Understanding what can get in the way of our decision-making is the first step to overcoming those barriers.
It seems that Shakespeare’s Hamlet has more in common with classical economists than we might expect.
When the Bard gave his Danish prince the words “What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!”, he was anticipating one of the central tenets of economic rationality: the assumption that we are all capable of making the right decisions based on maximum value or utility. And that even when we do get things wrong, we can, like economic markets, self-adjust and move on serenely.
Even for the most optimistic among us, this might seem like something of a stretch. For behavioural economist Daniel Ariely this “beautiful view of human nature” is fatally flawed, whether we’re expecting the market to right itself or to make a perfect decision with expected outcomes every time.
Instead, he believes that we have much less control over our decisions than we think. What really characterises our decision-making is our irrationality – our unerring human tendency to make routine errors of judgement. Worse, this irrationality is predictable: we all make the same mistakes, often without realising, over and over again.
In short, we are far less rational than standard economic theory — and Hamlet — assumes. That’s because, when it comes to making a choice (the essence of decision-making), it’s often hard to know exactly what we want, or what to do for the best. That makes us susceptible to external influences or internal biases and shortcuts that might help us make sense of the options on offer – but not necessarily make the best choices.
So, when we make decisions, it might be advisable to move away from what Ariely calls “naive psychology” to a more explicit acknowledgement that we need to understand and work with our irrationality. The good news is that, once we are aware of the traps we might be falling into, we can learn from our mistakes and make better decisions. Being irrational does not make us helpless.
First, though, we need to understand just some of the things that can get in the way.
A good starting point on this road to discovery is the recognition that decision-making is always something of a gamble. We can’t guarantee that even the best-informed and thought-through decision will turn out as we’d like it to.
All we can do is to make sure we understand the type of decision we need to make and put in place a good decision-making process to improve the odds of success. Without a good decision-making process, we’ll find it much harder to know when and how to choose.
Where decisions are straightforward and routine – for example, regular workflows or simple trouble-shooting – we can save ourselves some time and cognitive strain with established processes, procedures and checklists rather than reinventing the wheel on every occasion. Sometimes, the best decision is to cut down on the number of decisions we make in the first place: to make no decision at all or to delegate the decision to someone else.
The first potential barrier we face, then, is knowing when we need to make a decision at all – to understand the different types of decision we face every day, and to cut down the number we make where possible.
That simplification gives us the space to focus on the decisions where we need to put in more mental effort and tackle our irrationality.
In his book, Predictably Irrational, Ariely gives the extreme example of Chinese commander from the third century BC, Xiang Yu, who burnt his own ships and destroyed his army’s cooking pots to focus their attention on victory. The troops were left with the somewhat stark choice of either defeating the enemy or starving. Nine victorious battles later, they had prevailed.
This may be an extreme case of the power of cutting down options, but it’s a useful lesson for us all. Our “irrational compulsion to keep doors open” is often at odds with making choices. While we will often want to take into account as many options as possible early on in our decision-making process, decision-making is ultimately about whittling down the options to make the best choice possible.
That can be hard because, every time we do that, we close other doors, with all the potential loss and sense of regret that may entail. In his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, the philosopher Erich Fromm suggested that the prevailing dilemma of his age was not the lack of opportunities but the sheer abundance of them.
It’s a trend only exacerbated since then, with the dizzying array of choice we have on offer succinctly summed up by Barry Schwartz’s idea of the paradox of choice. The business of having even more doors to consider can be a double-edged sword: faced with so much choice, we might have the opposite problem to those starving Chinese warriors.
We may duck making a decision at all, or prevaricate until we miss the boat (assuming it hasn’t been burnt first). And when we do make our choices, we may suffer from post-decision regret, constantly replaying our decisions and thinking about those other doors we didn't go through.
Faced with these pitfalls, Ariely reminds us that we will often need to be more conscious about closing some of those doors. We might, for example, stop going to a regular meeting that we don’t really need to attend. We need to use the simplification techniques, such as delegation, that we’ve already seen are crucial. And we need to reconcile ourselves to a certain amount of FOMO and regret about the road not travelled.
Even when we’ve worked on cutting down our options, perhaps arriving at a two-choice either-or decision, that doesn’t mean that all is plain sailing. That’s especially true when it’s hard to choose between options that offer similar value or benefit.
If we’re finding it hard to make a choice, we might consider the cautionary tale of Buridan’s ass. With a nod to Aristotle, the 14th century philosopher Jean Buridan asked us to consider a hypothetical donkey that is equally hungry and thirsty, standing precisely midway between a bale of hay and a bucket of water. We might assume that the donkey is able to make the rational decision about whether to eat or drink first, but no. The poor beast is unable to decide, stays rooted to the spot and dies of both dehydration and starvation.
We may know that having the free will to make decisions is a privilege, but most of us will recognise the dilemma faced by Buridan’s poor donkey. When we need to make a choice and decide, especially when the best path is not clear (should I eat or drink first?), we can find ourselves faced with decision (or analysis) paralysis. Trapped in an endless loop of “what if…” scenarios, we eventually become so overwhelmed that we fail to make any decision at all.
Instead, we procrastinate (Hamlet-style), calling yet another meeting in the hope that the answer will become clear to us or waiting just that little bit longer for the data that will unlock everything. We might strive for an unattainable perfection, wanting to maximise a decision’s outcomes rather than 'satisficing', being prepared to go with (and adjust if necessary) a decision that is 'good enough'. We might fear failure or the negative consequences of a decision that doesn’t work out.
If we are to avoid suffering from fateful paralysis or missing out on positive opportunities, we need to be on the alert for any donkey-like avoidance.
At its heart, decision paralysis is about overthinking things. Analysis is, of course, essential when we have a more complex decision to make. But it’s easy for that to tip over in overanalysing. We might ruminate endlessly about the right choice or try to look into a crystal ball and extract some prediction or certainty about the future. The trouble is that it’s simply not possible to be entirely certain about the outcomes of even the simplest decision; all we can do, as we’ve seen, is improve the odds of success.
With that in mind, we can try some simple techniques to help us make that leap of faith:
If we’re finding it hard to decide, we should acknowledge that, name it and interrogate why we’re procrastinating. Might we have had a difficult outcome last time we made a similar decision? Might we be catastrophising, assuming the worst will happen? Are we concerned about our image if we get things wrong?
Improving our awareness around how we feel and why is the first step to taking remedial action.
If we practise making decisions quickly when the stakes are low, it’ll help us to become more comfortable when the decisions are bigger or more complex. Start with things such as what to wear or have for lunch to build the confidence to decide without overthinking things.
Decision fatigue can easily set in if we’re trying to make too many decisions at once. Simplifying the number of decisions and prioritising the most important can help to cut through overwhelm and paralysis. We can also note our work patterns and behaviours; if we tend to concentrate best in the morning, for example, try to schedule tougher decisions for then.
When we’re stuck in a cycle of over-thinking, it’s hard to gain any new insights. We might think we need to keep mulling things over, but opting for the opposite, and giving our brains a rest, can provide a much-needed reset. Try doing something completely different, such as going for a walk, reading a book or practising mindfulness exercises.
Setting ourselves (and sticking to) decision deadlines can help to create a commitment that overcomes the paralysis.
Remember that the decisions we make are rarely, if ever, perfect. Practise accepting the discomfort this causes, and the resilience we’ll need if things don’t quite go to plan.
It’s simply not possible to plan for every outcome or possibility. Decisions always bring ambiguity and uncertainty. Understanding and accepting that is at the core of good decision-making.
Very few decisions are absolutely final. Most can be made and then adjusted over time. Brand strategist Philip VanDusen likens decisions to minimum viable products (MVPs) – the first step in an ongoing process where the decision will evolve and grow over time.
Our brains are clever things. Because of the sheer number of decisions we have to make every day, many of them unconscious or trivial, we’ve developed mental shortcuts (or heuristics) to help us manage the cognitive strain. It’s what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking: fast, intuitive, automatic – and in charge most of the time.
But these shortcuts can come at a cost. They bring with them Ariely’s irrationality, our tendency towards cognitive or unconscious bias, to be guided by, and stick with, our first impressions or impulses, often despite evidence to the contrary.
It will come as no surprise that these biases can be a serious barrier to objective decision-making. We all have them and there are a bewildering array of them on offer.
For example, survivorship bias might make us too optimistic because we only look at successes (those who have “survived”) while ignoring failures. It can lead to the mistaken assumption that if only we replicate what’s been done before, we’ll achieve the same result again.
For example, just because the business world is dominated by hugely successful tech companies, it doesn’t follow that our own tech start-up will be similarly successful. We need to take into account all those tech start-up companies that have failed – and that we never really hear about.
Or we might be susceptible to anchoring (first-impression) bias, jumping to conclusions based on information we glean early on in the decision-making process. Once we form a particular opinion, it can be hard for our brains to move on and consider other options; we stay 'anchored' to our first impressions. That might not always matter (it can be a useful shortcut), but if the information we find so hard to let go of is inaccurate or irrelevant, it can skew our decision-making.
For example, if we’re recruiting and the first candidate we meet has an impressive qualification that’s not really essential to the job, it might be hard to view the candidates that follow – who do not have the same qualification – in the same light, even though that qualification is not part of the job specification. We’ve latched on to that initial “anchor”; as a result, we might overlook different qualities in other candidates that are more relevant for the role.
As well as bias, we might also suffer from cognitive distortions or thinking traps, thought patterns that cause us to view reality in inaccurate — usually negative — ways. Although those patterns may be irrational, they can, if left unchecked, become habitual, and have the potential to lead to anxiety and depression.
Unsurprisingly, like biases, cognitive distortions are a major barrier to objective decision-making. For example, a tendency to catastrophise, to think the worst is always going to happen, is not going to help us make complex decisions or overcome decision paralysis. We might overgeneralise, reaching a conclusion about one thing and then incorrectly applying that conclusion in other situations: if we make just one poor decision that doesn’t work out, we may start to believe that we’re a poor decision-maker, full stop.
Or we might dust off that crystal ball, jumping to conclusions by predicting that things will turn out in a particular way or acting as a mind reader, thinking that someone is going to act or think in a particular manner with no real evidence to support this.
As with other barriers to decision-making, awareness is the first step to tackling bias and distortion. We need to slow down and identify and interrogate our first impulses. This will mean sense checking: experimenting with a range of scenarios, being open to new and different perspectives and scrutinising our options.
For example, if we tend to be over-optimistic, we should make sure we’re looking at all of the factors that affect our decision-making in the round. We should not cherry-pick data or discount more pessimistic viewpoints.
Or if we tend to cleave to our anchor or make knee-jerk decisions, we can slow down, check our facts, ask questions and seek other perspectives.
In short, we need some Kahneman System 2 thinking to help us modify our initial impulses – what Kahneman calls a process of self-critique or quality control. This is not easy, because it takes mental effort. But it will make help us to make better decisions.
Daniel Ariely agrees that being aware of the barriers that get in the way of making decisions is the first step to dismantling them. He uses the analogy of the physical world, and how we have developed ways of overcoming our limitations by building around things. He suggests that we need to do the same with our cognitive limitations, accepting and adjusting to them to change and improve how we interact with the world.
These barriers come in a range of forms. They might be about a lack of decision-making process. Too many options might blindside us, leading to decision paralysis. Our own mental short cuts and thinking traps might also get in the way.
The good news is that, while we may be irrational, we are, in the words of Ariely, predictably so. These are not barriers that are insurmountable. With the right mindset, we can learn the lessons of Buridan’s poor donkey, able to overcome our decision-making demons to make the best possible choices we can.