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.

Difficult decisions or difficulty with decisions?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

 

Some years ago, when I was getting married, my wife and I engaged in the traditional ritual of the Choosing of the China. After trying to choose between china patterns all afternoon, the thought of being eaten alive by creatures from another planet was looking more and more attractive. Fortunately, it wasn’t an available option! By the end of the day, I just wanted the choices to end. I was ready to agree to anything. Indeed, I’ve often wondered if the reason police shows never use choosing china patterns as a form of interrogation is that it is seen as just too cruel.

In their book, “Willpower,” psychologist Roy Baumeister and NY Times reporter John Tierney discuss the phenomenon of will and decision making in great detail. From an organizational perspective, though, there are some key points that we need to consider as they have far reaching effects on organizational effectiveness.

As anyone who has ever had to choose china patterns can attest, the process is exhausting. We can only make so many decisions in a day before we start to feel like our brains are turning to goo and are trickling out of our ears. Part of the problem is that decisions are not always obvious: you’ll recall in chapter 11 we discussed the point that part of focusing on a task is being able to distinguish what is important from what is not. That separation is a form of decision making. Tuning out that annoying coworker in the cubicle down the hall is a decision. Indeed, what Baumeister found is that our decision making and our overall willpower are inextricably linked. The more decisions we have to make, the less willpower we have left for other things, like focusing on a problem or being creative.

Part of why decision making in groups works the way it does is that the energy people have determines the types of decisions they can make. In stage one groups, people are spending most of their time and energy just figuring out how to work together; thus, we end up with directive leadership being the most effective style in that situation. The group members lack both the decision making skill and energy for more sophisticated decision making techniques. As the group members become more comfortable with one another, the combination of learning to work together and increasing skill at decision making enables the group to develop and move to higher levels of performance.

Unfortunately, unlike physical tiredness, the sort of mental tiredness that comes with decision fatigue isn’t always so obvious. It’s not like we stop making decisions; rather, we just make increasingly poor decisions. When we’re mentally tired, we have trouble making the types of decisions that involve risk. We’re much more likely to just choose the thing that’s easy, which is generally to do little or nothing; to not try that new initiative or explore that new product idea. The planned bold new leap forward at dawn becomes a hesitant shuffle by the end of the day. Whether at an individual or a group level, we are subject to decision making errors of this sort. With groups, though, the poor decision is then amplified by the echo chamber effect of group polarization.

 

Riveting!  Yes, I called a leadership book riveting.  I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next.  The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Eric Bloom

President

Manager Mechanics, LLC

Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

The Power of Routine

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

 

My son takes Kenpo Karate. At the end of each class, the instructor has the kids bow and then recite the rules of the school, a short bit about effort and character. The kids then remove their belts and leave the mat. One afternoon, though, instead of the head instructor, one of the other black belts was teaching class. As the class drew to a close, the head instructor stepped onto the back of the mat, kneeled down, and bowed with everyone else. Instead of having the kids recite the rules, the black belt teaching the class told the kids to turn and bow to the head instructor. What followed was a moment of pure confusion: some kids started reflexively reciting the rules. Others half turned, then hesitated when they saw other kids not turning or starting to take off their belts. It took the assistant instructor several tries to get everyone to turn around, bow, and then end class normally.

Classes normally follow a very predictable routine. It always begins and ends the same way. Changing that routine, as the instructor found, isn’t easy. This is true for all manner of organizational routines. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about kids or adults: routines are powerful. As we discussed in chapter eleven, athletes use routines all the time to help them focus and prepare for competition.

There are fundamentally two different types of routines: routines that we deliberately create and routines that we just fall into. Both types are equally powerful. However, while deliberately building a routine is generally beneficial, routines we just fall into are as like as not to be counter-productive.

 

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

Control Over Space

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

 

 

As we’ve discussed in several chapters, the feeling of control is important. One of the key messages of the organizational narrative is autonomy: how much control do members of the organization have over their schedule, how they do their work, even when and where they work. Leaders need to foster a sense of autonomy and control amongst the members of their team for the team to achieve the highest levels of productivity and performance. We seek to exert control over time, and we seek to exert control over the space we are in. One easy, and powerful, way of doing this is putting a picture of a spouse or other important person on your desk, as we discussed in Chapter 5. However, that is not the only option.

As much as possible, we want to let people have control of their personal space; indeed, we want to make sure they have personal space to have control over! Not having a fixed working area is disorientating. You don’t really feel like part of the organization. Even when you have a fixed working area, be that an office or a cubical, how much control you have to arrange it to your liking or decorate it with personal effects varies from organization to organization. If you want everyone to think alike, a good first step is to make sure everyone’s office looks exactly alike. Of course, they will also tend to be less engaged and less likely to commit to the really difficult goals. Giving people control over their space makes them more engaged and helps them feel that they have more control over their ability to solve the organization’s goals. Control, or its lack, in the small areas of organizational behavior spreads outward to the big areas that businesses really care about.

It is also worth noting that wide open working areas and the lack of even the illusion of privacy can reduce people’s feelings of control. While there are some organizations where this is inevitable due to the nature of the work, much of the time cubical farms and pods are unnecessary and counter-productive. What they save in short-term costs they make up for in reduced concentration and increased distractibility. It’s hard to feel in control of your space when you can hear everyone talking or tapping on keys.

 

“…[Organizational Psychology for Managers’] combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.” – Eric Bloom, President, Manager Mechanics, LLC