How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

Never Say Never
In a complex situation, it’s rare that something is very obviously the right thing
to say, do, or choose. When we’re making any meaningful decision, whether it’s

---

how to run a meeting or where to invest a big chunk of money, there are usually
some pros and cons to every option. So when you notice yourself feeling very
strongly attached to an idea, or very strongly opposed to one, it’s a good sign
that you might be falling victim to confirmation bias.
In 
Chapter 1
, I suggested that you watch out for “absolute language” as a
signal that confirmation bias is affecting your intentions; it’s equally useful
when you’re evaluating options and ideas. Look out for phrases like: “We 
have
to do this!” “That will 
never
work!” or “I have 
absolutely
no clue why anyone
would want to do that!” Step back and ask:
“What am I/are we assuming or asserting here?”
“What if that isn’t 100 percent true? Is it never/always/absolutely/definitely
the case?”
“What do the exceptions tell me/us?”
In Peggy’s case, the fact that she sometimes catches herself asserting that it’s
“never” a good idea to add more words to an advertisement is a good signal that
she should consider when that might not be true—for example, when the words
explain the product’s more complicated benefits. In Nayan’s case, his
colleagues’ assumption that it was “absolutely necessary” to fire someone
prompted him to check whether it 
was
“absolutely” the only option. Hyperbole
is an excellent red flag on the route to real wisdom.
Conduct a Pre-mortem
Finally, here is a last-ditch tool to maximize your wisdom and minimize your
blind spots before pushing ahead with a decision. Recognizing that we can never
see the whole picture, we can force ourselves to explore the one perspective that
we’d never willingly adopt: that we are completely, catastrophically wrong in
the way we’re going about things. Psychologist Gary Klein, senior scientist at
MacroCognition, named this technique a “pre-mortem,” as opposed to the “post-
mortem” examination that sometimes happens 
after
a project has failed.
13
Uncomfortable, perhaps, but liberating, too—and far better than having to do an
actual post-mortem further down the line. It works like this:

---

Think about what you’re trying to achieve with the decision you’re making.
Think forward to an alternate future when your decision has played out, and
played out badly.
Imagine yourself now picking up the pieces. Ask yourself: Why did it go
wrong? What was it that you failed to think about when you first made the
decision?
I remember asking these questions one day when I was working with a big,
established company that was about to take over a smaller firm with a younger,
zippier culture. I’d spent a day with the integration team who were charged with
making the acquisition a success, and they were doing some advance planning
for the merger. Their conversation focused on “timelines” and “deliverables,”
and it had been pretty productive. But the problem with planning for mergers is
that a lot of it is done in secret, behind closed doors, before it’s announced to the
public. That makes it even harder than usual to uncover your blind spots. It’s
easy to believe your own version of the world is correct when you’re not
exposed to the thinking of outsiders.
So I posed an exercise that began: “It’s ten years from now, and the merger is
widely described in the business press as a failure. Why didn’t it work out?” At
first they laughed amiably. But then they threw themselves into the task. Their
headline answer was this: “We didn’t take steps to preserve the small firm’s
culture, the thing that made them attractive to us. Stifling their culture made it
impossible for them to be as creative as they’d been in the past.” I asked them to
be more specific. “Well, we assumed they should adopt all our business
processes, didn’t we?” This was indeed what they’d spent the previous hour
planning, in some depth. I asked what a wiser approach would have been. “We
would have been more nuanced about which processes we truly needed them to
adopt, and where we could have let them be different. And we would have asked
them to tell us how much space and support they needed to allow them to
continue being agile and innovative.” And with this pre-mortem completed, what
were they going to do differently now? “Well, we’re not going to impose all our
processes on them. We’ll work out which we think are really critical for us to
have in common, and then we’ll discuss it with them.” That sounded a lot wiser.

---