How Trust Affects Creative Collaboration

Control freaks and psychological safety — We brought Eric Olive on the podcast as a guest to talk about the science of decisions and we ended up talking about control and safety. How do you create an environment of psychological safety? And how does that encourage creative collaboration?

Eric has also offered a list of articles and books for more reading which we’ve added below.

You can reach Eric at:

uiuxtraining.com
eric@uiuxtraining.com

Articles

A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making by David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone HBR November 2007

Fooled by Experience by Emre Soyer and Robin M. Hogarth

Leaders as Decision Architects by John Beshears and Francesca Gino— Harvard Business Review. Structure your organization’s work to encourage wise choices.

“Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking”, Organization Science, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 409-421.

“The Identification of Solution Ideas During Organizational Decision Making,” Management Science 39: 1071–85. Paul C. Nutt (1993),

“Surprising but True: Half the Decisions in Organizations Fail,” Academy of Management Executive 13: 75–90. Paul C. Nutt, 1999.

Only for HBR (Harvard Business Review) Subscribers

Before You Make That Big Decision by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony. Harvard Business Review.

The Hidden Traps in Decision Making by John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa. Harvard Business Review, January 2006.

Books

A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger

Beyond Greed and Fear by Hersh Shefrin

Decisive by Dan and Chip Heath

Educating Intuition by Robin Hogarth

Focus by Daniel Goleman

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Intuition at Work by Gary Klein

Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

Seeing what Others Don’t by Gary Klein

The Art Of Thinking Clearly by Rolf/Griffin Dobelli

Winning Decisions by J. Edward Russo and Paul J.H. Schoemaker’

Human Tech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

September 16, 2017

iPhone X? Yes or No? It Might Come Down To Which Part Of Your Brain Is Active.

This week Apple announced the iPhone X. Some of you have decided you are definitely NOT going to buy it, others have decided you definitely are, and others are on the fence. Whether you go for it or not at least partially depends on whether you are making a habit-based decision or a value based decision.

Two parts of the brain for decision-making –– It turns out that there are two different parts of the brain that make decisions. One area is in the basal ganglia, deep in the brain, and is based on habitual responses. The other is in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) which is behind your forehead. If you are making decisions in the OFC area those are value based decisions.

Habit decisions take over — Research by Christina Gremel shows that if the OFC is quiet, then habit-based decisions take over. If the OFC is busy, though, then the habit area is over-rided. What does this mean? If you are comparing features, thinking logically, reviewing data, then you can’t make a decision based purely on habit. But if you aren’t evaluating which product is best for you, then it is likely your habitual responses will kick in.

Always buy the latest iPhone? — So if you are someone who loves Apple products and you always buy the latest iPhone, then chances are you will buy the iPhone X. The only thing that might stop you is if your Android-loving friend starts bombarding you with data comparing the new iPhone with his or her Android phone. As soon as you start doing a side-by-side comparison your OFC is engaged, making it impossible to make that quick habit-based decision.

So, which type of decision are you making?

Research citation: Christina M. Gremel, et, al, Endocannabinoid Modulation of Orbitostriatal Circuits Gates Habit Formation. Neuron May 2016.

October 1, 2016February 25, 2019

The Science Of Decisions

How we really make our decisions may surprise you. In this HumanTech podcast we explore the newest research on decision-making.

HumanTech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

May 4, 2015

5 Reasons We Make Poor Decisions

I just read a great report from Eric Olive on how and why we make decisions, especially bad ones. Here’s a summary of the report and the trouble we can get ourselves into:

People don’t like uncertainty. It makes us uncomfortable. So we tend to ignore important information and either make a bad decision or don’t make any decision at all.
People tend to make decisions that are in line with what they already believe. We filter information and just don’t let in data that conflicts with our view of the world.
People are overly optimistic about the future. Even though we have experience with things going wrong, or taking longer than we think they will, we tend to look to the future with rose-colored glasses.
People are influenced by confidence. If someone is confident then we believe them. And if/when we are confident that’s when we take action.
We think we can fool people but we often end up fooling ourselves. Eric gives an interesting example of how an executive in a corporation thought he could make it look like he was consulting his staff about some important decisions in the company, when he was really trying to manipulate the decision to go his way.

Most of our decision-making happens unconsciously, so it’s difficult to prevent these errors. Eric says your best strategy is to put some procedures in place while you are making decisions that force you from automatic mode (what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking) into deeper consideration mode (Kahneman’s System 2 thinking). Here are two examples of what you could do: 1) Enlist a skeptic to walk you through all the reasons why your plan is not realistic, or 2) Use the “pre-mortem” technique where you get your team together and imagine a scenario where you implemented the decision you are currently debating and it all goes terribly wrong. You ask the team to write out what made it go wrong.

It’s not easy to work around our unconscious mental processes! These tips from Eric just might work.

Eric goes into a lot more detail in his report. You can download it here: http://5thingsaboutdecisions.decisiongenius.net/

What do you think? Do you make any of these decision mistakes? Have a team member or supervisor who does?

November 13, 2009September 4, 2012

100 Things You Should Know About People: #10 — You Want More Choices and Information Than You Can Actually Process

candy

If you stand in any aisle in any retail store in the USA you will be inundated with choices. Whether you are buying candy, cereal, TVs, jeans, you name it, you will likely have a huge number of items to choose from. This is because people want lots of choices. If you ask someone whether they would like to choose from a few alternatives or have lots of choices, most people will say that they want lots of choices.

Too Many Choices and We Freeze — In my book, Neuro Web Design, What makes them click? I talk about the classic research in the field of choice. Iyengar and Lepper (2000) decided to test out the theory that if you have too many choices you don’t choose at all. They set up booths at a busy upscale grocery store and posed as store employees. They alternated the selection on the table. Half of the time there were six choices of fruit jam for people to try and the other half of the time there were twenty-four jars of jam.

Which Table Had More Visitors? — When there were twenty-four jars of jam, 60% of the people coming by would stop and taste. When there were six jars of jam only 40% of the people would stop and taste. So having more choices was better, right? Nope, that’s wrong. Continue reading “100 Things You Should Know About People: #10 — You Want More Choices and Information Than You Can Actually Process”

October 31, 2009

100 Things You Should Know about People: #5 — You Make Most of Your Decisions Unconsciously

You are thinking of buying a TV. You do some research on what TV to buy and then you go online to purchase one. What factors are involved in this decision making process?

It’s not what you think — I cover this topic in my book Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? You like to think that when you make a decision you have carefully and logically weighed all the relevant factors. In the case of the TV, you have considered the size of TV that works best in your room, the brand that you have read is the most reliable, the competitive price, whether you should get blu-ray, etc etc. But the research on decision-making, especially the recent research, shows that although you want to think that your decision-making is a conscious, deliberate process, it’s not. Most decisions are made through unconscious mental processing.

Unconscious decision-making includes factors such as:

What are most other people buying (social validation): “I see that a particular TV got high ratings and reviews at the website”

What will make me stay consistent in my persona (commitment): “I’m the kind of person that always has the latest thing, the newest technology.”

Do I have any obligations or social debts that I can pay off with this purchase (reciprocity): “My brother has had me over to his house all year to watch the games, I think it’s time we had them over to our place to watch”

and on and on.

Don’t Confuse Unconscious with Irrational or Bad. I take exception with Dan Ariely and his book, Predictably Irrational. Most of our mental processing is unconscious, and most of our decision-making is unconscious, but that doesn’t mean it’s faulty, irrational or bad. We are faced with an overwhelming amount of data (11,000,000 pieces of data come into the brain every second!) and our conscious minds can’t process all of that. Our unconscious has evolved to process most of the data and to make decisions for us according to guidelines and rules of thumb that are in our best interest most of the time. This is the genesis of “trusting your gut”, and most of the time it works!

So What To Do? — The next step is to think about what this means for people who design things like websites, where you are providing information and/or engaging customers to make a decision. This is, of course, the topic of my book, but let’s hear from you. If we know that people are making decisions unconsciously, rather than consciously, what are some strategies we should employ at the website to encourage them to engage?

And for those of you who like to read, great books on this topic are:

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer — The BEST book on the topic of decision-making in general.

Strangers to Ourselves: The adaptive unconscious by Timothy Wilson — A little bit more academic, but still a great book.

The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

and of course

Neuro Web Design: What makes them click?

——————————————–

Did you find this post interesting? If so, please consider adding your comment, subscribing to the blog via RSS, signing up for our email list, and/or sharing the post.