Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World

The drip, drip, drip doesn’t just make us less able to think, it’s also exhausting us. We are spent. Unable to sleep, headaches ever looming, always tired; our bodies cope with these new demands by keeping us, as we will learn, in a constant state of hormone-induced stress.23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Yet we crave these interruptions like catnip. Despite their pernicious impact, we actively seek them out. Forty per cent of people continue to check their work email after hours or while they are on holiday.24 (#litres_trial_promo) Eighty-six per cent of us use our mobiles while watching TV (this figure rises to 92 per cent for the 13-to-24 age group25 (#litres_trial_promo)). An informal poll of friends reveals a geneticist who checks news sites every five minutes while at work, a TV executive who catches up on his emails on the phone while he’s on the stationary bike at the gym, an art dealer who logs on to the Daily Mail website sixty times a day.

We are addicted,26 (#litres_trial_promo) stressed and overwhelmed, and it’s often while we are in this state that big as well as small decisions have to be made.

Whether we can be switched on if we remain switched on is a question I will return to.

The Age of Disorder

Alongside the constant distraction and the drip, drip, drip of the deluge, the third defining characteristic of our times, the triple of the triple whammy, is disorder – a combination of the breakdown of old, established orders and the extremely unpredictable nature of our age.

For this is an age in which accepted wisdoms have been dramatically overturned. An era in which Lehman Brothers – a bank that was ‘too big to fail’ – proved to be expendable. A time when, rather than preventing women from getting sick, it turns out that regular screening for breast cancer may actually make them sicker.27 (#litres_trial_promo)

An era when certainties can no longer be presumed certain.

Who would have thought, ten years ago, that serious conversations would be taking place about the Chinese yuan replacing the US dollar as the world’s main reserve currency? That a Eurozone country – Cyprus – would impose draconian capital controls? Or that, closer to home, we might no longer be able to trust in the safety of investing in bricks and mortar?

Things we thought we could rely upon now seem ever more vulnerable and chimerical.

Moreover, those who we depended upon to translate and curate the old world order for us have, in just a few years, lost their monopoly of knowledge. Librarians are being usurped by Google, travel agents by TripAdvisor reviewers. Doctors are being challenged by the shared experiences of patients. Grey-haired newspaper proprietors by twenty-something social-media moguls.

Established orders are collapsing all around us.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In an age in which our most famous economics sages failed to predict the financial crisis, in which our intelligence services failed to predict the Arab Spring, in which Facebook groups can prove to be better diagnosticians than medical experts (more on this in Step Six), and in which the tabloidisation of the broadsheet press makes us unable to blindly trust even supposedly respectable papers’ claims, the increasingly competitive information landscape is in many ways positive.

But that is not to say that this trend is categorically good. What are the agendas of these new curators? How trustworthy are they? Which is more likely to steer me to the right hotel – Joe from Idaho’s TripAdvisor testimony, or the advice of my long-trusted travel agent? And while it’s true that Wikipedia is in some subjects now as reliable as the Encyclopaedia Britannica,28 (#litres_trial_promo) will the ‘crowd’ always have my best interests at heart?

In a time of disorder, the past can no longer be assumed to be the lodestar for the future, the future cannot easily be foreseen, and accepted truths and conventional curators of information cannot be unquestioningly relied upon.

Disorder can bring about positive change and innovation, but it can also leave us feeling compass-less and uncertain.

It’s really hard to know who to believe. Who to trust. And who to rely on to help us work out what the future will hold.

Get with the Programme – How to Be an Empowered Decision-Maker

OK. You’ve got the picture now. The context in which we have to make decisions is, to say the least, challenging.

And yet, of course, we still have to make choices. I still have to decide which doctor’s advice to follow. The President of the United States still needs to decide whether to strike Iran. The mother hearing her baby cry still needs to decide whether to pick him up or to leave him to cry through the night alone. You still need to decide who to hire for your business, or where to put your retirement funds. We still have to make decisions, important, life-changing decisions, regardless of how distracted we are, how much data swirls around us, how unpredictable and uncertain our world now is. Regardless of how exhausted we feel.

Over time, we’ve developed ways to do just that, developed short cuts and coping strategies – some conscious, some not – for navigating this difficult terrain. Strategies for gathering information and then processing it in ways that fit with the realities of our distracted, deluged, disordered lives.

We must ask ourselves though how good these strategies really are. Most of us are going through life without interrogating whether our decision-making processes are fit for purpose. And that’s something we need to change – especially when the stakes are high and the decisions are of real import.

We need to take more control of our decisions and how we make them. We need to become empowered thinkers.

Without quality information we can trust and effective methods for interrogating it, our decisions are bound to be at best sub-optimal, and at worst very damaging to our needs and interests. So in the coming Steps I’ll be expanding on our information-gathering blind spots, and showing how we can do better.

How attuned are you to the most common flaws in experts’ thinking? How good are you at spotting statistical cons? How quickly are you able to identify a suspect ‘fact’? Is the information you are focusing on the right information to be basing your decision upon? What might be worth considering instead? Which unusual suspects might you turn to for advice?

I’ll be looking into whether you have dug deep enough to establish the truth of your sources. Do you know how to interrogate new sources of digital information? Or how to evaluate the ‘answers’ churned out by computers? Do you know who to trust? And why? I’ll also look in detail at the way our decision-making is being transformed by new online friends and foes, and point out the pitfalls as well as the quick wins.

In an era of disinformation and misinformation, an era of Photoshop, Fox News, personalised search and ever more spin, I will help you discover how best to interrogate your sources and assess the quality of information you are presented with. And how to widen your net in the first place.

I’ll also be investigating the surprising role that we ourselves play in the choices we make, by looking at what’s going on, at a conscious and subconscious level, during the decision-making process.

For we are not the robotic, emotionless, experience-less, rational decision-makers of economic theory. A whole host of visceral processes take place within us – neurons fire, memories swirl, emotions feel – at the same time as the analytical part of our brain churns out its computations. As we will see, this dance between subconscious and conscious, intellect and intuition, profoundly affects the risks we take, the futures we contemplate, the forecasts we make. As does the environment in which we operate. Colour, smell, touch – all impact upon the choices we make, as does the language used. What this means is that our immediate response will often need challenging, however natural or intuitive it may feel.

Given how fast-changing our world is, I’ll also be exploring whether the models and mental maps we currently use remain appropriate. How is the past affecting your current decisions? Is it locking you into particular patterns or behaviours? Is it leading you to make linear predictions? Or are you able to break free from the past when need be, and envisage a very different sort of future?

And have you assembled the right team around you to help you make the toughest decisions? In an age of dispersed knowledge, are you ‘crowd-sourcing’ your information-gathering? Who is in your inner circle? Yes-men or nay-sayers? Who is acting as your ‘challenger’ or your ‘translator’? Are you taking sufficient responsibility for your decisions? Or are you attempting to pass the buck to others?

Throughout the book, I’ll be combining the latest insights from academia – from psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology and information science – with first-hand insights from a wide range of people who have to make high-stakes decisions on a regular basis – hedge-fund managers and judges, CEOs and politicians, intelligence officers and fighter pilots, doctors and movie producers. By learning from decision-makers who’ve sometimes got things right and sometimes got things very wrong, we will get a better sense of those traits and strategies that can help us be good decision-makers, as well as the moves that can serve us ill.

With some traits, this is not obvious.

Take those super-confident forecasters, the ones who are given inordinate airtime. It turns out that the more confident a forecaster is in his predictions, the worse those forecasts prove to be.29 (#litres_trial_promo) It’s the same with doctors. You know those overly self-assured ones? I’ve certainly come across some in my time. A number of studies now reveal that the ones who are dead certain in their diagnoses are all too often wrong.30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Sometimes the strategies that work are incredibly simple.

We’ll learn how a board’s decisions can be transformed if the directors are asked to change where they sit.31 (#litres_trial_promo) We’ll discover how much easier it is to make the right choice when you ask for information to be presented in black and white rather than in colour.32 (#litres_trial_promo) We’ll learn how we make better decisions if we’ve had a sandwich.33 (#litres_trial_promo)

Winning strategies can be somewhat counter-intuitive. Did you know that you can at times get better advice on how to deal with your illness from a patient than from a doctor? That if you want your team to make smart decisions, you’d do better to make sure they’re at odds with each other for a fair proportion of the time, rather than always be of the same mindset? That rather than listening to your boss, you might be better off rebelling? Or that you might want to wait to empty your bladder until you’ve made your decision?34 (#litres_trial_promo)

What it is impossible to do in this book, however, is give you one over-arching, catch-all strategy to follow. This isn’t about ‘Blinking’, or ‘Nudging’, or trusting ‘the Wisdom of Crowds’, and leaving it at that.35 (#litres_trial_promo) I don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all decision-making template that can work for all of us, at all times. Human life is too complex for that, especially nowadays.

Instead, what I hope to deliver is a ‘decision-making tool kit’. A kit that will enable you to interrogate your own decision-making habits and investigate the information you are given. A kit with the tools that will empower you to make decisions in radically different ways from how you may have been making them until now.

Because ultimately, this book is about empowering you.

Empowering you so that you are able to get past the spin and evaluate the underlying substance. Empowering you so that you can challenge conventional wisdoms and determine what to replace them with. Empowering you so that you are not cowed by authority figures or over-confident experts, and are able to assess their opinions as you would the opinions of any others.

Empowering you so that you’re not ashamed to ask for help when you need to, but have the skills to be able to identify who best to get this help from, and how. Empowering you to be able to look into your own psyche, so that you can identify ways in which you may be sabotaging your own decision-making.

The goal of this book is to empower all of us to become more confident, more independent and wiser thinkers and decision-makers. To become people who neither blindly accept the dictates of others nor unquestioningly follow our own initial instincts or analysis – people able to face the world with eyes wide open, and make smart choices and decisions for ourselves.

QUICK TIPS FOR GETTING TO GRIPS WITH A WORLD IN HYPER-DRIVE

• Commit to becoming an Empowered Decision-Maker.

• See the Ten Steps as the tool kit to help you in this quest. The Tips that follow will get you thinking – they will get you started on your journey. We will develop them further as the book progresses.

• Become aware that we have to make over 10,000 decisions a day. Begin to think about which of these you actually need to make, and whether you are really prioritising the important ones.

• Start thinking about how it is you make decisions. Do you consult others and gather a range of opinions, or do you take everything upon yourself? Do you make decisions quickly? Or do you tend to want to mull options over first?

• Start noting who or what typically influences the choices that you make.

• Acknowledge that smart decision-making needs time and space. Begin to think about how you can reshape your environment to achieve this. How can you limit distractions and disruptions? Can you take technology-free Sabbaths? Can you initiate a new policy at work that limits who is cc’d on emails and under which circumstances?