Gary Klein: Insights For Making Better Decisions

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/842fc722f68c6f2d

One of the things I've examined is
How do you know who's an expert?
and identified about seven or eight criteria.
One of the
criteria I use if I want to engage somebody's expertise.
Is I'll ask'em.
Tell me the last mistake you make.
Let's talk about that.
If the person says
I can't think of any mistakes.
To me, that means
This person may be competent, but it certainly is not an expert.
Experts are well aware of their mistakes, and their mistakes eated them.
But people who are journeymen
Many of them stay as journeyman because they want to m move on and forget about their mistakes.
Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.
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Today I'm speaking with Gary Klein.
Gary is a research psychologist famous for pioneering the field of naturalistic decision making.
I've wanted to geek out with Gary on decision making for years and this conversation did not disappoint.
We talk about why some people stagnate at an intermediate skill level and some people reach mastery.
Cognitive flexibility theory, the role of stories, both the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we tell others.
The two ways to make better decisions, gaining better insights and reducing errors, and how we can improve at both of them.
Pre-mortems, shadow boxing, and how it helps you learn.
Fixation errors, cognitive biases, mental models,
And how we use them and
Fast tracking expertise.
It's time.
To listen?
And learn.
So you're a cognitive psychologist who has spent your entire career observing how other people make decisions, but you took an interesting angle to this, rather than focus on how to make better decisions directly. You approached it from
how we can develop expertise to make better decisions, we can sort of reduce errors.
Or have better insight, or preferably both, and yet these often seem in conflict with one another. I thought a good place to start this would be what sparks insight and what prevents us from putting our insights into use. Is it because they often contradict the beliefs we hold?
Uh and insight definitely is going to be incompatible with beliefs we hold. That's why we're surprised.
Uh I did a study of uh a hundred and twenty examples of insights. I wondered
I wondered where insights came from.
And I did the study out of frustration.
Because I would give talks.
And I would say if you want to improve performance.
There's two things you can do and there would be like a down arrow.
What you want to reduce?
and an up arrow what you want to increase.
And to improve performance, what you want to reduce is errors. And that's what most organizations do. They try to cut down on errors.
But they're missing the up arrow.
of improving increasing insights
And so most organizations only focus.
on reducing error uh error. So I would present this slide.
And people in the audience would say
Yes, that makes sense. That's my organization. All they care about is reducing errors.
But then they would ask me the question.
So when you know about insights.
And I would answer, I don't know anything about insights. I just have this one slide.
I I haven't studied it.
And once I I gave a print pr uh used a slide in a talk I gave in Singapore.
And I got asked that question.
And and then I flew home afterwards and it's a seven was it a seventeen hour flight. I had a direct flight.
That's a long time to be snooing over the fact that I felt like an idiot.
not being able to tell them what insights you're about. So I decided to
to do a study. So I collected a hundred and twenty examples of insights to see what's going on.
And and uh hopefully find out how to improve them.
Increase them.
And I tried to find a common theme and I couldn't.
Because it turned out that there were three different pathways.
One pathway is a connection pathway.
where we put things together. So there we're not contradicting anything. I'm going back to the original question.
We're not we're not upsetting our our mental model.
We're just putting different ideas together.
Darwin, you know, knowing that there was
a change in species, but what's driving the change and then
He reads Mothis's book of about population growth and com competition for scarce resources.
You read the the sixth edition.
And he puts that together and he said, That's what's driving evolution.
is a competition for scarce resources. So that that's a a connection.
type of insight.
A second type of insight.
is a contradiction in psych where something happens that doesn't make sense.
And there you do have to
change what you believe or wonder what's going on. And the example I use there.
Is a story I heard from a police officer he was driving around with a a partner who is uh
In his first year.
They're stuck in traffic. There' the the look there's a red light.
And the partner, this young guy, looks at at the uh car ahead, which is a new BMW.
And he sees the driver.
Take a deep drag on a cigarette.
And then flip the ashes.
He says.
Who flicks the ashes?
in a brand new BMW.
That doesn't make sense.
Something is off here. So they light him up and pull the car over. Sure enough, it was a stolen car.
So that's uh a a second type of
of insight, uh, which is
a a contradiction insight where something happens
That you didn't expect.
Now this didn't force anybody to revise their mental model or their thinking.
It just uh allowed them to to investigate further.
Now your question is
Where's the resistance coming from? And that and that's the third type of of pathway.
that we identified the correction pathway.
Where you're stuck.
Because you have a flawed belief.
And that's the problem and that's what's hanging you up.
And that that's the kind of insight
Most researchers study because it's easy to study in in a laboratory.
And the way we get
We get past that flawed belief.
Uh we found tw I found about twenty seven cases.
Well of that kind of uh
uh pathway.
And usually what happened was there was a hint. Something happened.
that made them investigate further.
And so
Instead of dismissing
the anomaly, which is what we usually do.
They became curious about it.
So in terms of insight, in terms of changing our beliefs
That's the secret sauce for this kind of pathway.
Where even practically for any of the pathways.
is to become curious about things that don't make sense.
Now what blocks insight in organizations
And this was
The really discouraging part of my research on insight.
What blocks insight?
is that organizations say they want insights.
And they want innovation.
And they really don't.
But they're they're being serious. They think they want.
insights.
But
Insights.
are disorganizing.
As you point out.
Insights make you change the way you think.
make you change all kinds of things.
And you know, they may not be right.
And so most organizations
Actually
inhibit insights when when when people bring up new ideas
They they tend to stifle that.
And so that's
That's a a big problem.
Is that because organizations are mostly focused on the error reducing side versus the
gaining insight side and the that that's the tension between these things. They don't like variants. They don't like things that are outside of the norm.
Yes, they like predictability.
To be a good manager, you want things to run smoothly.
And insights are not ways of running smoothly. Insights are disorganizing.
And disruptive.
And so that's that's uh a a b a major reason that that organization's
Without even intending to.
block the insights that come that come their way.
So so with that said, on an individual level, if I'm working in an organization.
What can I do within the the the confines of only what I control so myself.
to maximize um the insights that I observe.
And that I can put them into use.
within that environment. And then I guess the second question would sort of be, what can an organization do to facilitate
uh people gaining more insight and putting those insights into use.
You can be deliberate like you're you're describing now. You can say
I wanna have more insights, which means taking
an insight stance rather than a a stance that recoils
at something new and unexpected.
Enjoying.
You can become curious.
you can start to celebrate your own insights because if you go through the day
We often have very small insights, things we didn't know that and we make these discoveries.
And we just sort of, you know, cruise right past them and use them.
But if we make a mistake, we beat ourselves up.
Right.
I know I beat myself up. How can I have been so stupid?
But I'm less likely to say, Gee, that was
That was really clever of me or of people that I'm working with.
So you can you can start attuning yourself.
to the insights you have and the insights people around you have, so you're more sensitive to that.
you can you you can't be curious about everything because then you you just waste tons of time.
But you can be a little curious for a few seconds and say
I wonder what that means.
And think about it and imagine it and just get yourself
into that kind of a mindset.
Of wondering and speculating.
Rather than
recoiling at something that's unfamiliar.
So that's what you could do as an individual.
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What can you do as a organization? They're unless enthusiastic.
If you have an idea that's a bad idea and you make a mistake, that's the down arrow.
Everybody can see it.
Right is public.
So there's a lot of costs.
I'm making a mistake.
If you fail to make an insight.
Nobody will know.
So the reward c the the reward structure
It always favors the down arrow.
organizations if they're really serious about this
can try to create a mechanism so that
But right now, if I have an idea
I bring it to my boss. I bring it to you.
And you bring it to your boss and it goes up the chain.
It only takes one person in that chain to say
Now we better not do it.
And then the idea is rejected.
And
Good ideas are fragile.
and precious and and and easily
Discard it.
So they they um so they could give you
We could give me
an option for a review if I think the idea has been rejected prematurely.
I can and not really appeal. I don't wanna make trouble.
But there there could be somebody
It could be uh
Yeah.
Some organ some part of the organization.
that could re examine re examine the idea.
Because
But let's take an organization that wants to
come up with new ideas for whatever it is that they're doing.
Who's running the organization? People with lots of experience.
And we I found in my research that experience is essential for
for coming up with insight.
However.
People with in and with experience have lots of scar tissue of things that that got tried before and failed.
And if you look at innovations
Usually there's a bad track record.
People are trying it and failing and then somebody else trying it and failing until eventually it succeeds.
But until you get to the point where it succeeds.
you're gonna have people in the experienced people, the senior people in the organization
What are they gonna say? They're gonna say
You know, we tried that and it didn't work.
This may be the time for it to work.
Maybe the technology is mature.
Maybe you know the the the uh world situation has changed.
Who knows?
Like the people with uh who are calling the shots.
can remember times when this was tried in the past and it failed.
And often that's a good enough reason to squelch the idea.
I think that's a really interesting point, especially when it comes to experience because
If the experience is is typically the people at the the
um top of the organization.
have the most experience and they probably worked in a job very similar to the one that you're working in now.
The problem is their experience in that role is twenty years ago or fifteen years ago.
And I would imagine that the environment has changed a lot.
Whereas the experience of your manager or your team leader or whatever might be more recent and they would have a more accurate view.
uh of to what the the lay of the land is right now.
Right. So so
experience I I I still found that most of the insights in in the sample that I studied
would not have arisen unless people
had experience. I mean Darwin
didn't didn't just sit in the in his study and imagine.
He he was on the beagle. He was he was watching these various species.
He was looking at the variation. He was building.
is experience based.
So experience
is important. But
There are other things, there are other factors that that are operating.
And experience is not infallible here.
And and ex and the the the people
We're calling the shots are
Risk reverse and that's
Another issue in in organizations. The people at at the top are calling the shots.
Don't want to rock the boat.
because they're getting ready to r retire, they're getting ready to to draw a pension.
Uh my sense I ha I don't have data on this.
is they tend to be risk reverse.
They want to keep things going smoothly until un until they reach
the end of their career at the organization.
I wanna come back to something you said about experience. Is there a difference between experience and expertise?
Right. There there is a difference. And so one of the things I've examined is
How do you know who's an expert?
and identified about seven or eight criteria.
And the discouraging part is
None of them are foolproof. There is no goals.
gold standard for who's an expert.
But ex uh years of experience.
certainly contributes to to expertise, but it isn't the same thing because
There are people who just don't reflect on what happened.
They don't learn um about what happened.
Oh.
One of the
Other criteria I use if I want to find
Gave somebody's expertise.
Is I'll ask'em.
Tell me the last mistake you make.
Let's talk about that.
If the person says
I can't think of any mistakes.
To me that means
This person may be competent, but it certainly is not an expert.
Experts are well aware of their mistakes and their mistakes eated them.
Until they can they can sort of imagine
What I should have done is this.
and and figure out a way around it. So experts are highly aware of mistakes.
But people who are journeymen
Many of them stay as journeyman because they uh
They wanna move on and forget about their mistakes. How do we identify the difference between
people who know what they're talking about and not. And to this point, one of the most important decisions I think that we make
And we don't even recognize that we're making a decision is who we listen to and who we decide.
is credible and who we decide is not credible.
And we we don't recognize that we're making a decision in that moment, but how do we sort out
who is credible and who's not, or
Who's who knows what they're talking about or who's faking it?
Right. That's that's a really important question.
And I think most people do a mediocre job.
of determining
who they who could who they can rely on.
And um
A lot of people go on surface characteristics.
So if I carry myself
I stand up straighter than usual. I carry myself with confidence. Uh, people are gonna listen to me.
And if if I
express reservations and I use qualifiers that
I think this is the case, but I'm not sure.
I'm essentially telling people
I'm not an entirely an expert here. And so I've uh
disqualifying myself. I'll give you an example.
A friend of mine was excited about uh a t a scenario based t uh technique for for
Training.
Um using decision making exercises.
And that's a precursor for our
The shadow box method that we're using now.
And so he had
um some uh exercises that that that he had developed for it.
You work in a picture chemical plant.
And he had about oh
Thirty years of experience there.
And he said let's you know this this would be great. Let's use this for uh for people
who are just have been working outside
checking valves and climbing ladders and things like that. Now they're
Inside working the panels
So they they've been promoted.
Uh and there were two people who had just been promoted and he said
Let's get these people up to speed more quickly and let's have them do these
These decision making exercises.
And one of the people was somebody everybody felt good about.
He just carried himself.
With great confidence.
And and and people were were were excited about
About working with him.
The other one was was sort of
Um tentative about that.
And they they worried about him.
And they ran them through the decision making exercise.

First person.
Didn't really get it.
He didn't really understand critical dynamics of the plants.
And the second person for all of his caveats
Really did get it.
He understood what the relationships were, the different causes
causal factors and how they work together.
Now the story has a bad end.
Because they decided
The first person
Despite all their their their enthusiasm for him.
He wasn't ready. He wasn't gonna be safe operating a panel.
of a petrochemical plant that could blow up.
I mean it is a volatile compounds and lots of heat.
And uh that it's a dangerous environment. They say he's not ready.
He's gonna have to continue outside.
for uh for another year before he he can come and we can use him on the panel. And the second person was somebody
that they were ready to use.
And after they did that
Nobody wanted to engage with the decision making exercise.
Realize
If you don't do well.
it could have consequences. And and they weren't intending the consequences to be used to uh to uh to evaluate people.
But because they used it in that way.
Nobody wanted to do any more of that training.
That's a g uh the sort of like begs the question, I guess, how do we evaluate people's decision making?
How do you evaluate their decision making? You run them through a scenario.
See what choices they make, find out what their rationale is, find out the reasons.
That they're creeping one thing over another.
And use that to determine if if
if you think that their mental model is rich enough.
Uh another I I told you is ask people, tell me uh tell me about the last mistake you made.
Or uh or you can you can you and should use years of experience just um
take it all that seriously. So there's a variety of criteria.
Yeah, you can use you can use their track record. Have they had have they had a
A track record of successes.
But none of these are foolproof.
I may have um I may be an investor and I have a
track record of calling the market right
in the last five times and people say, Wow, he really knows what he's talking about. But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is gonna go and some of them
are gonna get it right by chance.
And people assume it's because they know what they're what they're doing.
And in fact, they're just the lucky one. So
You can't rely on performance.
And you can't rely on years of experience. To your point about explaining rationale and sort of why you made a decision and the variables that you consider and maybe how those variables interact over time.
I I think organizations partly get in the way of this because they might write a summary of why they're doing something, but it's so high level it doesn't actually contain much thought or
reflection in in the thinking.
Which also prevents people from learning from other people how they're making decisions and developing expertise.
You're you're exactly right. So what your you're
Uh what you're saying.
Is that we we need to go beyond
a simple surface explanation of why people did things.
Well um my colleagues and I talk about is cognitive interviews.
to get beyond the surface explanation.
To find out.
How are you sizing this situation up?
What were you noticing?
And you know, what what uh inferences were you drawing? And we can
We can be asking people
those kinds of questions to get into their head
More deeply rather than
I figured the market was due for a correction or something like that.
I've thought about an idea called a decision scorecard for an employee.
I sit down with the employee.
And I uh actually I've used it several times and I say
Let's go back in the previous year.
What were some of the major decisions you made?
And we we to you know, and and I come to the meeting with
What I think were the decisions, the employee comes.
With their decisions.
Then we compare notes.
And then we look at the decisions and say.
Which ones worked and which ones didn't. Now some decisions may have been good decisions.
That didn't work through no fault of the employee.
And some may have been bad decisions.
that work because the employee got lucky.
So you can't just look at the outcome.
But you have to look at what
What was the person thinking about when they made the decision?
And what can we learn?
whether it was a success or a failure.
And
My experience is that
This decision scorecard method of evaluating people.
is much less stressful. And and I
Enjoy it because we're we're all learning a lot as we go through it.
Evaluating those decisions requires you to have knowledge of what you what you knew at the time, what you were thinking at the time, not retrospectively going back and trying to piece it together because now you have new information.
And and we've written a lot at Furnham Street on the concept of decision journals.
I'm curious as to what information if you were gonna create a journal that an employee had to fill out every time they made a decision.
What information would you put in that decision journal?
to then use at these meetings where you're evaluating their decisions later on.
I think the idea of a decision journal is a great idea.
And I hadn't heard of that before.
I would like to know when the employee is making a decision.
What is the decision?
What?
Are the goals
that the employee wants to achieve.
the primary goal, but there may be other goals that the employee is aware of.
What are the prime pieces of information the employee is using to make the decision?
Who are the other
people or or teams that are gonna be affected by this decision.
Those are the things that I'd like to examine.
And then in retrospect
Yeah, we we can see what with their
Were there were there cues that I should have been paying attention to.
And I wasn't.
Are there goals that I should have been thinking about that I wasn't?
But you have it in a decision journal.
you have a record of what was the person thinking about.
at the time. I think it's a great idea.
And for for those of you listening, if you go to FS dot blog slash DJ for decision journal DJ
You can you can get access to the template that we have online. Gary, I'll send that to you after
I also I also think it's really important that people write it down in their handwriting and not on a computer because it's so easy to look at things
on a computer and convince ourselves that we didn't write that.
And you're gonna try to you know somebody else wrote that. I was clearly thinking way better than you know what it looks like. But when you when you're confronted with your own handwriting
And your own thinking. It does two things. One
One, when you write it down.
it's actually a bit of reflection. So you're taking this complex decision and you're distilling it, you're reflecting on it.
And then y you often realize through writing it that you don't understand it as well as you thought, or you know where to go look for new a different piece of information to to more effectively complete your understanding of it or to offer more value.
And the other benefit to doing it is that you can look back in the past and you can sort of like
Figure out patterns in your decisions.
Right. Both of those are are are important issues.
The act of journaling.
is is a way of helping you inquire better.
And be curious about things that you hadn't thought about.
Yes, all of those are are are all of the above. I I
I would like to see the the decision journal when we're finished here. Awesome. I think we're actually gonna publish one that people can buy on Amazon and write uh at some point this year. Maybe I'll get you to look that over before we we do that. I would love your your insight into that.
Happy to do it.
One one of the things we're we're down a few rabbit holes here and I I wanna come out of this, but you use the term mental models. What do you mean when you use the term mental model? What is that to you?
This could be another rabbit hole, but we do we've we a few years ago my colleague Joseph Waters and Ron Vazine and I did a study of metal model.
Petrochemical plants.
And going into this study, I thought that a mental model
was a set of beliefs about how something works, whether it's a a a
A piece of equipment, a piece of machinery, it's an organization.
Here's how it works. Here's here's what happens.
Here's the kinds of
of uh components and how they fit together.
So that was my belief going in. And we spent a a week
at a petrochemical plant running people
through a challenging scenario to to capture their mental model. And that was part of their mental model, but only part.
we found that there was another part of the mental model.
Not just how does it work.
But
What are its limitations? What are its boundary conditions? Where can it go wrong?
And people who are experienced.
are well aware of these boundary conditions.
And so they that's part of the richness of their mental model.
And then we found another component.
Which is
Um
What are the workarounds that I'm that I can use if we run into one of those limitations? How can I recover from it?
And then we found that there was a fourth component. We have actually a matrix of this, uh two by two matrix, the last component.
Is somebody with a good mental model
Can also anticipate
where people might get confused.
What kinds of mistakes they might make, what kinds of
um mis uh flawed beliefs they might have.
So that you need to be more careful.
as you've described what they're supposed to do.
So um my idea of a mental model started out with
How something works.
And now it includes all four of these components, how it works, what its limitations are, how to work around them.
And how
to anticipate confusion on the part of people who I'm going to be working with.
Do you think that relates to the learning process, so I have a um
I I think people learn with a learning loop and and
You you have an experience, you reflect on the experience.
That reflection gives you an abstraction.
And the abstraction turns into action. And so you have this loop of learning.
When you
learn concept from somebody else. You're
You're learning their abstraction.
So you're putting an abstraction into use as your action.
And if you take the time to reflect.
Well, reflection is how we learn those edge cases, how we encode it in our mind where it's more likely to work in this scenario and not. And so in the first case, when you're learning from somebody else, I think you have like
pattern matching, but it's exact pattern matching. It's like searching Google with quotes.
Whereas in the second case, you're doing pattern matching, but it's associative pattern matching.
What do you think about that?
That that feels reasonable.
I think
To do that kind of learning.
You're you're sort of exposing a a problem where I I get your abstraction.
But I haven't lived your experience.
So your ab abstraction I might draw the wrong lesson from your abstraction.
I don't know where it's coming from.
And I could ask you to explain it.
And language is a is a means for communication.
But it's also a means for miscommunication.
because there's all kinds of ambiguity in the words that we use. And people
use the same words and and mean different things.
and then believe that they mean the same thing.
and uh can get themselves in tr in trouble that way. So that's a limitation
of having you explain your
Abstraction.
A way around that limitation.
is to ask you about stories.
Where you know, where did you come up with this abstraction? What happened?
Tell me what what what went on.
That changed your mind.
And then I can ask you about about that event. So you were in this situation
And something happened that surprised you. What happened?
And why were you surprised? And how did you notice it? And what
What what w oh w what sense did you make of it?
Stories are um I'm not
Uh hampered.
by the limitations of language because now we have
And incident accounts that that we can drive.
And many organizations don't take advantage of stories. And we we've just finished a project.
for a picture chemical group about
Using stories.
to try to get at these kinds of of expertise.
And communicate that can you expand more on what role stories play? Are they just compressions of ideas?
A are are they sort of
highlighting certain variables or details or omitting certain variables or details or getting us to anchor to something.
Stories are doing all of those things.
And they're doing it in a
in a way that's that's really engaging.
Like
Uh here's what happened and I didn't know what to do about it.
And then you want to know, what did I do about it? How did it end?
And and um I know when
When people have um
recounted stories in a couple of groups that we studied when we were doing this project.
We'd say, okay, so what's the takeaway from the story?
And everybody
had a different takeaway.
So that's the richness of stories.
is what what have you learned from the story? What's
What are the implications?
And then we as as a small team.
Just compare notes and realize that
Because we have different mental models.
We have different interpretations of the story and the importance of the story. What makes for an effective story?
Uh, there's gotta be some sort of
Mystery.
About something happened.
That wasn't expected.
And and then the the people listening to the story wanna know how it how it uh wound up.
Second is the storyteller.
uh should be somebody who likes to tell stories. And I've encountered some people
who don't like to tell stories and uh and I'll ask them about
stories and they say I can't remember any stories. So either they're
a avoiding the issue or they their their brain isn't wired.
to to be able to access stories.
Um or I could
Some people think they're telling a story
When they just give me a narrative.
This happened and that happened and we go through what happened.
But there's no story and it doesn't move, it doesn't evolve.
There's no transformation.
And the good the good stories
Resulting in insight. That reminded me when you were saying that about the cop and the ashes.
Right. So he's looking for the contradiction. So he he's got a story in his mind, uh, in a way about the world works, and we all do when we're driving.
'Cause we're not consciously paying attention to the road, but we notice anomalies.
So we notice something that is unexpected and in in a vehicle, that that's our cue to pay attention.
as a driver of a vehicle. For whatever reason we get encoded with this after years of driving, it's like okay, now I I'm switched on, maybe my heart races a little bit.
But like I react. I get out of my trance and my body awakens. It's like I'm in low power mode and then I wake up.

But at work we don't do this. We we we get woken up and we we have a surprise or a contradiction.
And then we ignore it.
Or we explain it away, or we move on to the next task. Instead of going from low power mode to sort of like full power mode, what's going on here? Because the surprise would indicate.
The world is not working the way that I I thought that it should work.
So what you wanna have is the is a way to harness the power of curiosity when something
didn't happen the way it was supposed to.
And our natural tendency
is to dismiss it.
To ignore it.
and to explain it away.
And you think, well, why can't people think like scientists?'Cause scientists are careful.
But the researchers who investigated this
Find that scientists do the same thing.
They have something that's called knowledge shields the way all of us do.
uh that a a variety of techniques for explaining away
inconvenient uh data and anomalies.
So so we have a story about how the world works, and then we notice an anomaly.
And rather than
try to fit that anomaly in or explore the anomaly. We we it's easier. It's a low power mode for us just to continue with
the our story the way that we're we're telling it to ourselves.
And ignore or
Dismiss the anomaly.
That's why we we use these knowledge shields and scientists use the knowledge shield.
Scientists don't want to challen have anything challenge their theories.
And so you bring up a a a a data point.
That's gonna make my my my my uh pet theory look a little bit sketchy.
And I'm gonna say
Well, um how did the how did you collect those data?
Or um I'm not really sure that you've interpreted the data correctly.
I'm gonna find all kinds of ways of of dismissing it. Yes.
It leads to fixation.
Because one of our strengths when we uh encounter a situation is we we quickly make sense of it. We we use the patterns that we've built up.
And usually works, but it doesn't always work.
And so some people say
We should discourage people from coming up with immediate reactions. But that's ridiculous because
That's not the way we think and it would cripple us.
So instead you want us to come up with a
A quick reaction.
But
If something if we're wrong, there's gonna be an anomaly and we wanna be able to
to revisit it. So we
We want
People that's the way we break out of fixation.
is we notice the anomalies.
the way we get stuck in fixation and making fixation errors.
is we explain away the anomalies.
Hold on to the original wrong im impression.
Until it's far too late.
Now for your decision journal.
One of the things that you could capture is
Um, what do you think is going on in the in the situation now? You know, descrip what what's going on.
And then
As
Time occurs.
Maybe people can jot down
Oh data that they they that they receive.
Oh, that are inconsistent with that belief. So you you can sort of track
When is it that you first started to lose faith?
in your initial impression.
Could you have
questioned it earlier. Did you wait
Longer than you needed to. I I wanna switch gears just a little bit. How how do you think about the difference between people that stagnate at, say, an intermediate skill level and people who reach a mastery of the same skill?
Right.
So this gets into the issue of expertise and how do people get
to to the higher levels of expertise.
And uh some models of expertise say that that people just
acquire more and more information and that's how expertise builds.
But
That doesn't work because that's like having uh unexamined uh experiences.
And and you're not you're not coming up with a richer mental model.
Uh my speculation working with uh a colleague Holly Baxter
is that people get up to a certain level of performance.
And then they start to stagnate.
And they start to plateau.
And
people who who break through and move to the next level.
Are the ones
who engage in unlearning.
who realise there are certain
uh conventions they've bought into or beliefs they hold.
That are either wrong
or are limited and and don't apply as broadly as as they imagine.
Is is there any a sort of
practical things that you've seen work particularly well in the wild for people developing mastery in
uh less time, say, than people would expect.
So let's imagine two people.
starting out a job. We'll say person A and person worker A and worker B.
They're both gonna be on the job for a year.
Worker A
has a lucky year.
And everything goes smoothly.
And there's no disruptions, no problems. It's just I've really
very, very s you know, low stress year.
Work or B
has had a turbulent year.
All kinds of things have gone wrong, all kinds of adaptations have been necessary.
There were, you know, mistakes made that had to be
identified, diagnosed, and recovered.
And one thing is like the whole year has been filled with all of this.
Who is the one that you would like to have working with you after that first year? Oh, I would choose person B because the surface area of their learning is so much richer.
And detailed.
Exactly. So worker the the second worker.
With a turbulent year.
has learned much more.
What can you do for worker A, who's had this move here?
you can take some of these um
crises that worker that the second worker had
and encapsulate them as stories or as scenarios and you can present them to work a
just to to give them vicarious experiences.
To to get them to move forward.
So that's something that that you can do.
And and and uh we we've seen organizations
doing s things like that and that that's actually one of our decision training methods is to provide those vicarious experiences.
That's really interesting when you you think about organizations as as sort of like trying to reduce
the variability or reduce errors.
And then
At the same time acknowledging
Yeah.
errors create surface area for reflection
experience, expertise, and learning.
Yeah, but but where people spoil it is is they then take it one step too far.
And say
the more errors you you make, the the more you're gonna learn which which is true.
And and say we want to encourage people to make errors.
And they don't mean that. Organizations don't want to encourage people to make errors, especially some of the industries that I work in.
Where errors can be very dangerous.
And the fact is
I don't like to make mistakes.

If I do something, if I put on a workshop that has gone poorly.
My immediate reaction is
I never want to put another workshop on again. I mean this is just too painful.
And it takes me a few days.
to get out of that emotional funk.
And to think about it and say
You know?
If I had done it this way.
I could have used that problem.
And it could have been much better.
And so by the end of that kind of rumination, that kind of reflection
My reaction is
I can't wait to do another workshop.
'Cause now I want to try that again.
So but but the immediate reaction is one of being
Um pretty devastated.
by by a mistake. And and so it's gonna be a
A hard case if you tell me.
Gary, you know, try to try to make mistakes, you know, that that's how you're gonna learn.
It's not in my emotional makeup.
Maybe it's in your shame, but it's not in my emotional making. Oh, I don't know if I intentionally make them, but I certainly have more than my statistical fair share of them.
Well what is cognitive flexibility theory?
Having a flexibility theory is the the notion of
Trying to
Help people achieve expertise.
Bye.
Preventing them from locking in.
to routines and standard ways of doing things.
So that they can become
More naturally adaptive.
you can give them vicarious experiences that can't be handled.
by the usual routines.
just to force them out of their comfort zone.
And to get them into a mindset.
Of not only
Being prepared to be adaptive.
But enjoying being adaptive.
Because that's another thing that I've noticed about experts.
If they're doing the same job over and over again, they get bored.
And then something happens
And they can't
Use the same routines.
And the journeyman.
They get really frustrated.
It's not supposed to happen. I don't know. Who do I call?
And the experts.
Your eyes light up.
Okay, we can't use
the the techniques that have been successful for us up to now.
What can we do? What can we uh
Invent.
And so the the eyes lighting up.
is like for me a key to cognitive flexibility theory.
is to get people
into that mode where they're excited.
when things don't go as planned and and they're gonna have to
Improvise.
Coming back to the beginning, we've talked about sort of a a lot about gaining better insights. Let's talk about some of the tools that we can use to reduce errors.
Maybe we can start with a pre mortem.
What is it? Why is it useful? How do we conduct one?
I just sort of invented it for when uh for a company.
that my the company I was running back in the late
Nineteen eighties.
And we we've mostly had successful projects, but not always. Sometimes our projects would fail.
And then we would do an after action review. We'd say what went wrong.
We've realized oh if we've just done this differently.
um and might not have have ended so uh so badly.
And I said, why don't we we always have a kickoff meeting when a project starts.
Why don't we move that after action review?
To the front.
Like a a postmortem.
A postmortem is something that you do like in a hospital when a patient has died.
And the physician does a a post mortem to find out why did the patient die.
And the advantage
of doing a post mortem and and discovering what was the real cause of death or the causes of death.
Is that
the physician gets smarter, now has a richer mental model, so it helps the physician.
And now the physician can tell the family.
Here's why
You're
Your loved one died.
'Cause there
Yeah, they really want to know. And now you can
You can you can help
Reduce their pain by giving them that.
And answer and make we work with that.
Everybody benefits from a post mortem.
Except for the patient, because the patient is dead.
So we said instead of doing a post mortem for projects that fail after they failed
Let's move it to the beginning. That's why it's called the pre mortal.
And the way it works
is if we're on a team, we take everybody on the team, we're all sitting around a table.
And usually we do it at at a kick off meeting. Here's
Here's how we're gonna carry out the plan.
Now we've spent
an hour, hour and a half just go through the pick off meeting. What are we gonna do?
Who's doing what? What are the roles and functions? We've got all that nailed down.
We've got about twenty minutes.
At the left.
And we have time to do a pre-mortar.
And I say, okay, now we're gonna do the pre-mortal.
Everybody
Just relax. Sit back in your chairs.
Now.
I'm looking in an imaginary crystal ball.
I actually do have a crystal, but I don't carry it around with me all.
Yeah.
I'm looking at imaginal imaginary crystal.
And it's now six months from now.
Uh.
And this project.
has gone off the rails in a major way.
It's been a disaster.
It's been a failure. Could be six months, could be a year, pick
Pick your time frame.
Like
What happened is the crystal ba ball
is showing failure.
Now the crystal ball
isn't showing us why it failed.
Just showing us that it has failed. That much is certain and the crystal ball is infallible.
It never lies.
Now.
Everybody around the table.
You have a pad of paper in front of you and a pen.
Take the next two minutes.
And write down all the reasons.
why this project failed.
And then I have a timer and I start the timer.
And then everybody's writing like mad for the next two minutes.

And then I say, time's up.
I've got usually a whiteboard.
Or on Zoom I'll I'll have uh uh a virtual
Whiteboard.
And I'll say now I'm gonna go around the the room.
Um and I'll start if I'm a project leader.
Here's the top of my list.
Here's the thing that I mentioned.
And usually it's something that never came up during the meeting.
Uh a leader and the facilitator could be different people.
But in this case we'll say it's the same person.
I want to set a good example.
Yeah, I'm just
Not just coming with something that's absurd.
But something that's real.
And then I go to the next person, Shane, what do you have on top of your list?
And then Dave, what do you have on your list that neither Shane nor I have mentioned?
And we go around the room and I'm writing these down.
Usually we go around the room a second time.
Sometimes if they're
We have a long list of things.
That would explain why this project failed.
And most of them
Are things that
People hadn't thought about it.
And now we sort of are are harvesting.
the collective wisdom of the people.
and the scar tissue of the people in that room.
And we're we're seeing all the ways that this
Yeah we were
So confident, so overconfident in.
Now we're o our overconfidence.
Has been branched.
Now some people have worried that maybe the confidence level got too low.
So then we have a oh we added a last part of the exercise.
Look at everything on the whiteboard. Look at all of those items.
Now let's take another two minutes.
And write down
What?
Each of us, what can I do personally?
To try to
reduce the chance of some of these
Happily.
And then people are writing down what they can do.
And that's a way of trying to
uh reduce the risk.
And so that's that's how we we run a pre-mortem. What we find is
It surfaces ideas and and and and and flaws
Yeah, people hadn't considered.
But it also creates
A culture of candor in the in the team.
Where people are used.
are are starting to get used to
expressing problems rather than covering them up.
And it creates a sense of trust.
Yeah.
I can say something and I'm not going to get criticized for it.
The way the pre-morum works is it reverses the usual dynamic of these meetings.
Often at the end of a meeting somebody will say
All right, we're done we're just about done with the meeting. Does anybody see any problems?
Nobody wants to identify a problem. We've just spent the last hour and a half coming up discussing the plan.
Nobody wants to uh admit that there's a problem.
People aren't even thinking about problems. They're all in a a goal mode. Let's get started. Let's
You're impatient to start.
And there you know, there could be consequences of of exposing problems.
With a premortal we've we've reversed that dynamic.
The way you show you're smart in a pre-mortem.
is the quality of the of the items that you generate.
I think you hit on something that is hiding in plain sight that most people miss and and we've spent quite a bit of time on our ourselves is sort of
How do you run more effective meetings by changing
What people signal.
uh as value.
And and you can do this by asking people for unique insights into the problem that nobody else in the room has as one way. Instead of everybody coming in and summarizing
um the executive summary, which everybody's read, but everybody needs to paraphrase because they want to signal that they they've done the work and they're they should be in the room and they know what the problem is.
even though they're just regurgitating the same terms over and over again.
I th I think it's really uh a key a key factor to the pre mortem that you're s you're changing
You're signalling expertise.
to your co workers.
through coming up with something valuable and uniquely insightful into the problem.
Right. So it's sort of like uh
It's almost theatrical. I mean there there there's a certain uh performative quality.
to this and and and we try to I I try to do it quickly. I I I I just want to
Get everybody's entry very quickly.
So that the energy level stays high.
And I want to get one from each person because
often like one of the senior members of the team
might want to give the entire list and then everybody just sort of been up.
The receive mode.
I want to get out of that mode. I want everybody ready.
What are the common mistakes that people make in running a pre mortem?
One of the mistakes is that they just frame it the wrong from the beginning. They'll say, okay, we should do a pre-mortem, so what can go wrong?
It's not an an issue of what can go wrong.
We're dealing with a crystal ball that has showed
Yeah.
The plan has failed. We know that it failed.
And our job is is to
Oh explain why. So say what can go wrong
It's too tentative.
It's too vague.
And so that's a
That's I think maybe the most common mistake that that that people make.
is they don't frame it that way. Another mistake
Yeah,
uh uh individuals talk too long.
R and and everybody else is waiting and and this way.
We're going around the room in a pretty rapid clip.
And everybody just uh stating one thing at a time.
And a third mistake might be
The leader.
It's called feet.
And says, uh, I just want to hear what everybody else has.
We and so instead of creating a culture of trust and candor
the leader is is creating
A dangerous environment.
where people can get in trouble and the leader is is being
Shielded and protected. When we think about reducing errors, one of the the common things that sort of comes up with people is cognitive biases.
I'm curious as to what you've seen, what you think about
um trying to limit cognitive biases. We've talked about one, which is fixation error.
And I have my own theory on this, but I'd like to hear your your views.
All right, so I have to be careful about this.
And and just uh caveat what I'm about to say.
That I'm an outlier.
the the whole issue of uh decision and judgment biases.
is a major line of research.
And the community, the heuristics advisors community.
has been extremely effective.
at the in the research they've done and the applications that they
uh put this work too in the judgment decision community.
So I'm um
I I want listeners to understand that
The dominant view is that
These um these biases are important.
and need to be taken into account.
Uh, having said that, I don't agree.
I don't like the idea of decision biases.
I know my my sense from literature is that there's been little
of any success in de biasing people, and I think that's a good thing.
Because of biases that get identified
are essentially related to the heuristics that we've learned.
and are part of the experience that we have.
And they only look like biases in hindsight.
when one of them doesn't work. But it's a heuristic. It's not an algorithm.
So sometimes heuristics don't work.
And the way the research has been done.
Yeah.
You put people you give them a task.
where the heuristic that they're used to applying
It's not gonna apply in this situation.
And you show that people fall into the trap that you've set to them.
And you say you see their their heuristics.
are flawed and yet people uh many people
Most people.
Ah fall prey to it.
But nobody has done research.
on the positive side of these heuristics.
And so I think that's
A bias.
on the part of the decision bias researchers.
that they're only looking at the down arrow.
How do these heuristics get us in trouble?
And they're not looking at the strength of these heuristics.
And you know, Danny Kahneman and Amasty who do
I to develop these ideas.
They themselves stated that these heuristics are generally useful.
Even though they're not perfect.
And what what's happening is the community is setting up because it's easy to set up studies with
Heuristics.
get you the wrong answer. And so there's lots of these studies performed.
And so that's that's the message that gets.
Gets compiled.
without looking at the upside. So I've written about positive heuristics.
that all the major heuristics that get criticized
Are extremely valuable.
For coming up with insights.
and making decisions.
So availability bias.
Of course that's gonna be helpful if I wanna draw on my experience.
in order to know how to work in a situation. It's not gonna be perfect.
But that's what my experience uh buys me. The same thing for
Representative.
Bias.
Uh anchoring.
I guess.
I'm gonna anchor on a number. Now sometimes people do foolish things if you just give them a random number, they anchor on that.
So people are capable of foolishness.
But but generally
I've gotta start somewhere.
And so I drawn my experience to see
What's this like? And I'll I'll anchor on that and I'll
I d I just fr from that because
My initial impression
If I ha if I have a reasonable amount of expertise.
is going to be accurate.
And so the
Uh the heuristics that get criticized.
We would be crippled.
Without those heuristics.
And I'm
created a thought experiment.
Which is uh you know, people worry about
Emotion clouding our intellect.
And getting in the way of
of of good decision making.
And as it turns out there's a part of the brain, I forget what what the structure is called.
where emotion and
uh decision making come together.
And uh there are some people who have
a lesion in this part of the brain.
And this is work done by Damasio.
Fifteen years ago or so.
And he studied people with lesions in that part of the brain.
where they were unable to draw on their emotions to make decisions.
In other words, they were purely rational.
They were like Mr. Spock.
Their intelligence didn't suffer.
Your IQ is as high as it ever was.
before the the lesion.
But their lives became miserable. It would take them forty five minutes.
to decide what restaurant to go through. They got divorced, they lost their jobs.
Because they could not use their emotions
Because our emotions are a way of
drawing on on the patterns we've built.
and on our experiences. So here's
Here's the demonstration.
The thought experiment I had.
If you
Are a strong believer.
in the the idea that emotions cloud our thinking.
And interfere with our
with our decisions and our judgments.
We know where this area is.
We can do
lasgery to triangulate different laser beams.
to create a region in this area.
So you will no longer be troubled.
My emotions when you make decisions.
And my challenge is to any of the judgment decision researchers.
Who worry about emotions clouding our decisions.
Would you have the surgery done?
I have yet to find the backer.
And I've said I will pay for the surgery myself.
Now this would be a great experiment, a great opportunity.
Nobody has taken me up on this offer.
Talk to me a little bit about making decisions in teams of people versus an individual making a decision.
where boards or committees are are
are sort of asked to come to a decision. What are the pros and cons of a team based approach? And what have you seen as more effective ways to get teams to make decisions?
Team decision making, the teams use different kinds of strategies. And there's
different formats. You can have uh an autocratic team where a leader
Just makes a decision.
Uh you can have teams voting, you can have
Uh the vote be uh anonymous.
Are afraid of repercussions.
There are situations like
Let's take a pirate ship.
In the old Cor uh Caribbean days when you had pirate ships around.
Pirate ships were extremely democratic.
There was nobody in charge, they voted.
who was gonna lead them. They they voted about what targets they wanted to.
Exactly. Once they were in battle.
There was a captain.
And the captain had uh the captain's orders had to be obeyed.
because the under that time pressure with that kind of urgency.
And those kinds of snakes.
you needed to switch your decision strategy to something more autocratic.
So there's there's no general rule for how a team should make decisions.
It's gonna depend on
the the situation and the context.
I can give you an example of what not to do.
It was a movie with Matt Damon a number of years ago.
quote quote uh the Martian.
And Matt Damon
is part of a team that went to Mars.
And something happened and they needed to depart.
And they gathered everybody together, but they couldn't find that day.
he wasn't available and it was urgent that they depart.
And so they departed without him, assumed that he had gotten injured or killed.
That's why it wasn't there.
So now they've taken off from Mars, they're heading away.
And Matt Damon somehow finds his way back to the station.
and radios them and said, Where are you? They realize
He's still there. So the decision is
Do we go back?
Or not.
And the people on the spaceship know that if they go back it's gonna be risky.
So they said
Let's see if we can come to a a consensus about what to do.
I don't like the idea of consensus decisions.
And I don't like the idea of a consensus decision.
In this kind of a dangerous environment.
Because as the people in the spaceship went around
There was enormous pressure on everybody.
to go along with the with the the the the consensus.
Which was we should go back and rescue him.
And it was public.
And uh they went back and they they risked all of their lives in order to save.
What they should have done is had people
Vote.
In a way that was secret.
And I see this with people
or um cross country skiing in the back.
Country.
And you don't want to just cross country ski where it's level, you want places where there's hills.
But if the hills are too great, then you have a risk of an avalanche.
At a certain point they'll look ahead and say
This could be risky.
Do we want to continue or not? And it's the same dynamic.
There's a lot of pressure on people.
to inhibit their fear.
and go along with the with the consensus.
Rather than than
finding a way to to vote anonymously and realizing
Yeah, one or two of the members don't want to do it.
Having votes that are anonymous is important.
And I also don't like
consensus decisions because
Those tend to be
And in in other situations
The consensus.
It's fairly risk averse, unlike with the Martian.
And people want to have something that everybody can agree with.
And you've los lost your opportunity
For somebody who's had an insight.
Somebody has a new idea.
uh of of of trying to put that in practice.
But the consensus is to try to do
the safe thing that's comfortable.
that everybody can can live with.
rather than to do something that's bold and
So I have I have problems with
Consensus decisions. I have problems with group decisions. I think groups a as a a rule
like a heuristic make terrible decisions. Individuals should make decisions. Groups should provide input.
Uh, but there should be one sort of um person making the decision.
Um but that's my personal sort of uh experiences that I I've lived through through all of the uh different roles that I've had in life.
I would agree with that.
Uh I was trying to answer your question, how should how should teams make decisions? No, this is so important though, right? Because not everybody uh in in in
When people a lot of people agree with it, but they can't change it. So they're part of a committee and the committee's making a decision even though
Everybody on that committee might think it would be more effective if one person
Yeah.
sign their name to the decision.
Which also would increase the accountability of the process, believe it or not. Um, because often
What I found with group decision making
Is that
when the decision is correct, everybody in the room was responsible for it. And when it was wrong
Everybody in the room tried to convince them not to do it. And so the th there's no sort of like learning that happens from these, but in in
In the real world, a lot of organizations still insist on making decisions as a group.
So the question was sort of like how do we make more effective decisions as a group? And and and I think the uh you answered that beautifully. And
The second question is
How do we
How do we illuminate the insights in a group setting when we are making a decision as a group? How do we
Find ways to
Um
surface unique insights into the problem
Um that we might not know. Do you have any experience with that?
Oh well the pre modern method. Right.
Okay.
Is that to uh to a great extent.
And I think what's important about the pre mortar method that could also be used generally by
uh and and and group and team environments.
is to have people
craft their ideas and their interpretations and their assessments
individually and privately before they surface it.
To other people.
And uh the the research on like brainstorming, we're all brainstorming together.
The the research shows that brainstorming does not produce
more ideas and more innovative ideas.
And I I think teams would be and groups would be better.
having individuals
generate their own concepts.
And then after they've done it in independently and privately
Sharing it with the other. And that would be a good way to generate insights.
that are hard to surface about why the project might fail.
I is there a way to even bring those forward into
how we're proceeding with the project? Like how do we get the insights on the table, even if those insights are defining the problem, because before you can solve it, you have to define it. And often we have very different view if you were to
This is a fun experiment and I suggest everybody who who does this in in group settings do this.
when you go to a decision to make or go to a meeting to make a decision
Have everybody in the room write out
uh the problem
on a piece of paper that they think they're solving with this decision.
And then compare how different and how much variance there is in those problem statements.
And so often
um somebody has a more unique what what tends to happen in the real world is you go to a meeting
somebody surfaces what the problem is
it sort of clicks the minimal standard in everybody's mind and then being all type A
individuals we jump on solving a problem.
And we forget to sort of go back and say, like, do we have the right insight into the problem? Have we defined the problem?
And this is where if you have a sole decision maker instead of a group.
that you can acknowledge that the responsibility of that decision maker may be to listen to other people's definitions of the problem, but ultimately they are responsible for defining the problem for the group and for themselves.
Okay, so I have a bunch of reactions because you've said a lot of very interesting and exciting things just now. So first of all.
I agree with you. Better to have
A single leader.
that they trust, they don't have to think that the leader is infallible.
Uh but they they just know that the leader
is going to
Be effective and and
Making the most of of the team's resources.
But one of the traits that you want in a leader
is somebody who can honestly query the team members.
and see what what they think.
A lot of times that querying is done.
In a rote way.
It doesn't accomplish much.
So I know that I'm the leader.
But I'm not supposed to say
Here's what we're doing. I'm supposed to uh have some
Some uh guys
of uh of being open to other ideas. So I say
So let's go around the table and and see what other people think. What do you think? Okay, good. What do you think? So we're just checking the boxes.
So that I can say, but I I went around the uh the table.
And I learned what people had had in mind.
That's not the way to do it.
Instead of just checking the boxes.
You want to be curious.
About what do they think?
What are your thoughts about this? Hmm.
Uh in what ways do you think
Um you have a different sense of what's going on here.
or what our goals can be.
And let's capture that.
So that's the way to go around the table, not in a rote fashion.
You're starting to get into the area of wicked problems and and difficult problems.
And I'm I'm doing a project on that right now.
with uh two colleagues, uh John Schmid and uh Sean Murphy.
on on wicked problems.
and uh how to pr proceed with wicked problems.
And we're we're finding that
The notion of the goals
is going to get richer and it's going to change
as we proceed, as we go along.
And you want to capture that. You don't want to lock in.
to original ideas.
Because almost certainly our original ideas
are going to be inadequate.
Now there's also a way to do project reviews.
They could try to
Capture more insights.
In many organizations, if we're doing a project
Well, I'll say okay, Shane, um
You're doing this project, let's have a review every three months.
And now it's a standard review.
What resources have you expended? What did you project that you were gonna expend?
Uh what tasks did you accomplish? Where are we in the milestone chart?
And we go through all of those things.
But I can also ask you in that review meeting.
Shane, in the last three months since the w uh last meeting.
Has anything happened that surprised you?
If we're dealing with a complex situation
With a wicked problem.
That's different from something that's sort of like painting a room where everything is predictable.
So I say
Has anything happened in the last three months that has surprised you?
And if you say
No, no, nothing nothing has surprised me.
You don't have to worry.
That's when you have to worry.
Because I want to know what surprised you.
And now we can we can
start to examine that and see
And be curious about it and see what it might mean.
And how we can
Change our notion of
The problem.
With the goals.
Or any of any of the important parameters.
Wanna switch gears a little bit.
Um often when we we
are making a decision, there's two really
similar options that are I I wouldn't say equally, but near equal.
um in terms of their effectiveness or our anticipated effectiveness about how they'll solve the problem.
And we spend a lot of time, money, and resources trying to make a perfect decision.
Can you explain the zone of indifference to

Right. I love the idea of the zone of indifference.
And the phenomenon the the way it the phenomenon works.
And
If I've got two choices, a terrible
Option and a wonderful option.
Quick, which one do you pick?
Okay, that's not a hard decision.
as we move them closer together.
And so now the the terrible option has some
positive features and the great option has some
negative consequences.
And we get to this point.
Where
It's really hard because
The strengths and advantages.
Of of one versus the other.
are almost totally balanced.
These are the hardest decisions people ever wrestle with.
And the paradox is
If the advantages and disadvantages of the two options are almost perfectly balanced.
It doesn't matter which one we pick.
And yet we will spend
Days, weeks.
going around in a funk, which one am I gonna choose?
Committees spend hours going over it.
And
I if if if there's anything that that can be valuable and and efficient in what I'm discussing.
It's this.
When you think you're in a zone of indifference.
To recognize
I'm in a zone of indifference.
I'm never gonna be able to tease them apart.
So I'm just gonna pick one.
And spend my time in more fruitful ways.
Even if it means flipping a car. I I I like that a lot because I I think we do spend so much time um often
uh we get paralyzed with perfection
And I have a heuristic called stop flopper, no.
that I use to sort of like get myself out of this paralysis, which is you stop gathering useful information.
flop is the first loss opportunity, so you're about to lose an option or opportunity.
Or you know, you know what to do.
And so if you stop flopper no, it it can get you out of this sort of paralysis.
And so that works for you. Yeah.
And uh it sounds it sounds like a reasonable strategy.
Oh, it's not perfect. It's it' uh it's a heuristic again. But um talk to me about Shadow Box.
So here's how Shadow Box works.
It's primarily a scenario based approach.
I create uh a tough, challenging scenario.
And um we we go through this scenario.
Usually it's in text.
And
I stop it part of the way through and I say
Here's decision point one, Shane.
At this point
Here's four different options.
Things you can do.
Forces of action.
Rank order.
Which you would do from top to bottom.
And then write down your reasons.
Sort of like your decision.
Black.
And then
We continue the scenario.
And then we stop it again, decision point two.
Here are three goals.
that you might pursue.
Rank order the importance of each of these goals and write down your reason.
And then we continue and then we stop it again. Here's decision point three.
Here's five pieces of information that you can pursue.
That would help you.
Rank order the importance of each one of them.
and write down your reasons.
And it could be any anything like that, and we just go through the scenario that way.
At the same time.
I've had a panel of maybe three experts.
They've gone through the same scenario that I'm showing you.
They've written they've done their ranking.
They've written down their reasons.
We've combined their ranking.
We've synthesised the reasons.
So now when you go through this scenario
And we get to decision point one, here's four different courses of action.
And you you rank order them.
And you write down your reasons and then we say
Let's see what the experts picked.
And then immediately we show you
how your ranking compares to the experts.
And you want to match the experts. You're really trying.
to get your ranking to match theirs.
But the so that's the game part. You want you wanna get that to match.
But the real learning is
Look at what the experts wrote down as their reasons.
Here are the things they noticed.
Here's the things that they inferred, here's the things they worried about.
Use the opportunities they saw.
And you look at what you wrote down and what they wrote down.
And now you are seeing the world.
Through the eyes of experts.
But the experts don't have to be there because th that would be a bottleneck.
They've done their work.
And now we just have what we've recorded from them.
and we can provide it to you as feedback.
So you're seeing the world at least this scenario.
Through their eyes.
So that's how Shadow Box works and in a half a day of training
We show that
People's match to the experts.
increases by about twenty five percent.
Just a half a day of training.
Now there's another version of Shadow Box.
which is video based.
where I'll have like a one or two minute video of something.
And I'll say here's a situation
It could be um
Police officer.
uh dealing y using uh body cam uh camera.
uh footage or it could be something that's staged in a hospital.
And um
Yeah.
Well, like if it's a hospital, you know. Tell me
you know, what's happening in this situation.
And you watch the scenario from beginning to end.
And then we say now let's start again.
And as we go through the scenario
You can pause it at any point you want.
And then there's a little circle and you can put the circle around any Q
that you think is important to be watching.
And you do that as excessively as you go and you write down why you
why you you you uh highlighted that cue.
We go through this scenario.
Then if you after you finish that
We say now let's go through the same scenario
And we've had experts do the same thing you did.
Let's see what the experts were focusing on and when they were focusing on it.
Compared to you.
And then w what reasons they they gave. So this really is
Seeing the world through the eyes of experts. I I I love that idea and I think it's really effective and we're exploring using it with some of our stuff.
Yeah.
When you mentioned the police officer and the body cam, a question that came up for me is
It's one thing to watch.
in a room with air conditioning and watch this police officer approach a vehicle.
It it's a whole nother thing for the police officer to be approaching
The vehicle.
and be be in a different environment. And that sort of brings me to the question of
What role does environment play in our decision making? And are there things that we can do to improve our environment that improve our decision making?
That that's a a very important observation.
because this has come up in some of the work that we've done.
with uh use of forced decisions.
where you're you if you're a police officer you might be in a situation
Should I use force or not?
And sometimes there's
That's just part of the job. That's a a horrible part of the job for police officers.
But we find
Yeah.
Their name?
Of there may be sometimes ways.
To to avoid getting into that.
Decision.
The way you structure it, the way you frame it, the way you manage it.
can possibly diffuse the situation.
So that you don't necessarily have to get into a confrontation.
Yeah, you might be able to
Uh
To avoid it.
So yes, structuring the environment.
is a much better approach. And this is something we
have done a little bit with not as much as we would like.
About
And this and I say we, this is my uh my friend and colleague John Schmidt.
How do you get
Of voluntary compliance.
Rather than intimidation.
And for many
Mm.
A number of police officers
They only know one dominant way of getting civilians to comply with them.
Which is
To threaten them, to intimidate them.
But we did a project a number of years ago. Um my wife and I my wife Helen and I did the project.
To try to see what other techniques
for gaining voluntary compliance, for avoiding
These kinds of direct confrontations.
And the nickname for this project, it was funded by DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Nickname was the Good Strangers Project.
And we studied military
of personnel and we studied police officers.
who were known to be good at diffusing situation.
A uh creating an environment.
That was a benign rather than uh
A high conflict environment.
And go.
One of the things we learned
So
I remember one one
One police officer that we interviewed.
It was in a it was a small office.
He was a large police officer.
It was hard to to fit into this off. Oh, you would see like
is extremely strong.
And like
His arms.
were bigger than than my legs, okay.
He was a really strong police officer.
And he said
Yeah.
I joined the police because I like the action. I liked you know, I I I just liked it and uh
And and it was exciting, but I noticed as my career was going on.
If I would sometimes get in fights with people and I almost always won the fight.
But I I always
There was damage. Accumulating damage.
And then.
I looked at one of my colleagues.
He could get th people to do f things for him.
Yeah.
Just by
The way he carried himself.
And the way he talked to them.
And I said.
I I can't continue much longer.
I in the mode that I am.
What's he doing?
What uh what's his technique?
And he said ever since then I've been trying to
come up with golden words and I've been joting them down.
When I see other police officers use them.
And I'm trying to build a repertoire.
For how to gain.
Voluntary compliance.
One of his
Rules of thumb.
Maybe the most important one.
For my consideration is he said
Whenever he's in an in an encounter with a civilian
Or even with a lawbreaker.
He said.
I want that person.
To trust me.
More at the end of the encounter.
Then at the beginning.
And that governs the way
Carried himself.
that he was carrying himself in a way that would
Move the needle.
To create
Greater trust.
Rather than diminished trust.
And in terms of mindsets.
That's such an important mindset shift. The previous mindset was
I want to get people to do what I tell them.
And so I've got to be tough and I've got to be threatening.
And his new mindset was
How can I get them to do what I want?
Um
Um and have faith in me.
I think that's a great place to end this conversation, Gary. Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you very much for the opportunity. I've really enjoyed the conversation.
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