7 Tips for Making Work Decisions
According to behavioral economists, the deep processing the brain uses to reach decisions is flawed. It’s also too hard-wired and difficult to alter. “By recognizing the limitations in the way we make decisions and correcting for them, we can be more successful in both our personal and professional lives,” says Francesca Gino, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who studies decision-making.
Here are some tips from decision researchers on how you can overcome your own irrational impulses to make better decisions at work:
1. Beware of irrelevant emotions. In her research, Gino found that emotions such as anger, even when triggered by something completely unrelated to the decision at hand, lead people to reject the opinions and perspectives of others and just focus on their own. This leads to poor-quality decisions. Instead, Gino recommends that you reflect on the causes of your current feelings to examine whether irrelevant emotions are clouding your judgment.
2. Don’t follow your gut alone. According to Don Moore, associate professor of the management of organizations at the University of California, Berkeley, decades of research on judgment in decision making document the imperfection of gut and intuition. But you don’t want to be Mr. Spock, either. “What you want is to get your heart and head in communication with each other,” he says.
If you’re deciding between two jobs, and the numbers say to take job offer B, but your heart says to take job offer A, Moore says to reflect on the reasons for your feelings. “Is it that you like the work, the people or the city? Try to include that in the spreadsheet,” he says. “Get the information in there somehow so you can weigh all the factors against each other. Figuring out what the right weights are to attach to these ratings and numbers is a much more productive problem than the question of who gets veto power – your head or your heart.”
3. Understand the cost of ownership. “Once you become an owner of something, you care more about it. And that caring gets you to be more motivated, more invested, more willing to spend time on it,” says Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. “But at the same time, you’re blind to external intervention. You’re blind to changes, you’re blind to the fact that it might not be such a good idea, or that there are better versions of the idea.” For these reasons, it’s great to give people ownership over projects at work – and important to understand how this compromises their objectivity.
4. Forecast more realistically. According to Moore, almost every business decision relies on a forecast. And the way that most companies do forecasts – by using a point estimate – exacerbates the tendency for people to think that they know what’s going to happen. “Instead of asking for someone’s best guess, organizations should ask for a range of possible outcomes and the likelihood of each,” says Moore. “That is much more helpful for getting people to think through the uncertainty associated with making any of these big decisions.”
5. Understand procrastination. You might feel like going on Facebook right now instead of working. That impulse may be natural. But so is your false rationalizing that you’ll feel more like working later. “Right now, you say I really feel like Facebook, I don’t feel like hard work,” says Ariely. “The problem is that you won’t feel like hard work later, either, and you will be less productive and less efficient. So we should think about the real cost and the real benefit and try to act less on impulsivity.”
6. Beware of overconfidence. The most common form of overconfidence that biases all of our decision-making is the excessive faith that we know the truth, according to Moore. To combat this, push yourself to listen hard to the perspectives of others. Moore also recommends considering the opposite. “Think actively about why you might be wrong,” he says. “Why are you wrong and what else could be right? This is an extremely useful question to ask yourself. It doesn’t necessarily make you feel better, but it will help you make a better decision.”
7. Don’t underestimate the power of reflection. When people fall behind on deadlines, according to Gino, the usual solution is to work harder, which may actually exacerbate the problem. “In a recent field project I conducted, my colleagues and I decided to give people at one company time to think,” she says. “So for three weeks, we gave them 15 minutes at the end of each day to reflect on what they had learned throughout the day. The result: a more than 20 percent improvement in performance.”