I have been taking my readers through a series of posts on innovation decision making built around the WRAP process from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Decisive. The WRAP acronym allows you to remember their four decision anchors – Widen your options, Reality test your assumptions, Attain distance before deciding and Prepare to be wrong. If you need to catch up, you can find the first three posts here, here and here.
In this post, we’ll address the issue of Attaining distance before making a decision. How exactly as business executives can we avoid the “shiny object” syndrome when making R&D portfolio decisions?
When my friends and I first started riding off-road motorcycles, we noticed a fascinating phenomenon associated with what we euphemistically called our “get offs.” When we would make a mistake, like pushing into a corner with too much speed, we would get flustered, freeze and look directly at whatever it was that we did not want to hit. What happened next, inevitably, is that we would run right into the object we were trying to avoid. I later became aware that this was a well-studied phenomenon in motorcycling called target fixation. What happens is that our primal brain kicks in, and our emotions override our intellect and take us directly where our eyes are pointed. The solution? Learn to “snap out of it” and look where you want to go instead (much easier said than done, by the way).
In making innovation decisions, there is a remarkably similar behavior that takes place in even the best organizations. One interesting area that is nicely framed in the book, is that by simply being exposed repeatedly to the same set of words (even if we don’t understand them) we develop an affinity for them. Consider your work world, for example: a leader makes a statement in a meeting that doesn’t quite add up, but no one challenges it. Later on that day a subordinate quotes it, and soon the whole team is taking it as fact. Once we have heard something stated enough times, we lower our filters and believe it to be true – whether or not it is.
3 Sets of Tools for Innovative Decision Making
Since it is so easy for us to become quickly fixated and taken in by emotion, when the decision calls for whole brain thinking we need to be very deliberate in escaping. The best way to build a bridge towards a better way of considering your decision is to use deliberate tools that open up your thinking processes.
So, how do we use these tools as innovation leaders?
Tools for pushing you back into a less emotional frame
- Every executive leader needs a wingman — someone who they can depend on for the unvarnished truth, or at a minimum, a new perspective when looking at a decision. These kinds of people are harder to find as you get more altitude in an organization, so develop a circle of paradigm-busting associates early and keep them close.
- Before making a decision, give yourself one sleep cycle. There is a remarkable amount of processing that is done by the unconscious mind during sleep, and if you are involved in high stakes decision making, investing in a regular sleep cycle has a huge ROI.
Tools to give you perspective
- Make a drawing. More than half of our brains are wired to process images and graphics – yet most of the time we are saddled with big textual documents that contain the foundation and structure of what we are to decide on. Simply sketching out what is really going on, with relationship notes and connection paths, can reduce blind spots and give you a new perspective. A classic resource in this space is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
- Fly over you business at 30,000 feet and draw a map. Mentally changing your position from the conference room table to an airliner can do amazing things for your thinking process. Suddenly things that seemed important at runway level become balanced in the big picture view.
Tools to anchor you back to core values
- Investing in a written set of values both personally and professionally makes fixation much less of an issue. Using decisions as an opportunity to refine and revisit these values has a dual positive effect – it allows you to test the strength of what you have written, and provides you with an opportunity to anchor your decisions in clarity.
What are your favorite tools to regain perspective and make better decisions? Please drop me a line or leave a comment below.
