Start with why

The Naked Brain
. When you force people to make decisions with only the
rational part of their brain, they almost invariably end up “overthinking.” These
rational decisions tend to take longer to make, says Restak, and can often be of
lower quality. In contrast, decisions made with the limbic brain, gut decisions,
tend to be faster, higher-quality decisions. This is one of the primary reasons
why teachers tell students to go with their first instinct when taking a multiple-
choice test, to trust their gut. The more time spent thinking about the answer, the
bigger the risk that it maybe the wrong one. Our limbic brains are smart and
often know the right thing to do. It is our inability to verbalize the reasons that
may cause us to doubt ourselves or trust the empirical evidence when our gut

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tells us not to.
Consider the experience of buying a flat-screen TV at your local electronics
store. You stand in the aisle listening to an expert explain to you the difference
between LCD and plasma. The sales rep gives you all the rational differences
and benefits, yet you are still none the wiser as to which one is best for you.
After an hour, you still have no clue. Your mind is on overload because you’re
overthinking the decision. You eventually make a choice and walk out of the
store, still not 100 percent convinced you chose the right one. Then you go to
your friend’s house and see that he bought the “other one.” He goes on and on
about how much he loves his TV. Suddenly you’re jealous, even though you still
don’t know that his is any better than yours. You wonder, “Did I buy the wrong
one?”
Companies that fail to communicate a sense of WHY force us to make
decisions with only empirical evidence. This is why those decisions take more
time, feel difficult or leave us uncertain. Under these conditions manipulative
strategies that exploit our desires, fears, doubts or fantasies work very well.
We’re forced to make these less-than-inspiring decisions for one simple reason
—companies don’t offer us anything else besides the facts and figures, features
and benefits upon which to base our decisions. Companies don’t tell us WHY.
People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. A failure to
communicate WHY creates nothing but stress or doubt. In contrast, many people
who are drawn to buy Macintosh computers or Harley-Davidson motorcycles,
for example, don’t need to talk to anyone about which brand to choose. They
feel the utmost confidence in their decision and the only question they ask is
which Mac or which Harley. At that level, the rational features and benefits,
facts and figures absolutely matter, but not to drive the decision to give money
or loyalty to the company or brand. That decision is already made. The tangible
features are simply to help direct the choice of product that best fits our needs. In
these cases, the decisions happened in the perfect inside-out order. Those
decisions started with WHY—the emotional component of the decision—and
then the rational components allowed the buyer to verbalize or rationalize the
reasons for their decision.
This is what we mean when we talk about winning hearts and minds. The
heart represents the limbic, feeling part of the brain, and the mind is the rational,
language center. Most companies are quite adept at winning minds; all that
requires is a comparison of all the features and benefits. Winning hearts,
however, takes more work. Given the evidence of the natural order of decision-
making, I can’t help but wonder if the order of the expression “hearts and
minds” is a coincidence. Why does no one set out to win “minds and hearts”?

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The ability to win hearts before minds is not easy. It’s a delicate balance of art
and science—another coincidental grammatical construction. Why is it that
things are not a balance of science and art, but always art before science?
Perhaps it is a subtle clue our language-impaired limbic brain is sending us to
help us see that the art of leading is about following your heart. Perhaps our
brains are trying to tell us that WHY must come first.
Absent a WHY, a decision is harder to make. And when in doubt we look to
science, to data, to guide decisions. Companies will tell you that the reason they
start with WHAT they do or HOW they do it is because that’s what their
customers asked for. Quality. Service. Price. Features. That’s what the data
reported. But for the fact that the part of the brain that controls decision-making
is different from the part of the brain that is able to report back that decision, it
would be a perfectly valid conclusion to give people what they ask for.
Unfortunately, there is more evidence that sales don’t significantly increase and
bonds of loyalty are not formed simply when companies say or do everything
their customers want. Henry Ford summed it up best. “If I had asked people
what they wanted,” he said, “they would have said a faster horse.”
This is the genius of great leadership. Great leaders and great organizations
are good at seeing what most of us can’t see. They are good at giving us things
we would never think of asking for. When the computer revolution was afoot,
computer users couldn’t ask for a graphical user interface. But that’s what Apple
gave us. In the face of expanding competition in the airline industry, most air
travelers would never have thought to ask for less instead of more. But that’s
what Southwest did. And in the face of hard times and overwhelming odds, few
would have asked their country, what can I do for you over what can you do for
me? The very cause upon which John F. Kennedy introduced his presidency.
Great leaders are those who trust their gut. They are those who understand the
art before the science. They win hearts before minds. They are the ones who start
with WHY.
We make decisions all day long, and many of them are emotionally driven.
Rarely do we sift through all the available information to ensure we know every
fact. And we don’t need to. It is all about degrees of certainty. “I can make a
decision with 30 percent of the information,” said former secretary of state Colin
Powell. “Anything more than 80 percent is too much.” There is always a level at
which we trust ourselves or those around us to guide us, and don’t always 
feel
we need all the facts and figures. And sometimes we just may not trust ourselves
to make a certain decision yet. This may explain why we 
feel
(there’s that word
again) so uncomfortable when others twist our arm to make a decision that
doesn’t sit well in our gut. We trust our gut to help us decide whom to vote for

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or which shampoo to buy. Because our biology complicates our ability to
verbalize the real reasons why we make the decisions we do, we rationalize
based on more tangible factors, like the design or the service or the brand. This
is the basis for the false assumption that price or features matter more than they
do. Those things matter, they provide us the tangible things we can point to to
rationalize our decision-making, but they don’t set the course and they don’t
inspire behavior.

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