprofits, they've fired their top executives, and the stock 287 board members of these organizations. What the study found was that 23% of these top leaders 23% were fired for denying negative reality risks around their company facts or were problematic around the company, that organization was happening. So they were fired for denialism. That's what they were fired for. Started, they were fired for bad performance, they were fired for actually just denying the problematic situation, the company either the bad performance of the company, or negative external risks, or a combination of both. Just denying that being way too optimistic, and denying these negative facts. And such denialism, especially if it's modeled by people on top leadership positions, really spreads for the organization. But it also happens even when top leaders don't experience or express risk nihilism that happens at all levels of the organization. Unless the organization takes proactive steps to address risk denialism. It just naturally happens, negative information doesn't float to the top, it doesn't get reported, various problems occur. So this risk nihilism is very frequent and seriously problematic for all sorts of organizations and all sorts of leaders. That reason that such risk denialism happens for pretty much everyone, it's very common, it's very intuitive to deny risks is that negative information, risk information feels bad to us. We don't like it. And if you remember, the previous wise decision maker shows your recall of our emotions, when we just go ahead and let our emotions when we go ahead and decide how we ordinarily intuitively decide when we go with our gut. our emotions determine 80 90% of the decisions that we make 80 90%. So here's what ordinarily happens, negative information, or risks, and so on, feels bad, it feels unpleasant. So we intuitively just flinch away from this negative information. We don't want to hear it, we don't like it. And we ignore it. And we sometimes punish people who bring us this information. So that's bad, that's problematic. That's what happens. We don't like to feel bad. We don't like this. It's unpleasant. So what you need to understand is that it takes strong ability and emotional intelligence to address risk denialism. You want to overcome your instinct and develop the skill of welcoming negative information. Now, emotional intelligence was that emotional intelligence has to do with you being aware, intelligent about your emotions, and the other component of intelligence is managing your emotions. So emotional intelligence has to do with awareness and management of your emotions. So you have to be aware that we tend to flinch away from negative information risks, threats, problems, negative realizations. I mean, there's a reason that nearly half the marriages in the US ended in divorce, right? It takes effort to overcome our instincts around negative information, and then develop the skill, the ability to welcome praise those who bring you negative information, praise yourself for accepting this and welcoming this negative information. It's a very hard counterintuitive thing to learn, as are many things on the wise decision maker show that help you make the wisest decisions. So that's something that you have to realize is part of your experience. And it's part of everyone's experience. And you're checking out this show you're learning about other folks and so they're going to be suffering from what's called the ostrich effect. So the ostrich effect has to do is a cognitive bias when these dangerous judgment errors that talk about all the time that we make because of how our brains are wired, that cause us to deny negative reality. So it's called the ostrich effect. That refers to some technical scientific name for this risk denialism. Now, it was named after the mythical notion that ostriches stick their head in the sand. When countering threats. That's not what actually happens, but that's what it's named after. So the ostrich effect, you need to manage the ostrich effect within yourself. It's very tempting for us to stick our head in the sand or somewhere else, when we don't want to face negative reality. And there are lots of other related cognitive bias risks which you need to learn how to manage as well. They're all talked about in my book, never go with your gut, how pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. The ostrich effect is the really big key problem for risk denialism. Now, how do you deal with risk denialism, who, in others, so you want to deal with them within yourself? And we talked about this emotional intelligence, gaining awareness of when we're trying to flinch away from negative information, and learning to welcome it, welcome it instead, praise yourself, praise others, for giving you this information. Praise yourself for welcoming in. What about others, when they're denying negative information? How do you deal with them? Now, it's very tempting for us to just go ahead and argue with them by stating facts, taking risks, and then arguing with them, when they deny that these are real facts, real risks. Unfortunately, arguments rarely change people's minds, you'll be surprised to hear that, but that's just what the reality is, arguments are not great at changing people's minds. So just stating these facts, just taking the risks will not work. Because when people are denying, pretty clear risks, when smart people especially are denying pretty clear risks, there's likely some emotional blocks that are going on. And remember, emotions are determined at 90% of our decisions. So you gotta assume that there are some emotions that are going on that are blocking that person's ability to appreciate and accept these risks. So to fight these blocks, use the strategy called egrip. Don't just state facts, don't just take risks, don't argue, use eeglab instead, that is an acronym ygritte. That stands for five steps, a five step method to deal with risk deniers effectively, first you address their emotions, because of emotional block, then you find shared goals, then you build rapport, then you share some of them pleasant information, and then you can give them positive reinforcement for changing their minds. Let's go through each of these steps in more depth, emotions. So again, emotions, you gotta assume, are at the root of why they're not accepting these risks. So when someone denies facts, you have to assume that it's caused by their emotions, and you want to understand what's going on. So we talked about emotional intelligence that has to do with your understanding of yourself, your emotions, and your ability to manage your emotions. Now, the next the more complicated perhaps not necessarily depends on the kind of person you are, some people are more other oriented. The other aspect of dealing with emotions is dealing with other people's emotions. And that has to do with social intelligence. So we have emotional intelligence that's about us. social intelligence is about other people. So social intelligence has to do with awareness of and the ability to manage to influence other people's emotions and their relationships with you and with each other. That's what social intelligence is about. So, when you are trying to understand other people's emotions, you have to employ the skill of social intelligence, social intelligence is the crucial skill. And I talk about that more in my book the blind spots between us how to overcome unconscious bias and build better relationships. So you have to assume that their emotions are blocking them and you have to identify what are the specific emotional blocks? What are the specific problems specific challenging emotions Is it fear is anxiety is grief? Is it anger is frustration is it loss, what are these emotions? So, you identify the emotions, you have that in mind? What do you do next? Next, you establish shared goals, understanding their emotions, you figure out within that space, which shared goals would be most relevant because we all share goals with each other, you know, me conveying that you know the people who are your enemies, you still share 95% of the goals with them. You want to have a safe life, a happy life. You like your family, you support them. They like their families. They Want to save life, they want a happy life, maybe the way they go about it is very different from you. But they still, you know, they like their pets, you like their pets, maybe your cat person, their cat person or your dog person, their dog person, you know, who knows? There's things that we don't realize that we share with each other. So you still share a lot with them. And so these underlying goals, you figured out, what are the goals that you share with them, if you're in the same company for talking about your colleagues, you share the goal of the company making a profit and doing well for the world. If you are in another type of organization, you share the goal of achieving that mission of the organization. Whatever goals you share, figure those out, establish those shared goals. So shared understanding about those shared goals. And understand that this is crucial to the next steps of sharing knowledge that will help them get over their emotional blocks. So the goal establishment is the crucial precondition. So you understand their emotions, you establish shared goals, then I mean, if you're collaborating on a shared project, then you want the project to go well, maybe a very different idea about how it should go, but still, you want to go. So for example, then after the goals, you get to report, build rapport with them and build an emotional connection. That's what rapport is about, where you connect with that person, and you establish a sense of trust, a sense that you are on their side, because you share goals, and you understand their emotions, and you echo their emotions to them. You use empathetic listening, to hear them hear the kind of concerns that they're raising. So you already understand their emotions, you're you have shared goals, they're going on to the specific concerns that they are expressing use empathetic listening to really get to the nitty gritty details, the depth of their emotions, and how well their emotional language, the blocks that they're experiencing, and you want to echo their emotions, based from your previous understanding of their emotions, and these nitty gritty details that they're sharing, Echo their emotions, use their language, to show that you understand them, that you empathize with them, that you understand where they are, that you understand what they're feeling, and that you have shared goals here, you also talk about your shared goals with them, make clear that you share these goals that you're in their same side. So you're showing them that you understand how they feel, and that you're on the same side. And by doing that you build up that bond of trust, this bond of trust is critical and could be radically important for the next step, which is sharing information. So here you're going to those uncomfortable facts, that uncomfortable information, those risks, that they're kind of denied. Then again, usually what people will do is they first and then argue about them. This is not good. It breeds a defensive response. So defensive response can be in two flavors, the fight response or the flight response. The fight response is where the person gets aggressive and starts arguing with you. The flight response can be them ignoring you or them nodding and saying Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they're shutting down inside, and they're not actually hearing you, they're not paying attention to you, they're just waiting until you go away. Neither of those is great. So that's why I need to go through the whole egrip and the motions, goals and rapport, those three, emotions goals report, before you get to sharing information. Now, you share those uncomfortable facts in a very sensitive manner, highlighting how, hey, if they have the emotional block, if they have the challenging emotions that prevent them from accepting these negative information, these serious risks that they're denying, then you will not accomplish your shared goals. And that's what they want isn't that so provide this new information that they didn't realize before provides a new way, in the framing of your report being on the same side, in the framing of these shared goals that you share that will be compromised by them not accepting this information? And if you understand their emotions? So here, you're challenging their lower level beliefs about the tactics that you use to accomplish their shared goals. But of course, it's all about your shared goals, and you're understanding their emotions. So you're shifting their perception, their beliefs around the right tactics to accomplish these shared goals. And that's the critical key, you still have the goal, they still get their underlying desires met, but they do it in a different way, in a way that accommodates and accepts the serious risks that they denied. You want to be especially sensitive around the actual pain point, whatever it happens to be, their actual emotions be especially sensitive around that big careful when you talk around this issue, and you'll get from the center of the conversation how much you want to push on this. So get a push on this, well, as long as they're comfortable, don't go too far. And then they will very, very likely move at least somewhat toward your position toward your perspective. And that's wonderful. That's exactly what you want. This ygritte is not necessarily a one time conversation, not necessarily a one and done, it's something that you'll probably have to have a couple of times with someone depending on how big the issue is and how significant it is. I mean, if it's not too significant, we, you might get away with one conversation. If it's more significant than more basic to their emotions, this is a tactic that's really important to them, then it might take you more time. But anyway, they will somewhat shift toward your perspective. And the next step is providing them with positive reinforcement. I get frustrated with people who use a grip and just use the E grip part. And they don't get this part because they feel okay, I've got what I wanted. Now I can move on and do other stuff. Positive reinforcement is fundamentally fundamentally important. If you truly understand and value what emotions are, what drives us is what drives our decision making around and other people, then you'll realize how important this step is. So after the person changes their perspective, after they shift their belief somewhat toward your perspective, you've got to provide them with positive reinforcement. See how difficult that is how challenging it is how much you appreciate that they shifted their perspective, it's not easy to change your mind, it's not easy to do it, and you really value them, you really value that our ability to do that, that's a sign of a very powerful person, a strong person, a great leader, whatever, that whatever the context calls for, that they're able to shift their perspective, because you got to help them shift their emotions around this issue. If they just acknowledge in the moment that you're right, and then you don't give them positive reinforcement, they will likely backslide on the specific issue at hand. So you got to get them to shift their emotions around this issue by giving them positive reinforcement for changing their mind. And you got to give them positive reinforcement for the matter. The matter is the broader issue. So there's, there's the cognition, our actual thought patterns. And there's metacognition, how we think about our thought patterns. And metacognition here is the ability to change your mind, the cognition is whatever they change their minds on whatever they shifted. Metacognition is the ability to change their mind. And so you got to give them praise for that as well how that's a difficult thing, hard thing to do, and so on. So, ego trip, this is the key technique to address risk nihilism in others. And again, remember within yourself, you have to learn to overcome the ostrich effect, welcome negative information and address these negative flinching away experiences within yourself. And then their standard, they happen within others as well, probably quite a bit more powerfully because they didn't learn about this information. So that's today's Wise Decision Makers Show. I hope this show helps you make the wisest and most powerful, and most profitable decisions. Again, please subscribe to the show on whatever venue you're checking it out. We have video cast in the podcast, you can check out both there are going to be in the show notes for whatever if you're watching this on YouTube, checking this out on iTunes are in URLs of check out the show notes for the other one and the video, get the podcast, the podcast the video, click Like and share your comments. Love to hear what you think. And there'll be much more information about the show in the notes. So check those out. All right. I look forward to seeing you next time and until then, the wisest and most profitable decisions to you, my friends.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on May 4, 2021.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace” and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules.

As we continue to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and adjust to the post-pandemic world, it's important to identify and meet your basic needs. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes how to survive and thrive during the post-pandemic recovery.

Video: “How to Survive and Thrive During the Post-Pandemic Recovery”

Podcast: “How to Survive and Thrive During the Post-Pandemic Recovery”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here is the article about how you can thrive after this pandemic.
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the wise decision maker show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. We're in a wonderful time where vaccines, at least in the US, and in the UK, are available, widespread, available to whoever wants them. So we're entering a stage of post pandemic recovery. And that's great. I'm so excited about it. And you and I, and everyone need to figure out how to survive and thrive in this new stage in our lives this post pandemic recovery. And that's what today's show is about how to survive and thrive in the post pandemic recovery. So the first thing to understand is to go back to the context, the history, what happened with COVID. Very briefly, of course, it very much disrupted our reality very much changed everything in March 2020. With the lockdowns funded, our professional lives depended our personal lives, all of these were changed drastically, dramatically, by COVID, whether it's our households that are disrupted, whether it's our jobs that were disrupted, all of that led to massive work life imbalance, led to a lot of changes led to a lot of shifts. So that's the broader context from which you're coming into this post pandemic recovery. And again, there are lots of cycles of up down COVID surge, not surge, conflict, seven of our masks and not masks, issues with working from home, all of that sort of stuff. That's where we're coming from. So if you understand the context with which we're going into the post pandemic, recovery, and face this new abnormal spouse, pandemic recovery, with clear eyes, not just kind of, you know, rainbows and unicorns and denying everything that happened. But with clear eyes, we must acknowledge what's real, what are the facts on the ground here, where we're coming from, how people are thinking, how people are feeling, this history of the pandemic. For the goals, one of the goals of doing so we want to thrive and not just survive. So thriving means flourishing. That means in every area of your life, doing what you want to do in your professional life, achieving your goals, in your personal life, achieving your goals in your Fitness, Health, whatever, all sorts of things with your family, with your social life, that's personal life, your professional life, your career, your business, your organization, whatever it is thriving, meaning achieving your goals, feeling fulfilled, not just surviving, then just getting by. That's the goal of succeeding effectively, in this new post pandemic recovery in this new post pandemic reality, which is the, we're still not quite there yet. We're in the recovery stage from the pandemic and the tail end of the pandemic. So we say, and to do so, effectively, we must fight these dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases, which you've probably heard before, if you've checked out the wise decision maker show that these are the dangerous judgment errors we make as human beings, just because of how our brains are wired. Our brains are not wired for the modern environment. They're wired for the savanna environment, when we lived in small tribes of 15 people, 250 people, and we had to respond to threats very immediately in life or death situations or the fight or flight response. We might have heard of it as a saber toothed Tiger response where you have to jump at 100 shadows in order to get away from that one saber toothed tiger, you might notice that many of us saber toothed tigers in the modern environment, but we still react with the fight or flight response. And we still have very strong tribal responses in the modern environment. Neither of those are great. And there are many, many other problems that come from this event environment. The specific ways our brain goes wrong. Because of the savanna environment, because of its structure of the brain are called cognitive biases. These are mental blind spots that lead us to make bad bad judgment errors. The biggest one for the pandemic. And the post pandemic recovery is called the normalcy bias. The normalcy bias. That's the biggest problem for the post pandemic recovery stage in which we're in right now, as well as it was for the pandemic. That's the perception that the future will be much like a date. That was a safe bet in this event environment. I mean, what's going to change the seasons is the main change for winter, spring, summer fall. That's the main change in the Savannah environment. But that's what happens in the modern environment. Our environment is very disrupted, very disrupted by the pandemic before that 2008 2009 fiscal crisis. by things like the rise of the smartphone, the rise of the Internet and so on. You can still remember back to the 1990s when you had to get out The internet for the phone that sounded II. You, we, for those, you know, an agent, clearly I'm aging myself. But yes, this is something that really reveals my age. But that's something that was a major disrupter for my environment from my life. And it's something that is a major factor in our modern environment that, despite us feeling that the future will be much like to date, things will be normal. That's not what actually ends up happening, the future is much more disrupted than we thought. So it's much more disrupted. And thus, we tend to minimize the impact of the disruption of the pandemic. So we minimize the impact of the pandemic destruction. Despite the fact that the post pandemic recovery will not go back to what we imagined everything being normal, the prior pandemic, the anti pandemic, normal, that's what we imagined. But we will never go back to that time that prior to the pandemic, January 2020, that's just not in the cards, things happened, we changed, our life changed. And we will all will keep a lot of these changes that came from the pandemic, that's pandemic changed our habits, how we behave, I mean, how long good we stay under lockdown masks, working from home virtual interactions, all of that sort of stuff, ordering global groceries, online, whatever you're doing, all of that sort of stuff, not seeing our family's values, how what we value, what we care about the risks, problems, health issues, all of those are changed in significant ways, our preferences, what we prefer to do. So many people now prefer much more to work from home, we have surveys indicating that over half of all employees who work from home would much much rather have worked from home more than half the time. But rather than go back to the office, and that's a serious issue, we have other plenty of other preferences. I mean, let's say people are cooking at home much more. So they will not be going out to restaurants, nearly the same rate as they were previously, our desires, and so on. All of these things are changed in fundamental ways, what we value, what we want, our habits, our preferences, so everything will not go back to normal. So after the pandemic, some of the things that you need to be thinking about, there will continue to be a lot more work from home. And this is not simply coming from the employee surveys employers are definitely planning to do a lot more hybrid work where people are mostly working from home downsizing the office, some companies are moving to fully remote allowing some or all workers to work fully remote leanness is not only tech companies, this is major old traditional companies like say Nationwide Insurance right here where I am in Columbus, Ohio globex. So that's companies moving a lot of people to the, to the home working from home. And I count the number of companies transitioning to having at least one of their employees work from home permanently. And many all who are capable, basically, of having a hybrid model of them coming in maybe like two days a week or so. And some coming in weather ones who are working permanently from home maybe once a quarter to meet with their teams. So work from home will continue. And hybrid work will continue that will just continue to a large extent. After the pandemic, we'll have a lot more virtual interactions, of course, not only at work, but in all sorts of professional settings where we have professional meetings and personal meetings where we meet with people, where we interact with service professionals and say, lawyers, real estate or someone you're checking out some house in a different state where we want to move or someone we're not going to go there. We're going to have those virtual tours and so on lots more virtual interactions of various sorts, the game night will be a lot more virtual. So social life will be a lot more virtual entertainment will be a lot more virtual people will be doing much more streaming concerts will not come back at the previous rate they were theatres and so on. No matter how much these venues believe they will, fitness, people are going to do a lot more online fitness, a lot more of everything that they were doing at home. After the pandemic, of course, gyms will see a pickup and yoga studios but not nearly to the same extent that they had before the pandemic, education a lot more online education will continue to take place even after the pandemic, no question about it. So, and more broadly, there will be an orientation towards risk avoidance folks throughout the world, I can guarantee you this will be much more wary of risks will be much more avoidant of risks after the pandemic, in this post pandemic recovery and after the pandemic than they were before. So this is a substantial shift. These are all substantial shifts that you need to be thinking about for yourself , for your organization, for your household, what will be happening in this post pandemic recovery, and after the pandemic itself ends. Now, what you want to understand in order to survive and thrive. So understanding this shift, understanding of facing reality, understanding, we will never go back to January 2020, you want to define your post pandemic needs. So what's going to be happening with yourself? What are these fundamental needs? Because the habits, values, preferences, desires changed, but our underlying needs didn't. So think about what are these underlying needs, and how do you satisfy them, because those needs those wants, they remain the same those underlying fundamental urges, and that are free in particular, which needs to be satisfied, free needs, which you need to satisfy in order to make sure that you survive and thrive, that makes sure that you survive and thrive here are the three critical needs that you need to satisfy. So first, satisfy them differently, though, than you did before the pandemic. So let's talk about those three needs that you need to satisfy in a different way before the pandemic. So fundamental needs of connection. So first, connecting with others, you'll need to meet this differently after the pandemic, because we'll have a lot more virtual interactions, you'll still have a lot more virtual interactions with your colleagues, because you'll be doing hybrid work or maybe full time remote work. And that will happen I mean, even people who are full time in the office will be doing a lot more virtual meetings than they previously did. No matter how much or little, you might like virtual meetings. So connection with colleagues, and connection with other people in your household. in your community, you'll be doing a lot more virtual connection than you previously were. So that's something for you to realize, understand that something these trends will be happening. And you need to figure out where you fall in these trends and how you will make sure that you satisfy your needs, your desires for connection in a different way. And of course, in the post pandemic recovery, we're still in the tail end of the pandemic, you have to be thinking about, well, who's vaccinated, who's not, how do I interact with them, masks are masks off in their house, and so on, for and in the job in the workplace, and so on. All of these sorts of things will be part of the conversation that we're entering into in the post pandemic recovery. Then safety, or some of these things, we're talking about how to deal with safety of masks of, but also keeping yourself safe from risks. Like I told you, people will be much more risk avoidant after the pandemic, and you likely are more risk avoidant after the pandemic, or in other terms more realistic, around the risks because it will clearly be very much too optimistic about the risks prior to the pandemic. So think about how to prepare yourself not simply for the next pandemic, but other major disruptors in your world, in your business. For you, if you're a business leader, think about that business continuity plan for major major disruptions. The next pandemic, the next thing a solar flare. And, you know, next hurricane or tornado, same thing for your household, how will you prepare for that major cyber attack of all that sort of stuff? How will you prepare for that, so make sure that you are safe, make sure that you have resources prepared, whatever resources you need to stay safe in your professional life and in your personal life. So that's one, that's the next thing. And the last one that you need to know as a fundamental need to meet is your self esteem. Now, connection and safety might be more obvious, but self esteem is a really critical one. Again, this is all based on research around our fundamental needs of self esteem is a really critical fundamental need, where we need to feel confident about ourselves, esteem ourselves, respect ourselves. And that comes from our ability to feel good about ourselves to feel good about our own our lives, about our progress, about the kind of life we lead about what we want to accomplish, you might want to for example, take up a new skill, learn something, develop yourself, as a person grow, feel good about yourself. Or if you're doing things like let's say raising a family, make sure that you're raising your family in a way that makes you feel proud that you're raising your kids in a certain way, or that you're running your business in a certain way or that you're developing your career in a certain way. All of these sorts of things feed into your self esteem. And you got to be thinking about how you fulfill that need in this post pandemic recovery in this different time. So think about that. Think about how to fulfill these different needs in the Different time the spouse pandemic environment, the tail end of the pandemic and the boss pandemic environment, the connection need the safety, the self esteem, because we're never go back to that idyllic time of January 2020, we will have a lot more virtual interactions, people will be a lot more risk avoidant, there'll be a lot more hybrid in the remote work. So think about all these things, as we're entering the post pandemic recovery, to make sure that you survive and thrive in your professional and your personal life. All right, this has been another episode of the wise decision maker show. I hope you've liked this show. If so, make sure to subscribe to whatever venue you're listening to, or watching. We have both video cast and the podcast version. So please check those out in the show notes a lot more information about how to survive and thrive in the pandemic is going to be in the post pandemic recovery is going to be in the show notes of blogs, books, and so on. And I hope that you will comment on the show. How did you like it? We'd love to hear your comments, love to hear your feedback. Please leave your thoughts in the comment notes. leave a review on whatever venue you're checking us out. Alright everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this show. And I will look forward to seeing you next time on the wire decision maker show. And until that time, the wisest most profitable decisions to you, my friends.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on May 11, 2021.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace” and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules.

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about how I helped Matt, the CEO of an insurance company with a staff of 1,300, navigate through a widespread work-from-home burnout crisis in his company.  I advised Matt that what he needs to do in order to defeat work-from-home burnout is to stop thinking of COVID as an emergency situation to be handled via operational tactics. 

Companies need to approach COVID and the post-COVID world as our new abnormal reality, and use a strategic approach to survive and thrive in this new world.  That includes a strategic re-evaluation of your internal structure, culture, and norms for a much more virtual environment for the foreseeable future. One cornerstone, and the crucial first step, of this re-evaluation is to be able to identify key issues that could lead to work-from-home burnout.   

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:  

And if you like audio, here’s a podcast based on the blog:  

Or simply read onward!  

In the case of Matt’s company, as with many other businesses as well, the issues ranged from those that stemmed from an individual’s personal circumstances to those that originate from the workplace itself. 

The most significant problems I’ve identified include the deprivation of our basic human needs for meaning, purpose, connection, and the chance to build trust with workmates. Working from home also deprives employees of the chance to be mentored by senior colleagues.

Then, there’s the “Zoom fatigue” brought on by the stress and feeling of drain due to technology failing to get our basic need for connection met. This issue is true for the formal and official aspects of work as well as the informal ones, such as when companies use videoconferencing for happy hours and other virtual social gatherings.  

There are also other important pieces, such as employees’ lack of skills in effective communication, collaboration, and technology tools in virtual work. Employees may also be affected by pandemic-related mental health challenges, subpar work-from-home environments, poor work/life boundaries, as well as other COVID-related pragmatic challenges.

To efficiently address these issues, I urged Matt to take 21 steps that organizations can use to defeat work-from-home burnout and Zoom fatigue.

A Strategic Approach to Defeat Work-From-Home Burnout and Zoom Fatigue

The first step to fixing these problems involves a commitment to a strategic shift. You’ll need to reframe your company culture - and policies - from “emergency mode” of working from home to remote work being the new normal. That includes not only the many, many months of the pandemic, but after the pandemic as well, with many staff working full-time remotely while others work in the office a couple of days a week. 

Start by stepping away from your existing structure of, your culture around, and your assumptions about, remote work. People have a tendency to stick to their pre-existing beliefs based on their initial information and first impressions, even when strong new evidence shows that these beliefs are erroneous, such as how we set up remote work. Behavioral economists and cognitive neuroscientists call this mental blind spot anchoring. Anchoring is one of many dangerous judgment errors, or cognitive biases, that harm the decision-making process in business and every area of life. Doing so has caused many bad decisions during the pandemic, and you want to avoid such anchoring as you re-envision working from home.

Here are the specific steps I suggested for Matt’s company and the other companies who I helped strategically realign their culture around a much more virtual work environment, both in the pandemic and the post-pandemic world:

1. Gather thorough information from your employees about their virtual work challenges. Your organization might find that work/life boundaries pose a particular problem for your staff, while other companies may see different areas as a bigger problem. Run surveys and do focus groups and one-on-one interviews to diagnose the extent and impact of each potential virtual work issue in your organization in particular.

2. Develop metrics and determine a baseline. While running the surveys, make sure to get both quantitative and qualitative data. Structure the surveys so that you can use the quantitative data to establish clear metrics on all relevant aspects of work-from-home challenges. Experiment first with different ways of asking questions to make sure that the responses you gather actually get at the issues you’re trying to measure. Then, make a broad survey across your whole organization to establish a baseline for the current state of virtual work. You’ll use this baseline to evaluate the interventions you’ll make as part of your strategic shift. After all, as the founder of management consulting Peter Drucker once said, “what gets measured, gets managed.”

3. Educate your employees about the deprivations of needs. In my experience, the vast majority of employees fail to recognize the psychological reasons for why they feel much less fulfilled and why their expectations aren’t being met. A critical early intervention involves educating them about this topic. Doing so goes a long way toward lowering their expectations and reducing their sense of frustration and discontent.

4. Intentionally cultivate a sense of meaning and purpose in your employees. The office environment naturally facilitates a sense of meaning in the workplace. The sense of place, the patterns of daily work, the social environment and work culture all help employees develop a personal narrative and sense of identity tied to work. However, the virtual environment removes all of these natural ways of building meaning and purpose. To address this problem, you need to help your employees intentionally develop a sense of meaning and purpose in the virtual workplace. That includes using an evaluative tool to establish a current baseline of meaning and purpose, self-reflective activities on identity and personal narratives as tied to one’s work, and many other practices such as connecting your work to something bigger than yourself.

5. Replace square pegs with round pegs for round holes. To cultivate human connection and a sense of trust, you need to replace bonding activities from office culture with native virtual bonding activities. These activities should be specifically distinct from office culture-based ones, so that our gut reactions don’t have elevated expectations and they should also take advantage of digital technology.

 1. For instance, here’s an activity that almost all of my clients implement, namely a “Morning Update” for each 4-8 people team inside their company. They establish a separate space in their collaboration software dedicated to this topic. Every morning, all team members send a message answering the following questions: 1) How are you doing overall? 2) How are you feeling right now? 3) What's been interesting in your life recently outside of work? 4) What's going on in your work: what's going well, and what are some challenges? 5) What is one thing about you that most other team members do not know about? Employees are encouraged to post photos or videos as part of their answers. They are also asked to respond to at least three other employees who made an update that day.  Note that most of these questions are about life outside of work, and aim to help people get to know each other. They humanize virtual team members to each other, helping them get to know each other as human beings, or keeping that connection if they had already known each other from in-office collaboration. There’s also one work question, focusing on helping team members learn what others are working on right now. That question helps them collaborate together more effectively. 

 2. Another activity adopted by over 80% of my clients involves establishing another separate space for each team called “Life Stuff.” There, anyone who feels inspired can share about what’s going in their life and respond to others who do so. The combination of mandated morning updates combined with the autonomy of the “Life Stuff” channel provides a good balance for building relationships and cultivating trust that fits the different preferences and personalities of the company’s employees.

 3. Encourage other informal communications in the workplace. For example, the typical presumption during virtual meetings is that you should pay full attention to the speaker. Yet during in-person meetings, you actually engaged with those around you, communicating through a brief aside or a look that conveyed your opinion on what the speaker was saying. You can encourage your employees to do the same through texting or private Zoom messages or other means.

6. Encourage them to get their needs met elsewhere. Some of their needs, such as for physical social connection, you won’t be able to replace. Encourage them to get their needs met elsewhere in their lives, while staying safe in the pandemic. 

7. Provide professional development in effective virtual technology use. Before providing professional development in various aspects of virtual work, highlight the broader strategic shift to virtual work and the benefit of long-term professional growth for each team member’s effectiveness and productivity. That way, you’ll get buy-in from your team for investing their efforts into training. Remember to keep training hours and targets for technology use separate from regular working hours and targets so that team members won’t feel pressured to rush through the training just so they can meet their productivity targets. The same applies to all other training, of course. 

8. Provide professional development in effective virtual communication. There are numerous tips and tricks of effective virtual communication that you need to help your team develop. Here’s an example of an easy tactic for improving virtual communication to connect with and influence others during videoconferences that I bet even the vast majority of your sales professionals fail to practice. When you speak, you need to look at the video camera, not at the people in the small squares on the screen. When you don’t look at the camera, you’re not making eye contact with those at the other end of the videoconference, and it truly shows in your weakened ability to connect with and influence them effectively. You’ll want all your team members, and especially those in sales and leadership positions, to learn how to do this effectively. The same goes for other forms of virtual communication growth.

9. Provide professional development in effective virtual collaboration. Development in emotional and social intelligence as adapted to virtual settings will help employees collaborate much more effectively. For example, they need to ask intentionally how other people feel, not think, about their proposed ideas. Previously, in the office, people’s feelings came through easily through body language and tone of voice. Of course, that doesn’t happen in virtual work environments. So you need to teach people to take deliberate steps that would evaluate the temperature of the room in order to improve virtual collaboration. Many other techniques exist for effective virtual collaboration.

10. Initiate virtual mentorship programs. To address the loss of mentoring support, pair up your junior and/or younger members with senior staff. This will be good not just for the guidance that senior mentors can give, both regarding specific work tasks as well as how to handle major economic turmoil, such as the financial crash of 2008. It will also help address the lack of social connection in a virtual workplace, for both senior and junior employees. Moreover, it will help the senior employees learn how to handle technology better, since younger employees tend to be more savvy with digital tools. Senior employees often feel embarrassed about a lack of capacity with digital tools; informal opportunities to ask their mentees for advice help address this problem. 

11. Establish digital coworking. Encourage all members of a team to spend an hour or more per day coworking digitally with their teammates. What this means is getting on a Zoom or Microsoft Teams call, turning microphones off but leaving speakers on with video optional, and then working on your own tasks. This experience replicates the benefit of a shared cubicle space, where you work alongside your team members, but on your own work. You get to bond with each other, chat about how things are going in work and life, ask and answer quick clarifying questions, and mentor each other as needed. However, note that this isn’t meant to be a work meeting, and you shouldn’t intend to have any lengthy conversations during it; do a separate call with a teammate if you need to have a longer chat. If you have specific teammates with whom you’re collaborating more intensely, you should do a coworking session with them daily in addition to the broader coworking with the team as a whole.

 1. Mentors and mentees should also do a co-working session with each other daily. Again, this session shouldn’t be intended as a meeting, but a time to work on your own tasks, while asking clarifying questions as needed. 

 2. A special case of digital coworking involves sales teams. There’s a lot of benefit to sales teams doing outbound or inbound sales calls together. You get to learn from overhearing how other sales agents handle prospect questions, overcome objections, and close the sales. The pandemic has prevented such learning; digital coworking offers an effective way to address this problem. It takes a bit of practice and technological know-how, but you can learn to adjust audio so that you can keep your microphone on during a coworking session in which you and others handle prospect calls and learn from each other effectively.

12. Physical and mental breaks. There’s an unhealthy expectation that once you start your workday in your home office chair, that you’ll keep working for all the time you’re sitting there (except for your lunch break). That’s not how things worked in the office, which had physical and mental breaks built in throughout the day. You took 5-10 minutes to walk from one meeting to another or you went to get your copies from the printer and chatted to a coworker on the way. Those and similar physical and mental breaks, research shows, decrease burnout, improve productivity, and reduce mistakes. That’s why you should strongly encourage your employees to take at least a 10-minute break every hour. At least half of those breaks should involve physical activity, such as stretching or walking around, to counteract the dangerous effects of prolonged sitting.

13. Funding for working from home. Over a year into the pandemic, way too many employees still use their kitchen table for office space and rely on 5-year-old laptops. You need to provide a separate budget for your employees to address this problem. That can include funding a comfortable and well-equipped home office, or it can mean paying for their membership in a coworking space if they have no adequate room in their home or if they feel unable to work effectively without others around them. Provide extra financial support for working mothers, due to their particularly difficult situation. Doing so will greatly improve productivity and help reduce burnout among your employees.

14. Ensuring accountability to leaders and peers. The goal here is to have each member of a 6-8 person team provide a weekly report of their progress that’s visible to their whole team, and then discuss it privately with the team leader. The report should include sections on their own work progress, as well as on their collaboration with teammates. The expectation should be that other team members read each others’ reports and address any issues that they see in their own private conversations with the team leader. Doing so balances privacy, peer-to-peer accountability, and chain-of-command accountability.

 1. For example, here’s a typical weekly report that my clients tell me works quite well for nearly all of their teams. Each employee should send a weekly report to their leader listing: 1) Their goals for the past week and how they did on meeting these goals, as well as their goals for next week and how they plan to achieve them; 2) The challenges they faced and what they did to overcome the challenges, and what challenges they expect to face next week and how they plan to address those; 3) What they did for professional development and what they plan to do next week; 4) How well they collaborated with their teammates and how well their teammates collaborated with them, and how they plan to work with their teammates next week; 5) An overall quantitative self-evaluation of how well they performed for the week, and their plans for improving their performance next week. An example of a quantitative evaluation that works well involves a range from 0 to 4, with 0 = greatly below expectations, 1 = somewhat below expectations, 2 = meeting expectations, 3 = somewhat exceeding expectations, and 5 = greatly exceeding expectations. Of course, the weekly update should reference the previous week’s update and compare the goals set with goals achieved. 

 2. Then, the leader would meet with their subordinate, and discuss the weekly update. They’d ask clarifying questions and suggest changes as needed, including addressing any collaboration challenges with other teammates to ensure effective peer-to-peer accountability. Finally, the leader would give their own quantitative evaluation for the week. Naturally, unexpected circumstances should not result in serious deductions in the quantitative evaluation; the key is how the direct report responded to these circumstances. These quantitative evaluations should then feed into the quarterly performance review, determining salary and promotion. 

15. Reduce unnecessary meetings. Too many Zoom meetings happen because leaders want their team members to feel connected, and yet they end up disappointed due to elevated expectations. Virtual coworking provides a much better sense of connection without the elevated expectations. Only schedule meetings where topics need to be hashed out in synchronous discussion; reports and updates can be sent in text or recorded video or audio form to be reviewed and responded to later. 

16. Weekly check-in and progress report evaluation. While you should avoid unnecessary meetings, leaders should set aside time to check individually on their direct reports in a 15-30 minute videoconference. This should include 5-10 minutes of just catching up and talking about matters that would otherwise be uncomfortable to talk about in a group setting. Check in particular on how they’re doing with virtual work, especially during the transition period of this strategic shift. The second part of the meeting should involve 10-20 minutes going over their weekly progress report. 

17. Support work/life boundaries. You can safely assume that a lot of your employees are feeling worried about their jobs due to the current economic uncertainty. This might lead to them taking on an unreasonable workload or extended working hours despite feeling burned out. And some of your mid- and lower-level managers might be encouraging or even mandating such behaviors. It falls to senior leaders, then, to reinforce the boundaries. That includes regular public reminders to employees to stick to preset hours and discouraging the sending of any form of communication after hours. It also includes communicating to mid- and lower-level managers that you’re serious and won’t tolerate them encouraging burnout to meet their goals, and asking them to speak privately with and discourage any employees who regularly work after hours for hourly employees, or excessive hours for salaried employees or those with flexible schedules. The only exception should be an unexpected emergency that shouldn’t happen more often than once per month. Note: if employees are underperforming in their weekly reports, it doesn’t mean they should simply work more and violate these boundaries. It might mean they need more professional development or better equipment for remote work. It might also mean that they’re overloaded with tasks that should be handed off to someone else. It might even mean they’re no longer the right fit for the job. What you don’t want is someone burning the candle on both ends, burning out and resigning, and then have no one left to handle their mountain of tasks.

18. Encourage time off. Just because people are working away from a physical office doesn’t mean that it’s any more relaxing. Encourage your team members to take some vacation time, even if it’s just for a staycation or somewhere they can have some socially-distanced leisure time. Leaders should take time off as well and be a role model in work-life balance. This will send the message to your employees that it’s perfectly fine to take some time to recharge.

19. Advocate for mental health screenings. Be part of efforts to destigmatize getting mental help. Make sure to regularly inform and remind your team members about the mental health benefits provided by your company, such as EAP, as well as free and anonymous mental health screenings available from Mental Health America and elsewhere. Learn about and look for signs of mental health challenges in your weekly check-ins. Also educate your team about virtual support groups that they might find beneficial, particularly those addressing any concern that might be over-represented among them.

20. Switch to flexible shifts. After you get a better handle on reasonable productivity loads and your team members’ personal circumstances relevant to their roles, consider switching people to flexible working schedules whenever possible. This will allow employees to be able to efficiently integrate their personal and work spaces - as well as the routines involved - which will significantly cut down on unnecessary stress. Of course, such flexible shifts need to allow for effective coworking time.

21. Integrate all of these initiatives over time, not immediately. Start with education about basic needs. Then, proceed to whatever seems most appropriate and urgent for your company based on your internal surveys. As part of doing so, get feedback from lower-level staff on what they see as the most important priorities, both for the value of their information and to get their buy-in from the perspective of change management. Use metrics to determine which of your interventions works and which might need revisions. As you pick lower-hanging fruit, start implementing the more challenging interventions.

Implementing the Strategic Shift to Virtual Work

We started the strategic shift to virtual work in Matt’s company by using an internal survey conducted in mid-October 2020 to develop a baseline for virtual work improvements and determine the biggest challenges facing employees. Not surprisingly, work/life boundaries emerged as the top issue. Deteriorating teamwork proved the second biggest challenge; on a related note, the third was a decrease in mutual trust. So we implemented interventions in that order.

After running some focus groups to get buy-in and feedback from lower-level staff, the company announced a strategic virtual work initiative. That included offering most staff the flexibility to stay virtual full-time even after the pandemic, and only come in for a quarterly conference once the pandemic was over; a new policy of hiring employees for most positions across the country, not only in the region around the office, as long as they were willing to attend the quarterly get-togethers after the pandemic; downsizing office space and hot-desking for those who still wanted or needed to come in occasionally once it’s safe; and a budget for home office improvements and/or coworking space payments.

Next, the company scheduled training to educate employees about the deprivations of needs. Then, HR rolled out policies encouraging stronger work/life boundaries and advocating for appropriate time off. After that, the company addressed teamwork challenges through professional development in virtual collaboration, as well as having leaders focus on improvements in peer-to-peer accountability. The next step involved rebuilding trust through virtual coworking and via establishing “Morning Updates” and “Life Stuff” channels in the company’s Slack collaboration software for each team. 

Other improvements followed in the order that responded most to the needs of employees and the company’s situation. The HR department ran internal surveys monthly, adjusting the implementation as needed to address challenges. For instance, the senior leadership had to reinforce to mid- and lower-level managers, several times, the importance of work/life balance and time off; HR ended up having to provide training to and monitoring of a number of managers to improve compliance with this policy. 

By the time my engagement with Matt’s company ended in January 2021, survey results showed that employee satisfaction with virtual work improved by 27%, their comfort with work/life boundaries grew by 32%, and confidence in their team members rose by 18%. More importantly, bottom-line figures improved as well: employee retention grew by 17%, and customer complaints dropped by 14%, while healthcare costs dropped by 8%, and productivity increased by 9%. 

The latter figure proved surprising for many mid- and lower-level managers, and even some senior executives. Many thought that productivity would drop due to more time off and better work/life boundaries. They felt skeptical of my claims about the extensive research on the benefits of work/life boundaries, breaks, and time off for productivity and health. It’s a frequent tendency I observed: many managers, especially older and more experienced ones, feel extensive research on best practices shown effective elsewhere for some reason doesn’t apply to their context. However, once the findings from their own workplace bear out the research, the skepticism eventually dissipates, as it did here. 

From a qualitative standpoint, while Matt’s company wasn’t able to retain some of their key talent due to these problems, they were able to save many major accounts due to the efficient turnaround. Matt also told me privately that the increased trust and transparency in their workplace empowered the executive team to make better-informed decisions and roll out more appropriate initiatives, which he felt would attract key talent and clients in the long run.  

Conclusion

Work-from-home burnout is a serious issue that needs to be addressed strategically. You need to reframe your company culture and policies from remote work as an emergency mindset to remote work being the new normal, and support your employees in this strategic shift.

Key Takeaway

Protect your company from the disastrous effects of work-from-home burnout and Zoom fatigue by a strategic shift toward virtual work being the new normal rather than an emergency measure...> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• What does your company currently do to deal with work-from-home burnout and Zoom fatigue?

• Where might you do a better job of helping your team members deal with work-from-home issues related to mental health and professional development?

• Which next steps will you take based on reading this article?  

Image credit: VinzentWeinbeer/Pixabay

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on March 23, 2021.  

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). He has over 550 articles and 450 interviews in USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Time, Business Insider, Government Executive, Fortune, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training on change management, decision making, and risk management strategy. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. Contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and register for his free Wise Decision Maker Course.

Are you, or someone you know, struggling to cope with depression as we’re transitioning out of the pandemic?

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:

And if you like audio, here’s a podcast based on the blog:

Or simply read onward!

What you or they are going through isn’t as uncommon as you might think. According to a recent study published in JAMA Network Open, depression has been three times higher during this pandemic than it was previously.

The researchers also discovered that lower income groups had an increased risk of getting depressed compared with higher income groups.

This puts more pressure on those who are already worried about, or dissatisfied with, their professional lives. It’s a vicious cycle when we’re all trying to balance our personal and work lives with our mental health. Fortunately, there are strategies that can help you survive and thrive during the post-pandemic recovery.

The Slippery Slope That Is Depression

Perhaps it started out with you feeling a bit more tired than usual. At some point, maybe you started to lose interest in things you used to enjoy. Perhaps you’re having trouble sleeping or, on the flip side, you’ve started sleeping more than you used to.

Depression can manifest in different ways. While some might feel overwhelmed and become increasingly sad, some might think they’re handling things relatively well, only to find that they can’t focus on simple tasks.

There is a whole range of physical, emotional, and mental changes when you’re experiencing depression. One crucial thing you must do is to pay attention to these changes and be ready to take action.

What’s the Best Way to Cope With Depression?

Regardless of the everyday pressure we need to deal with in our personal and work lives, we have to remember that human beings have needs that must be fulfilled in order to function. This means that you must identify and address any mental blindspots in yourself around depression, in yourself or others, during the post-pandemic recovery,.

You might have heard of Abraham Maslow’s theory of human motivation and the pyramid of needs based on his work. Maslow’s theory included “self-actualization,” or needs that help us achieve our full potential through personal growth.

More recent research by psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman has redefined self-actualization as combining exploration, love, and purpose. A good approach to adapting to the new abnormal in the post-pandemic recovery, and addressing any depressive symptoms, is evaluating your life through the lens of these needs and ensuring that you satisfy them.

A large part of the depression that people may experience comes from refusing to recognize that our needs have changed. We can’t simply go back to the way we used to live our lives after we get vaccinated. Your own and other people’s habits, norms, values, preferences, and goals changed, sometimes dramatically, during the many, many months of the pandemic. You have to recognize that the previous way we fulfilled our needs do not work during our current environment.

Our needs for exploration, love, and purpose remain urgent and paramount. However, we have to learn about these changes within yourself and others. Then, we need to address these in ways that take into account our current circumstances. Here are some ways we can effectively tackle and meet our needs:

Exploration

We have a need to explore, learn, and understand the world. Exploration in this sense is driven not by fear and anxiety—such as the watching of regular news briefings on the pandemic—but by the thrill of discovery and curiosity about the novel, the challenging, and the unknown.

Depending on your vaccination status and the number of cases in your state, you might still be staying at home. Still, you have tools to help you address depressive symptoms in the post-pandemic recovery.

Studies have shown that physical activities can help ward off depression. You can sign up for online exercise classes. You could also safely exercise outdoors and have access to places where you can maintain social distancing, you can also look into exercising in green spaces. These can include urban parks, nature reserves, and wilderness environments. Research has shown that spending time in such places has a positive effect on mental health.

Love

This second aspect of self-actualization can be manifested by expressing love. The first step, of course, is to express this love towards yourself. If you feel overwhelmed by depression or think that you already need help from a professional, one of the self-care acts that you can do is to look into online therapy and tele-psychology, which boomed during the pandemic. You can even check with your company if this is something that they can provide or facilitate.

Next is bestowing love on other people. This means making a positive impact on the lives of others and building up your social connections. Stronger social support networks help address depression.

You can express this love towards your existing relationships. Surprise your romantic partner with an unexpected date night. Perhaps you can host socially distanced outdoor parties for your friends to strengthen bonds. And if you’re all vaccinated, you can even do indoor parties! You can even volunteer to provide virtual companionship to lonely elder strangers.

Purpose

The other critical aspect of self-actualization involves developing, refining, and pursuing your sense of meaning and purpose. In the context of the post-pandemic recovery, it’s even more important to proactively seek a sense that you are contributing to something you’re passionate about that’s bigger than yourself, a personal mission of service that offers you fulfillment and contentment.

Some people might find their sense of purpose in taking care of their family and friends, and that’s fine. You might decide to reach out to struggling colleagues, eventually bridging the gap between personal and work lives and forming deeper friendships along the way. You might even tap into your network to help those who’ve lost their jobs find a new one.

Or maybe you could focus on improving your local community. Whatever you choose to do, you should regularly evaluate how much it contributes to your sense of purpose. Revise your activities to help further develop that sense within yourself.

Conclusion

Dealing with depression in the post-pandemic recovery means doing an honest evaluation of your activities and connections. Make sure your needs for exploration, love, and purpose are being met consistently. Taking action now—not later—will help you improve and maintain your mental health during these challenging times.

Key Take-Away

To cope with depression in the post-pandemic recovery, find new ways of fulfilling your needs for exploration, love, and meaning and purpose...> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• What have you done to cope with depression and other mood challenges in the pandemic and the post-pandemic recovery?
• How can you better fulfill your needs for exploration, love, and meaning and purpose in this time?
• How will you change your behaviors based on reading this article?

Image credit: Pixabay/flavoiopantera7

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on May 18, 2021.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace'' and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules.

What do employees want in returning to the office after the pandemic?

It’s easy to assume we know what they want. Our assumption is that they want what we would want in their circumstances. In other words, we place ourselves in other people’s shoes.

Unfortunately, that assumption falls into a dangerous judgment error termed the false consensus effect. This problematic mental blindspot causes us to perceive others who we feel to be in our tribe, such as those who work in our organization, as sharing our values and beliefs. That’s often not the case.

If you enjoy video, here’s a videocast based on this blog:

And if you like audio, here’s a podcast based on the blog:

Or simply read onward!

The false consensus effect is one of over 100 misleading mental patterns that researchers in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience call cognitive biases.

Stemming from our evolutionary background and the structure of our brain’s neural wiring, cognitive biases lead us to make bad strategic and tactical decisions when we go with what we feel is right in our gut.

These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health to politics and even shopping. Fortunately, by learning about how to defeat the harmful impact of these dangerous judgment errors, we can make the wisest and most profitable decisions.

Survey Says…

To address the false consensus effect, we need to turn to objective data that doesn’t rely on our gut feelings, intuitions, and assumptions. A good way to do so is to conduct a meta-analysis of several in-depth, independent, and large-scale research surveys of employees on post-pandemic remote work and returning to the office published recently.

A Harvard Business School study on remote workers found that:

• 27% hope to work remotely full-time
• 61% would like to work 2-3 days a week from home
• Only 18% want to go back to the office full-time

A study by the Society for Human Resource Management discovered the following:

• 52% would like to work from home permanently full-time if herd immunity to COVID is never achieved
• 34% would still like to work from home full-time and permanently even if herd immunity was achieved
• 35% would accept a reduction in salary to work from home permanently

Another survey of those working from home had these top-line findings:

• 42% say if their current company does not continue to offer remote work options long term, they will look for another job
• 68% perceive a hybrid model of significant remote and in-person work as the ideal model
• 87% would prefer to work remotely at least some of the time
• 80% report they adapted well to full-time remote work
• 76% of employees consider benefits when evaluating whether to stay in a job, and they list remote work, flexible schedules, and mobility opportunities as the top three benefits
• 34% want resources to help set up a home office, and 33% want resources to subsidize other remote work expenses
• 35% report working more hours and 54% report taking less time off
• 50% are not concerned about their career growth
• 43% of remote workers say that they would be nervous about their job security if they worked remotely full-time, while others returned to the work site
• 26% plan to look for a job with a different employer after the pandemic, and of these, 34% want to find a job where they can work remotely and 80% are concerned about their career growth
• 48% feel more pressure to be online all the time while working remotely
• 39% find it difficult to socialize with co-workers
• Remote worker connection to company culture improved from 36% in May 2020 to 47% in March 2021, showing that working remotely may actually boost company culture
• 42% of workers who plan to leave their current employer would grade their employer’s efforts to maintain culture during the pandemic as a “C” or lower compared to 30% of all workers

A fourth survey of remote workers finds:

• 46% would look for a different job if their current employer doesn’t offer some remote work after the pandemic
• 54% would be willing to stay in their job if not offered some remote work after the pandemic, but be less willing to go the extra mile
• 80% expect to work from home at least three times per week after the pandemic
• 81% think their employer will support working from home after the pandemic
• 74% would be less likely to leave their employer if offered remote work, and 71% would be more likely to recommend their company to a friend
• 75% of people are the same or more productive during COVID-19 while working from home
• On average, remote employees worked an extra 26 hours each month during COVID (nearly an extra day every week)
• 80% believe there should be one day a week with no meetings at all
• 23% of full-time employees would take a pay cut of over 10% in order to work from home at least some of the time
• 57% weren’t concerned that working remotely would impact their career progression
• 77% feel that after COVID, being able to work from home would make them happier
• 72% agreed that the ability to work remotely would make them less stressed
• 77% report that working remotely would make them better able to manage work-life balance
• No more than 25% of companies pay or share the cost of home office equipment
• 32% report that training in remote work would make them more effective
• 62% of respondents saw interruptions/being talked over as their top telework challenge
• 57% of respondents said that the audio quality of video conferencing is a challenge, and 56% said the video quality is a challenge

A fifth survey’s key findings on staff working remotely in the pandemic:

• 58% said they would “absolutely” look for a new job if they cannot continue remote work
  • 31% said they aren’t sure what they would do
  • and only 11% said that working remotely is not a big deal
• 46% feel concerned that returning to the office means less flexibility
• 43% believe it will bring less work-life balance
• 84% rank not having a commute as the most important benefit of telework
• 55% believe their productivity has increased while working remotely, 33% said their productivity has remained the same, 6% think their productivity has decreased, and 6% aren’t sure
• 35% see overworking as their biggest challenge with remote work, 28% list dealing with technology problems, 26% report challenges with reliable WiFi, and 24% indicate Zoom fatigue
• 56% experienced burnout

Here’s a sixth survey (including both remote and non-remote workers):

• 47% of employees say they would likely leave their job if it didn’t offer a hybrid work model once the pandemic ends
• 41% say they would be willing to take a job with a lower salary if their company offered a hybrid work model
• Asked about the top benefit of hybrid work, 38% cite the top benefit of hybrid work as less time and money spent commuting, 34% say work/life balance, and 21% list improved work performance

Finally, a Microsoft study of remote and non-remote employees, combining survey responded with data from LinkedIn and Microsoft 365 products, found that:

• 73% of employees want flexible remote work options to be permanent
• 66% of leaders are planning to remodel their company spaces for hybrid work
• 67% of employees want at least some in-person collaboration after the pandemic
• 54% of employees felt overworked, 39% felt exhausted, and about 20% believe their company doesn’t care about work/life balance
• 46% of those currently working remotely are planning to move to a new location in 2021 because they can now work remotely
• Remote job postings on LinkedIn increased more than five times during the pandemic, and women were 15% more likely to apply to such positions than in-person ones
• Comparing collaboration trends in Microsoft 365 between February 2020 and February 2021:
  • Time spent in Microsoft Teams meetings has more than doubled (2.5X) globally
  • Average meeting is 10 minutes longer
  • Average Microsoft Teams user is sending 45% more chats per week and 42% more chats per person after hours
  • Despite meeting and chat overload, 50 percent of people respond to Teams chats within five minutes or less, a response time that has not changed year-over-year
  • Number of emails delivered to commercial and education customers in February, when compared to the same month last year, is up by 40.6 billion
  • 66% increase in the number of people working on documents.
  • This barrage of communications is unstructured and mostly unplanned, with 62% percent of calls and meetings unscheduled or conducted ad hoc
• LinkedIn data indicates nearly a doubling of job-switching intent in 2021

What Does Other Research Say?

Other research backs up this information. For example, consider a thorough survey comparing productivity of in-person vs. remote workers during the first six months of stay-at-home orders, March through August 2020, to the same March through August period in 2019. Employees showed a more than 5% increase in productivity over this period. Another study surveying 800 employers reported that 94% found that remote workers showed higher or equal productivity than before the pandemic. Non-survey research similarly shows significant productivity gains for remote workers during the pandemic. Moreover, governments plan to invest in improving teleworking infrastructure in the future, making higher productivity gains even more likely.

Such remote work productivity gains aren’t surprising. Prior research showed that telework boosted productivity pre-COVID. After all, remote work removes many hassles taking up time for in-office work such as lengthy daily commutes. Moreover, working from home allows employees much more flexibility to do work tasks at times that work best for their work/life balance, rather than the traditional 9 to 5 schedule. Such flexibility matches research showing we all have different times of day when we are best suited for certain tasks, enabling us to be more productive when we have more flexible schedules.

Some might feel worried that these productivity gains are limited to the context of the pandemic. Fortunately, research shows that after a forced period of work from home, if workers are given the option to keep working from home, those who choose to do so experience even greater productivity gains than in the initial forced period.

An important academic paper from the University of Chicago provides further evidence of why working at home will stick. First, the researchers found that working at home proved a much more positive experience, for employers and employees alike, than either anticipated. That led employers to report a willingness to continue work-from-home after the pandemic.

Second, an average worker spent over 14 hours and $600 to support their work-from home. In turn, companies made large-scale investments in back-end IT facilitating remote work. Some paid for home office/equipment for employees. Furthermore, remote work technology has improved over this time. Therefore, both workers and companies will be more invested into telework after the pandemic.

Third, stigma around telework has greatly decreased. Such normalization of work from home makes it a much more viable choice for employees.

The paper shows that employees perceive telework as an important perk. On average, they value it as 8% of their salary. The authors also find that most employers plan to move to a hybrid model after the pandemic, having employees come in about half the time. Given the higher productivity that the paper’s authors find results from remote work, they conclude that the post-pandemic economy will see about a six percent productivity boost.

A Meta-Analysis: 10 Key Findings

Here are the key conclusions of a meta-analysis comparing all of these studies:

1. Over two-thirds of all employees who worked remotely in the pandemic want and expect to work from home half the time or more permanently, while over a fifth want to work remotely full-time

2. Over two-fifths would leave their current job if they didn’t have the option of remote work of two to three days per week

3. Over a quarter plan to leave their job after the pandemic, especially those who rate their company cultures as “C” or lower

4. Over two-fifths of all employees, especially younger ones, would feel concern over career progress if they worked from home while other employees like them did not

5. Most employees see telework and the flexibility it provides as a key benefit, and are willing to sacrifice substantial earnings for it

6. Employees are significantly more productive on average when working from home

7. Over three-quarters of all employees will feel happier and more engaged, be willing to go the extra mile, feel less stressed, and have more work-life balance with permanent opportunity for two to three days of telework

8. Over half of all employees feel overworked and burned out, and over three-quarters experience “Zoom fatigue” and want less meetings

9. Employees need funding for home offices and equipment, but no more than 25% of companies provided such funding so far

10. Over three-fifths of all employees report poor virtual communication and collaboration as their biggest challenge with remote work, and many want more training in these areas

Conclusion

Don’t assume that you know what your employees want when they return to the office. Cognitive biases such as the false consensus effect misleads us into thinking others in our group share our beliefs when it is often not the case. Surveys and research have shown that new habits, norms, and values picked up during the pandemic will continue to have a significant impact on the post-COVID workplace. A combination of mainly hybrid and some remote work is our future. Defend yourself from mental blindspots so you can make the best strategic decisions after the pandemic.

Key Takeaway

Our assumptions about what others want are often incorrect due to the cognitive bias called the false consensus effect. Extensive research shows that most employees place a premium on telework and work-life quality after the pandemic...> Click to tweet

Questions to Consider (please share your answers below)

• Do you have a clear view of what your employees want post pandemic?
• Which of the points raised in the article resonate with your organization?
• How will you use the 10 key findings to improve processes in your team?

Image credit: StartupStockPhotos

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on May 25, 2021.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace'' and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules.

To cope with depression in the post-pandemic recovery, find new ways of fulfilling your needs for exploration, love, and meaning and purpose. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes how to cope with depression in the post-pandemic recovery.

Video: “How to Cope With Depression in the Post-Pandemic Recovery”

Podcast: “How to Cope With Depression in the Post-Pandemic Recovery”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here is the article: How to Cope With Depression in the Post-Pandemic Recovery
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the wise decision maker show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. And today, we'll talk about decision making that will help you cope with depression in the post pandemic recovery. And by depression, I mean negative moods of all kinds doesn't mean very full out depression, very deep sadness, very much fatigue and all that. It just means to press negative moods of all sorts. And it's pretty easy to fall into depressive states. Despite the recovery from the pandemic, you know, it's meant to be a happy time. We're dealing with a pandemic, the virus is going away, people are getting vaccinated more and more. I hope you got your shot, I definitely get my shot. So it's supposed to be a happy time. But in many ways, it's a challenging time, because really now starting to cope with the pandemic during the pandemic itself. We didn't really have time to cope, we just needed to deal with the situation as it was. It was one big on the rolling crisis, sea sort of situation, a big big emergency, a very unusual time. Now that we're going out of the pandemic, we're in the post pandemic recovery stage. It's the time that we're coping that will really realize what we lost. And so depression has been on the rise throughout the pandemic, we need to realize that depressive states moods, negativity, it tripled actually, during the pandemic itself. So it was pretty difficult for people in the pandemic itself. And right now, it's going to, of course, add on because we're coping with what's happening in the pandemic. We don't have statistics right now, because it's just going on. But I can tell you that it's going to be more difficult in some ways than it was during the pandemic, because we'll be coping with what happened in the pandemic itself, or you really strained mental health resources, especially because people couldn't see therapists in person. And of course, telemedicine is great. And I engaged in telemedicine myself, and tele therapy is great. But there are certainly some aspects of therapy that you can't get from teletherapy. So that's something to consider. Now, this is something especially important to realize that lower income groups are particularly at risk of mental health challenges. And that doesn't mean that if you're in a higher income group, you're not at risk. But there's particular risk during the pandemic, of course, more of them were essential workers, so they were facing the virus more, they were getting sick and dying at higher rates, their friends and neighbors were getting sick and dying at higher rates. And that's something to consider for those who are at special risk. Now, depression, you have to understand it manifests itself in different ways. It doesn't only manifest itself in sad moods, sometimes it can manifest itself in a lack of emotions. Or it can manifest itself in physical states like increased exhaustion, fatigue, that's definitely a way that depression manifests in me when I feel depressed, it feels, I feel fatigued, I feel low energy. So that's really, I feel apathetic, not caring about things. So fatigue, exhaustion is definitely a way that manifests, of course, indifference, not caring about previous activities and hobbies. That is something that manifests that way in some people. For me, that's a slight aspect of depression. For me that exhaustion, fatigue is more of a problem. But for other people, indifference, sad moods around previous activities, and hobbies, lack of motivation, inability to focus, you might have heard of brain fog, it doesn't only come from COVID comes from depression as well, and insomnia, so inability to sleep, all of that sort of stuff, not having good sleep cycle, breaking your previous sleep cycle, and other problems with routines, for example, challenges with sticking to your eating routine, sticking to your diet, your exercise routine, and so on. Now, after the pandemic, we have to realize what's going on is that not only are we coping with the pandemic itself, but we have a lot of uncertainty as we're going into the post pandemic normal. What does it mean? How will we recover from the pandemic, so there's a lot of uncertainty and people feel anxious and scared. And then sad about uncertainty. I mentioned we're dealing with trauma from deaths or damaged relationships. And now we're kind of coping with that. Now we're kind of coming to terms with that. There's of course disrupted work routines, and whether we go work all in person, all remote or hybrid, who knows and maybe want to decide to not work in your previous fields as you're really having the spirit of transition. redefined social norms. That's a huge one, how we interact with each other post pandemic, you know, masking, we're not masking all of these sorts of things. How will we actually feel anxious about interacting with others in a crowded space, especially indoors. So all of that stuff will be complex. Want to navigate that, and that causes certainly both anxiety and depression. Now what you'll need to do to address depressive states post pandemic is determining your needs and your underlying needs. So the same thing as pre-pandemic, but it's going to be especially important post pandemic, because these needs, while the underlying needs are going to be the same, the way that you satisfy them will be different. So you'll need to figure out how to satisfy them in ways that you did not do so before the pandemic because of the change circumstances or during the pandemic because again, of the change circumstances, so we have these disruptions to the satisfactions of our underlying needs. And we need to realize that this is something that we'll have to deal with and recognize as we navigate into the post pandemic normal. So there, the key to coping with depression is meeting these needs, figuring out these needs for yourself and meeting them. Now, the free underlying needs that we all have for self actualization for fulfilling our higher order desires, not talking about kind of some of the, those desires that are more basic fundamental, but those higher order desires to really give us joy, give us happiness, give us pleasure, things that really help us cope with depression. So meeting self actualization needs that are free, three key things that you want to be thinking about. One is exploration. Another is love. And another one is purpose. So those are the three areas that you need to be thinking about for yourself, and how you satisfy them, for yourself. So that's what you want to be thinking about. Now, exploration, what does that have to do with that means learning more about yourself, the world around you, other people, that's what exploration is about. So that's what you want to be thinking about as part of exploration. And of course, as we go into the post pandemic, normal, there's gonna be a lot to explore. Because this will be in many ways a different world than either the time during the pandemic, or the pre pandemic, normal, picking up new skills and hobbies, that's going to be great, that's going to be important for you to do to learn more about yourself learn more about the world, I picked up during the pandemic, for example, the hobby of indoor gardening. So I have a lot of plants, I have a lot of lights. And that's been really important for me. And that's something I'm determined to keep after the pandemic, and also expand my repertoire and knowledge of how to do indoor gardening, or plans and so on. That's satisfying, and that's pleasurable for me. I need to find something that's satisfying and pleasurable for you. So for example, my wife and business partner, Agnes Vishnevkin, who works with me, and Bridget helps produce the wise decision maker show. She picked up the hobby of arts and crafts. She created this craft right here, this part right here. So this is something that you have to think about, or these weights. So I'm doing more exercises right now, kind of as part of my daily routine. So these are the kinds of things that you want to be thinking about, what kind of skills and hobbies that you want to be picking up. Exercise, right, I talked about the weights, you can do exercise by yourself. And I generally do exercise by myself, or indoors. Or you can also do exercise with others and online classes. Lots of people picked up various sorts of online classes during the pandemic, and they will continue them and you might consider continuing them post pandemic. In green spaces outdoors, this is a good time, maybe you want to maybe consider still avoiding gyms, while case counts are still high. Even if you're vaccinated. I'm currently avoiding gyms. I will probably go back to a gym. If there's an if the case counts continue going down in the late in the mid late fall, when it's too cold to exercise outside. Right now it's fine to exercise outside with group classes. So consider that. And of course, if there are new variants by the fall, or there's a high rise in case counts, I probably will not go to the gym. So that's the kind of thing you want to be thinking about. If you're still the pandemic, while we're in the post pandemic recovery, the pandemic is not over. So, love. Next point, what does that have to do with? Well, that has to do with loving yourself and loving others? What does loving yourself up to do? What's that about? That's about self care. So what does self care mean for you? What does that mean for you, taking time for yourself, maybe taking time to read a book, maybe taking time to cook for yourself? Maybe exercise is a form of self care for you. It can actually be for some people, for some folks, you know, some folks are really motivated by that, or stretching or something like that, then this is an important thing that I want to highlight, consider online therapy, Tella psychology of all sorts. That's going to be something that if you haven't done that, and if you feel increasingly in a depressive state, that might be very helpful for you. Then love also has to do with others, so loving others expresses good things toward others. So strengthen existing relationships again, coping with broken relationships. Some people died and some people really discovered incompatibilities during the pandemic. And you want to focus on strengthening existing relationships and forming new ones, especially now that there's more opportunities for face to face interaction after the as the pandemic is winding down, especially with people who are vaccinated, you can hang out with them indoors, or hang out with them outdoors, still the safest thing, but you can also hang out with them indoors. So that's going to be great. And then consider volunteer work, you can certainly do online volunteer work, you can also do in person volunteer work with other vaccinated people outdoors and not unvaccinated people. Outdoors is fine, too, with other vaccinated people indoors is great. So consider those sorts of things. Finally, purpose. So figuring out your purpose, what does that mean for you? What is your purpose? Some people's purpose has been quite disrupted by the pandemic itself, and they can't go back to the pre pandemic normal. So think about the things that give you purpose, a pretty common one is family and friends, our connections to family and friends, how we feel about them, what kind of things do they give to us? What kind of things do we give to them? So this, of course, intersects with the previous one with love. So there's a natural transition. So nurturing your family and friends is going to be an important one, then your colleagues, so helping your colleagues gives a purpose to many people, as a mentor, as a coach, as a guide, helping your colleagues in the professional setting that's really positive and powerful. So that's a way of getting purpose in your workplace, and then contributing to your local community. Already, you mentioned volunteering, but this doesn't have to do necessarily, with specifically volunteering, you can be an activist of some sort, you know, get expansion for your local zoning board and allow them to build more affordable housing in your neighborhood, or maybe clean up the streets to some things about recycling, or anything like that helping help your local community maybe help you to local businesses that were hurt by COVID and organize together with your neighbors to help them out somehow. So there are a variety of ways of enriching your local community as part of seeking your sense of purpose. So again, that that exploration that love and purpose are going to be critical for you, in order to meet your needs in the post pandemic recovery or self actualization needs, which will help you cope with depression, which is surprisingly going to be an important thing to address as we're in the post pandemic recovering despite this being a supposedly happy time. All right, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the wise decision maker show. And please click like, if you've liked this show, please follow us on whatever venue you've heard this, we have a podcast and video cast before being announced. So make sure to follow us Subscribe. That's going to be great. Leave your comments, thoughts, suggestions, you can leave them in the show notes or email them to me directly at Gleb at disaster avoidance experts.com I'll be happy to answer them. So I hope you've enjoyed this show. And there are more notes about these topics in the show notes. Alright everyone, and I hope that this episode will help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions, and we'll see you next time, my friends.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on June 1, 2021.  

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace” and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules.

Our assumptions about what others want are often incorrect due to the cognitive bias called the false consensus effect. Extensive research shows that most employees place a premium on telework and work-life quality after the pandemic. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes what employees want when they return to the office.

Video: “What Do Employees Want When They Return to the Office?”

Podcast: “What Do Employees Want When They Return to the Office?”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here is the article: What Do Employees Want When They Return to the Office?
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• The book Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the wise decision maker show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. And today we'll talk about decision making on returning employees to the office and specifically figuring out what employees want. Employers often don't have much clarity about what employers want, especially during a time of disruption. And the pandemic has been a time of major disruption. So bringing employees back to the office is a very tricky question that depends on really understanding what they want. Because you know, you don't want to be forcing people to go back to the office, it's going to be pretty difficult environment, if you tried to force people, especially with the great resignation coming with so many people looking to leave their current positions, and find a new job in the midst of this great hiring boom, the post pandemic recovery. So what does the post pandemic workplace look like? It may not be what employers imagined. Employee leaders overwhelmingly have been successful through in person interactions, they have successful 2030, some 40 year careers through in person face to face in office interactions, and I really want to go back to January 2020. That's what they feel like doing. And that's what they feel like their employees should feel like doing. Because they assume that that's what employees want, it's easy to make that assumption, because that's what they want. leaders want that and they assume that employees want that. Unfortunately, these assumptions are often wrong, and problematic because of mental blind spots called cognitive biases. And the biggest one, the biggest one, applying to employees, where employers make assumptions about employees is called the false consensus effect, the false consensus effect. It's a problematic mental tendency, where we assume that those who are in our tribe, those who are in our in-group agree with us to a much greater extent than they actually do. So for example, though, our employees, the employees, the various leaders, their team members, have the same opinion about returning to the office permanent post pandemic porque arrangements. So that is an example. It's often a false assumption, something that really is not as accurate as we think we are in making that assumption. We happen in relationships all the time as well. By the way, this is why there's a pretty significant divorce rate in the United States. People make bad assumptions about their partners and in all sorts of relationships, you have to understand that the pandemic caused major disruptions where people really shifted their perspectives. I mean, over a year of telework, that has really shifted the perspectives and all the things associated with the pandemic, then society, the worries, the problematic lack of social interactions, face to face that cause people to have different habits, norms, values, and returning to the office, they often don't think what employers think they should think or actually think they think. So it's good to get research on what employees actually think. And so that's what you want to do to avoid judgment errors, avoid making hasty assumptions. And instead, look at this objective data, survey data research of all sorts on what employees actually want. So what do we do? What kind of data do we have? Well, there are eight major surveys that have been done, on what employees one that have been published in the spring of 2021. And so that's what the employees, that's where the surveys are coming from. And overwhelmingly, they show that employees want to continue working remotely for a large chunk of the time seven, some even permanently. So for a large chunk of their workweek. employees want to work from home, the large majority vast majority, and then a substantial minority want to continue working remotely full time, over two thirds, that's over two thirds, want to continue working remotely half the time or more. And that's kind of the lower bound of the surveys. Usually when you see questions of you know, how many people want to go back to the office for over half the workweek. With this you'll see something like maybe 20% 25%. It's rare that it goes and surveys up to 33% 1/3. So definitely over two thirds want to work remotely half the time or more, and over a fifth. Depending on a survey you'll see anywhere from 20 to 35% want to work remotely full time over two fifths and this ranges from 42% to 58%. With quit if working remotely wasn't a regular option if working remotely for at least half the work week wasn't a regular option, and some would quit if working remotely full time wasn't the regular So something you have to understand where employees are coming from. Now, employees feel pretty good about remote work, you know, you might have heard about complaints about remote work, or various problems. But overall, they feel quite good about it, as you can see from the fact that they want to do substantially, a lot of it, they want to do remotely, it's a crucial benefit, this perceived as a crucial benefit, something that they will sacrifice a lot of money for 8% of their salary on average. So that's a major chunk of change that they are willing to sacrifice. So this is really something for you to consider as employers. And as employees, neither, this is something for you to bring to your boss. And this is something they should know. Now, the surveys also show that there are a number of other benefits of remote work, where employees report having much more work-life balance when they work remotely, when they don't come to the office, employees feel more productive, they feel more engaged, they feel happier. So all of these are huge, large benefits, productivity, engagement, happiness, and they're glad to be in your company. Those are all major benefits. And they also feel less stressed. So not only are more productive, engaged, happier, but also less stressed. So that's great. We definitely want employees who are productive, engaged, happy and less stressed. Now, there are some problems with telework. So working from home is not all fun and games that are some challenges that need to be addressed. And that can't be addressed effectively. They want fewer meetings. Now that's not too difficult to address as an issue of telework. Over half the field burned out partially because the hours are stretched, there's insufficient boundaries on their time, which can be addressed. And over three quarters, get zoom fatigue, again, tied to the meetings, lots and lots of meetings, which you can definitely have less of. So you want to solve a large number of challenges with telework to make it easier going forward. Other telework issues include that there's a lot of challenges with employees getting sufficient money for their home offices for their equipment, equipment, like good laptops, good microphones, good video cameras, good bandwidth for their internet. So broadband and stuff like that are issues and for their furniture, good ergonomic furniture, nice comfortable home spaces, quiet home spaces. Another issue is that other folks may not be great at virtual communication, collaboration. So this is a challenge if they feel that, hey, there's a lot of challenges with others and themselves, not having the greatest skills in virtual communication, virtual collaboration. Those are areas I've been really surprised to see companies failing to invest in getting training in these areas. So getting training in virtual communication and virtual collaboration is something that would be really important for companies going forward. And research done during the pandemic backs up the survey results. That's the survey results. There's a lot of research showing that these survey results are quite accurate. employee productivity rose following the transition to telework. So for example, there was a 5% increase more than 5% increase from March August 2020, compared to March August 2019. So in that period of time, six months from March to August 2020 compared to March to August 2019, there was a 5% increase in productivity, which definitely shows that people going to work at home contributed to the rise in productivity. 90 and 94% of workers feel equally or more productive than before the pandemic working at home. So this is all about telework, of course. So talking about teleworkers only. And employers overall are pretty convinced of efficiency. So when we look at employers, and when we ask them, are you going to make workers more productive? Are they more efficient? They say yes, which makes sense because of course, workers don't have nearly as much money and they don't have a community. I've had to go from their bedroom to their home office, right? Instead of spending a couple of hours on the commute, stressed out and so on. And they don't have a lot of the hassles that come from working in the office. So coming in various distractions going through security, all of that sort of stuff, so they can spend more time being productive and actually doing work. Now, there are a number of other reasons telework will stick around some companies, a lot of companies made serious investments in it for remote work. So they keep using this because they now have this much less of an obstacle. Employers, employees spend money and resources for home offices. There are some companies that fund home offices for their employees. And of course, employees themselves spent a lot of money on improving their home offices as well. So that's another benefit and there is a big Big reduction in stigma around telework, which was a big issue. But people who are teleworking were perceived as folding it in. And now teleworking is normalized. That's the big thing. So that's what you need to understand about workers and what they want when they return to the office. And again, the large majority of workers over two thirds more likely over four, three quarters on average. So two thirds of the lower bound want to work from home over half the time, about 20 to 20 to 35% want to work remotely full time, and over two fifths would quit if they weren't given the opportunity to work remotely, at least half the time. And the number would quit if they weren't given the opportunity to work remotely, full time. So those are things that you need to understand about workers and what they want. And the false consensus effect is a dangerous judgment error, which causes leaders to misperceive what their workers want and what they will be willing to do. If they don't get what they want. While we're seeing a number of companies with good workers, the top talent is leaving, because the company is really bungling the return to the office. All right, this has been another episode of the wise decision maker show. I hope you liked it. Please leave your comments and thoughts on the show. I'll be glad to hear them. You can leave them in the show notes as comments. And you can of course, email me at Gleb at disaster avoidance experts dot com with your notes with your quote, questions, comments, again, that's Gleb at disaster avoidance experts.com. You'll find a lot more information about the show in the show notes and I hope you subscribe to the show on whichever venue you've checked out. Check this out, whether it's videocast or podcast we have both. Alright, I hope you have benefited and that hope this show will help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. Till next time, my friends.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts June 8, 2021.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace” and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules.

When it comes to shopping choices, we overestimate our abilities to keep our impulses in check. You can avoid poor shopping choices by developing a host of shopping mental skills. That's the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes what influences your shopping choices.

Video: “What Influences Your Shopping Choices?”

Podcast: “What Influences Your Shopping Choices?”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here is the article: What Influences Your Shopping Choices?
• The book Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters is available here
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the wise decision maker show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. And today we'll talk about the most profitable and wisest decisions about shopping. Specifically, what influences you to buy what you buy. In various contexts, you might think you're a fully rational person who buys just what they intentionally think through and deliberately want to buy. But research shows that's not the case, however much we might believe it. So that's something that you need to realize is what actually influences your shopping decisions? And how do you become better at making the wisest, most profitable shopping choices? in all sorts of shopping? Whether you do it for your family, whether you do it as part of your professional business, all sorts of shopping decisions, how do you make the best shopping decisions? How do you buy the right things at the right time to fit your needs, not the needs of the people who are selling you the stuff that they want to sell? So that's what we're gonna be talking about, how do you make the right purchase decisions? Now, we often ignore the reality that we are not very rational, it's very easy to make pretty irrational choices when we're making shopping decisions, we're going to be focusing on shopping decisions. So we're going to be focusing on online and offline all sorts of shopping decisions. It's easy to make bad choices in all sorts of contexts, because we tend to overestimate our extent of self control, self understanding, self management, we tend to greatly over focus and perceive ourselves as being more in control of ourselves of our decisions of our shopping choices than we actually are. We actually shop pretty impulsively, we're mainly emotionally driven, even for the biggest decisions in our lives, like what house to buy, or what job to take. Or if you are in a professional context, you know what major service vendor to hire, or something like that, to make pretty rational decisions. And so this is important for us to know, and to address these dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases that cause us to splurge on things that we don't want to splurge on. Sometimes, you know, that's not a bad thing to splurge. But that's only when we deliberately think through and make that choice, whereas too often we're just irrational about it. We're pulled by our emotions, we're tempted, and then we make bad choices that we leave that come to regret. Now, first, we need to understand what factors affect our shop, there are several external factors and several internal factors. The internal factors have to do with cognitive biases, external factors have to do with the external environment. Of course, these institutions, organizations, folks who want to make us sharp cause sharp shapes in our environment, our shopping environment in such a way as to induce us to shop online sites, for example, have reviews, there's some reviews offline, but especially prevalent. Online, you've probably seen tons of reviews, and whether you make your purchases on Amazon, Google, Yelp, all of these reviews, many, many shoppers trust online feedback, sometimes more than they trust feedback from their friends and family, especially younger people, we see that from studies of what drives people to buy. And the online reviews are the second most or top most important factor depending on the study. And depending on the age of the participants. For younger people, they tend to be more important. For older people, they tend to be less important. So that's something to really understand. But they're all important even for older people. So usually the number two factor for older folks. Unfortunately, many of these reviews are fake, lots, and lots and lots of fake reviews probably heard that. And there are actually a number of companies that provide fake reviews for products for venues, they actually sell fake reviews, they're specializing in providing that service. So when you see a lot of good online reviews, especially short ones, or brief ones, great products, and so on, it's often going to be the case that the reviews are fake. And of course who buys fake reviews for people who don't have very good products to sell you. They're just trying to make money on selling you by buying the reviews and selling your crappy product. So you want to be very careful about whether you want to look at reviews that are not five stars, don't look at one star reviews because you sometimes have companies that buy bad reviews for their competitors' products. So they are bashing their competitor, which doesn't really want to look at reviews that are in the middle 234 stars and ones that are lengthy and describe their experience with the product to get a more credible sense of what's actually going on. So if you have like a 4.9 product doesn't mean that everyone who left a review saying great product. Five stars is a fake reviewer, but if you don't see any four or three star reviews give a lengthy description of why they like the product. That's something to be suspicious about. So that's something for free to be really aware of. Then another external factor is the quality of websites. We see a lot of research showing that the quality of websites rather than the quality of the products often compels us to buy. So if you have a similar product presented on two websites, one is higher quality and better graphics, all the design and so on another lower quality, lower graphics, lower design, people will tend to buy the product from the high quality website, even though this product may cost much more there. So this is a problem. And even though the product may be worse, when you have a better quality product and the worst quality product, the better quality product on the worst looking website will cause people to generally buy a lower quality product on a better looking website. That's a problem for you. And that's a problem for me, that's a problem for everyone who shops. So that's the quality of websites then think about that's online reviews on websites and in person. shops have, of course, a lot more control over us. When we go in personnel, we don't see reviews unless we research something on brands, but they control our whole environment. Whereas online, the environment that's controlled is our visual environment. That's the main environment, sometimes they have sounds, but I always make sure to turn off the sounds, I hope you do that as well. So that the sounds of the website don't compel you to shop. So they only control your visual sense. But in the store, it's not so simply visual, it's visual, auditory, they can influence you for of course, tactile smells, they can influence, you have third touch, tactile, they can influence you for smells. And so there's a lot of stuff that's going on visually, see, hear, smell, touch, all of that sort of stuff that really influences us. So it's even more powerful the influence on stores. So that's something to be very much aware of. And of course, the visual impact in stores is much greater. Because online, you're only looking at your phone screen or in your laptop, whatever monitor computer, that's a small square, relatively speaking, where the store you're completely surrounded by all of the products, and the store can do various experiments to see what influences you to buy what you buy. Now, when you shop online, you can take steps to protect yourself by making comparisons to make better decisions. There are a number of comparison websites that you can use to make better decisions. So you can see, you know, go to the net or top 10 or various other review comparison websites to compare a number of products together and write reviews. So you could actually compare things online. That's a beneficial thing. And that's a much more credible review, when you have external third party reviewers who have no stake in the game for reviewing the products, rather than the reviews of the products themselves that might be bought in fake. So that's kind of something for credible websites, like I said, CD net wire of all of those sorts of stuff, the top 10. And you can also make comparisons on different websites I can go to, for example, Google Shopping, will give you comparisons of prices on different websites for various products. So you can check that out. When you're shopping in person, you need to understand that you're really overwhelmed by all the visual stimuli, especially that it's very powerful. Humans tend to be more visual creatures than anything else, we tend to be very much visually processing tactile, as well. But visuals are very important for us. So you need to understand that you need to protect yourself from these visual stimuli. And it's really hard to resist those impulse purchases. And visual stimuli are the most prevalent, but smells are really powerful. And you'll be surprised how powerful they are to really reach deep into our the smell sensors most connected to our brain, and most immediately connected to our brain. So stores use that quite a bit to influence us and not simply about food, nice furniture smells, or something like that can also influence so you have to realize that and I would recommend doing more online shopping than in person shopping. For that reason. If you don't want to overspend and splurge by buying things that you don't want to buy, it's much easier to resist doing that online than in person, less fun, but much easier to resist splurging. So that's external factors. What about internal factors? What's going on within us? Well, these are the cognitive biases that I mentioned earlier. These are the dangerous judgment errors we make because of how our brain is wired. So there's four dangerous judgment errors that are particularly important to shopping that I want to highlight. And so are these cognitive biases. The first one is restraint, bias, restraint bias. So it has to do with our ability to restrain ourselves, we tend to greatly exaggerate our ability to control ourselves the moment we think, oh, we'll be fine. We'll control ourselves. I won't get that second Dartmouth right. Or I won't buy that appealing thing at the display counter. It will be fine but we are very much powerfully in flow Once by what's happening in the moment, and we tend to greatly exaggerate the extent to which our future self will be restrained by are in the moment by our desires right now. So if I go to the store right now, you know, I might think while I'm here, before I go to the store that I won't buy stuff that I want that I didn't actually intend to buy it, but I'll probably will just because my in the moment in the store self will have a difficult time restraining himself from that. Another factor is called the purse post purchase rationalization kind of cognitive bias post purchase rationalization. We justify our shopping decisions after making them rather than before making them . What happens in our brain is that our emotional part of us pulls us to make the decision to buy the thing. And so we buy it, and then we come home or after repaying, we rationalize it to ourselves, we say, well, there's good reasons for us to buy reason x reason why reason z. That's why I bought it. But the reality is you bought it because you're emotionally pulled by it most likely due to the manipulation by the store, maybe some fake reviews online. And that is a problem for us. That's something that's really caused us to make bad decisions. So you want to make sure to do your rationalization, to explain to yourself why you want to buy something before you buy, rather than try to have a story afterwards about why you bought it. So okay, so we have restrained bias post purchase rationalization, there are two more cognitive biases that you need to remember, the framing effect. That's how your options to buy something are framed. And stores really know this well. And they influence us very powerfully, where the context by which something is presented, really influences whether we buy it or not, which really determines our decision. So for example, if it's something presented on a shelf at eye level in the store, or is it presented somewhat below eye level. And if it's presented at your eye level, let's say you're an adult, you know, let's say you're five foot eight, right? So it's present on that shelf. What about kids who are going with you? Is it what's presented in the air, their eye level? And what are they tempted with? So you want to be thinking about this, what's presented there? That's kind of like one dynamic in the stores, then, of course, online, what are they presenting next to each other in the websites, we have, for example, we know we have research showing that if there are three items presented a, b and c, and B and C are similar on all characters, a is different from being scenes, it's in same category, but somewhat different, b and c are similar, but C is higher priced than will tend to buy B even if that's not the right option for us, even if a might have been the best option for us will tend to be weighed toward buying B by that presentation. So that's a problem for us. That's how they're framed for if you want to make rational shopping decisions. Now, the fourth one is attentional bias, where we're drawn by our attention to make shopping decisions that are not so great for us, we focus on what's the most emotionally compelling part of whatever the product happens to be in front of us. Rather than all the other important factors, you know, if we like the color, or feel like the person presenting it to us, you know, if we'd like the real estate agent who's showing us the house, if we like the backyard of the house, if we look at the car, and we like how it drives, if we are looking at I don't know some product from the store, and we'd like the packaging where it says no, now it says organic or something like that, we will be influenced by that rather than considering a lot of other factors that might be quite a bit more important than that single one factor that drew our attention. So that's a problem for us those four cognitive biases that you need to be aware of. So to defend yourself, of course, you need to address the external factors and the internal factors to address the internal factors you need to commit to being aware of and fighting these biases. So restrained bias, you need to be aware of that. And you need to make sure that you take steps to restrain yourself before going to the store. So for example, even if you set a budget, you can say, Hey, I'm not going to buy more than this amount of money. Same thing for the website of a when you go on a website. So that's kind of a way of fighting the restraint, bias and post purchase rationalization. You want to address that by making sure that you have to explain to yourself why you are buying the thing before you actually buy it, and so on. So these are the kinds of things that you want to be thinking about the framing effect. You want to make sure that you're not super influenced by things the way that that information is presented to you so that you don't simply click on the first page of Amazon and say, Okay, I'll be you know, I'll be fine with this page. You want to go through, you know, a couple, two more pages. third page, see what the kind options are that you have. And that simply settle on what's at the top because of course, Amazon will show you that more pricey things at the top, it's in their interest to buy or the ones that are, have the biggest profit margins for them, for example, and the same thing in the store, you don't want to only look at the shop shelf that's on your eye level, which is very tempting. But you want to look at all i levels and know that the products that they want to sell you less because they have less profit margins on them will likely be knowledge, the level of adult and the same thing for the child, you know, that there'll be trying to tempt the child with the eye level of the child. So you want to commit to fighting these cognitive biases and make sure that that's something that you are addressing within yourself. So think about that, then change the context to limit bad shopping decisions. So I talked about the context. I strongly recommend that you choose to do more of your shopping online. It's much easier to address bad shopping decisions online than in the store because you have much more control over your senses. And that you go to review websites to look at products rather than trusting the reviews in the potentially fake reviews. And if there are no good review websites of a specific product, and of course, they're far from all products, have good review websites, have quality third party reviews dedicated to them, then look for reviews with 234 stars to give lengthy descriptions of what's up, delay your decisions by at least half an hour. To get that emotional, attentional bias to address attentional bias, we talked about that. That's one of our cognitive biases, that causes us to be very much prompted by the emotional salience of whatever fact we fixate on. So you want to delay your decision by half an hour. And give yourself time to calm down for all possible I mean, obviously, it's not gonna be possible in the store. But if you're going online, and you're thinking about buying something, and if it's not a small decision, if it's like 100 $200 thing, then take a half hour to think about it, and not think through the full lead but just can do something else, and go away and come back. And then consider other factors rather than the one that initially drew you to what's going on to address the attentional bias. And make a list of shopping priorities. It's good whether you're going online, and especially good when you're going to the store, make a shopping list to make sure that you get your priorities met, and that you don't buy too much stuff. Too much stuff that's not in your list. Then finally, you want to get high quality advice like from this show on how to address bad decisions, how to address bad shopping decisions, so improve the quality of your decision making, not simply the specific object level shopping choices that you're making. But the matter of the meta refers to the way you think about a topic, the way you process the way you understand the topic. So the meta decision, the meta shopping, how you think, how you make your decisions, how you approach shopping. So use this as a strategy. Think about your shopping, think about your shopping processes and decisions and change that change the process. So get good advice and chew as part of your shopping decisions. Alright, everyone. This has been another episode of the wise decision maker show. I hope we've helped you make better shopping decisions in all life areas. And I hope you will subscribe to this show at whatever venue you've been checking us out. We have a video cast in the podcast, so make sure to check out both there in the notes. Please click Like and share your comments. I'd love to hear what you think about it. Email me at Gleb at disaster avoidance experts.com. Again, that's Gleb at disaster avoidance experts dot com to find to tell me what you thought and happy to chat with you about given there's going to be a lot more information about the what you've heard about what influences your shopping choices and how to make better decisions in the notes to this podcast and I will look forward to seeing you next time. In the meantime, the wisest and most profitable decisions to you, my friends.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on June 15, 2021.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage (Intentional Insights, 2021). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace” and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules.