The Business Sensei

China Design Torture

China can be a problem.

No, not the country. The dishes. Choosing a China pattern can be a particularly stressful and exhausting proposition, a form of torture not dreamt of by the Inquisition. And somehow, I suspect that making people have to choose China patterns as an interrogation method wouldn’t make particularly convincing television. Nonetheless, the process of making multiple decisions leaves many people so drained they can’t make even a simple decision afterward.

Decision making is an interesting phenomenon. As simple as making a decision may seem, it turns out that we can only make so many decisions each day. Actually, let me be more precise: we can only make so many good decisions each day. The more decisions we make, the harder each one becomes. And while taking a break or having a meal can help recharge our decision points, that trick only goes so far.  Ultimately, decision points run out and the only option for recharging is rest.

How much of a problem decision fatigue causes really depends on what you’re deciding. If it’s China patterns, maybe that’s not such a big deal so long as you don’t mind becoming skilled at covering the plate with food. However, if you’re making major financial decisions or running a company, well, that’s a bit more serious. Making the wrong decisions can have long-term consequences, and, in this case, there are two types of wrong decisions: first, there are what most people think of as wrong decisions. When we run out of decision points we become increasingly prone to decisions that appear to not change anything, but which lead to poor outcomes: decisions which make the problem worse, decisions that miss critical opportunities, and decisions that lead us down blind alleys.

Then there’s making the wrong decisions: making decisions that are below your paygrade. If you spend your points making decisions that could be handled by someone else, then you risk not having anything left for the more important financial and strategic decisions that can only be made at your level. The second type of wrong decisions leads inexorably to the first. If you use up your decision points on decisions that should be made by other people, you will inevitably miss strategic opportunities, persist when you should change direction, and become up close and personal with a lot of blind alleys.

Knowing how decision-making works is the easy part. Changing how you make decisions is hard. It requires a lot of decisions! It requires putting in the time and energy to find and train people who can make those lower-level decisions for you. It requires creating the infrastructure so that they have the necessary information. And, it requires accepting that they may not make exactly the same decisions you would make; rather, the question is whether or not they are making decisions that you can work with.

Fortunately, there are ways to make it easier to make good decisions.

• The best decisions are made early in the day, after lunch, and after an afternoon break. There is a theme here: being rested and having eaten recently do help with making better decisions. In general, it’s better to sleep on a decision than make it late in the day.

• Conduct meetings and discussions in light, well-ventilated rooms. Recent studies find that the carbon dioxide content of meeting rooms goes up rapidly with only a few people in the room. Sitting in a stuffy meeting room quickly makes us feel sleepy and interferes with our abilities to make good decisions.

• Take frequent breaks. Decision making is an endurance activity. Don’t try to sprint the marathon.
• Don’t make important decisions after choosing China patterns 😊.

• And, circling back around to the beginning, avoid making decisions below your paygrade. Use your good decision-making time to create the infrastructure you need to delegate. Save for yourself the decisions that only you can really make.

The ability to make good decisions is a powerful, yet limited asset. Treat it accordingly.

The Sign of the Fours

During the month of January, my wife and I were attending parent-teacher conferences for one of our children. We walked into the building and went to sign in at the desk. There, my wife pointed out the odd date on the sign in form. Instead of reading, “1/15/13,” as one might expect given that the month was January, it read, “4/15/13.” Given the freezing temperatures outside, one might be forgiven for assuming that this represented some sort of wishful thinking. In fact, though, closer examination of the sign in sheet revealed that someone earlier in the day had written the date using a stylized number “1,” such that it looked vaguely like a four. Everyone after that simply copied down the date as they saw it written, apparently without giving any thought to the fundamental lack of logic inherent in the situation. In other words, even though it was January, even though it was freezing cold and there was snow on the ground, even though we weren’t even a month past New Year’s Day, even though, in other words, all the data screamed “January,” people were writing April for the date.

Now, if this phenomenon were limited to people signing into meetings, it would be quite unremarkable. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. This sort of automatic pilot behavior happens all too often in businesses. In businesses, though, it’s rarely quite so benign as writing down the wrong date on a form. Rather, it can involve misreading or misunderstanding critical instructions, with results that do not become obvious until much later in the product development cycle.

At one company, engineers assembling a set of medical tools would quickly glance at the notes left by the person who worked on the previous step, and then take the appropriate actions based on those notes. Alas, the “sign of the fours” played in quite frequently: when the notes were ambiguous, people would often interpret them in ways that made no logical sense given the nature of the product or the point in the development cycle.

At another company, a senior person gave a rather bizarre presentation to a client because he was quite convinced that was what he’d been told to do, even though logic would have suggested that just maybe he was misinterpreting his instructions. In a famous example from WWII, a young pilot mistook the humming of the general sitting next to him in the cabin as instructions to raise the landing gear, even though the plane was still racing along the runway. As a result, the plane crashed. Time after time, we’ve all seen people make apparently nonsensical decisions or take actions that appear to make no logical sense simply because they are reacting to the “sign of the fours”; we may even have done it ourselves from time to time.

So what is going on here?

In virtually every one of these situations, the common element is time. “So what?” you might ask. Time, after all, is a common element in every situation. The key, though, is in how we perceive time. When we perceive themselves as being rushed or short on time, we tend to make snap decisions based on whatever is in front of us. That number looks like a four? Okay, write down a four for the month even though it’s January. The general gestured with his hand? Clearly he wants the landing gear up even though we’re still on the ground.

Ironically, this perception of time is often an illusion. We talk all the time about “saving time,” but no matter how much we save, it’s never there when we want to make a withdrawal. Time is money until we actually try to get a refund. We all get sixty minutes to the hour, 24 hours to the day. Nothing we do can change that. The only real decisions we have are how we allocate that time and how much we can get done during the time available to us. Counter-intuitively, the more we try to schedule, cram, and pack our days, the less we actually do: we become more prone to distractions and mistakes. Athletes who feel rushed moved very fast, but lose more often. Athletes who have learned the trick of feeling like they have lots of time tend to win, even in such high speed sports as fencing.

The secret, therefore, is to structure our time so that we don’t feel so rushed. It’s not that we’re changing the amount of time we have, merely how we perceive it. The master fencer perceives time in slow motion, and thus appears to always be in the right place at the right time. Since all of us have a tendency to underestimate how long projects will take, one trick is to change our perception of the deadline by creating a series of challenging, but realistic, deadlines that we can miss and still be ahead of the game. So long as we take our self-imposed deadlines reasonably seriously, we will get a great deal done, yet when we don’t make them, we still feel in control and able to focus. It’s when we feel events rushing down upon us that we become most vulnerable to the “sign of the fours.”

Of course, this whole discussion does beg the question of how many of those people who wrote “4/15/13” instead of “1/15/13” then went rushing off to deal with their income taxes.

Where Did The Time Go?

There is nothing quite like that warm feeling you get at the end of the day when you look back and wonder where the time went. There is nothing quite like realizing that an entire day has gone by and nothing got done. Unfortunately, this happens far too often, especially when the day holds meetings.

Meetings have a bad reputation for consuming a great deal of time while producing little of substance. That reputation is well deserved. Despite this, meetings remain extremely popular in many companies. Unfortunately, in addition to potentially wasting a great deal of time, meetings often tend to leave people drained and unable to focus. As a result, they use up even more time getting back on track after the meeting.

Read the rest at FreudTv.com