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

And if you get things wrong, remember the imperative to learn from your mistakes.

That’s what Dick Zanuck did. He realised that he had based his decisions too firmly on past experiences, assuming that what was right yesterday would be just as successful tomorrow. It is testament to both his creative energy and his willingness to engage in introspection that he came back from these harsh experiences to produce some of the greatest movies of all time.

The Truth about Harry

Being stuck in the past can cause other problems too – a fog of assumptions based on past experiences can obscure the new or the innovative.

This is something that a dozen of the most prestigious British and American publishing houses must now realise.55 (#litres_trial_promo)

When a 223-page manuscript of around 90,000 words from an unknown female author landed on their desks back in 1996 they quickly turned it down for a number of understandable but misconceived reasons. The book was too long for kids these days – 50,000 words longer than the average children’s novel at the time.56 (#litres_trial_promo) Reading by boys was declining, especially of books by women and those light on dialogue. Moreover, this was a straight-on, full-blown fantasy, not a book about the kinds of serious issues such as bullying or broken families that were currently in vogue. It was hard to think of a successful children’s fantasy book in recent times.

Penguin, one of Britain’s most prestigious publishers, flatly rejected the manuscript. At Transworld it languished in the in-tray of somebody who was off sick.57 (#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, twelve of the top British and American publishers turned it down.58 (#litres_trial_promo)

It took a publisher new to the game, working in a children’s division just a couple of years old, with no past to be stuck in and a belief that a story with emotional resonance would always find an audience, to take the plunge.

Barry Cunningham, a former marketing man and one-time giant puffin (at exhibitions for Penguin’s children’s books imprint, Puffin, Barry, as Marketing Director, would walk around thus costumed), read all 223 pages. ‘The skies didn’t part and lightning didn’t come down or anything,’ he recounted as we sat in the basement of the nineteenth-century Savile Club, the Mayfair haunt previously frequented by Kipling, Hardy, Yeats and other literary greats, me sipping tea, he his trademark Coca-Cola.

Cunningham simply thought that the manuscript was ‘really engaging’. He negotiated with the author’s agent ‘for about five minutes, because he didn’t want very much money and I didn’t have very much money’, and bought the first two books in the series for the princely sum of £2,000.

As he said to me, ‘The rest is history.’ And it sure was.

The author, a first-time writer by the name of Joanna Rowling, who was ‘so nervous’ the first time Barry spoke to her that she ‘couldn’t really talk’, was delighted to get the firm offer, especially after so many rejections. And Barry Cunningham, of course, was also delighted. The seven Harry Potter books went on to sell over 450 million copies worldwide, have been translated into more than seventy languages, and spawned a movie franchise worth over $4.5 billion.

Rudyard Kipling was right to caution us to treat both triumph and disaster as ‘imposters’. Yet we’re all too prone to letting failure and success become our only guiding beacons. What this means is that not only do we risk ignoring cues that things may be changing around us, but also deny ourselves the possibility of contemplating futures, trajectories and possibilities that are different from what has come before.

How to See with Eyes Wide Open

To make smart decisions we need the right information to guide us. That is a given.

This means being aware of how instinctively tunnel-visioned we can be, of how some information glitters much more brightly than others – some of which may well turn out to be fool’s gold.

It means becoming more conscious of the way we are drawn to what’s most familiar or most obvious, or closest to what we want to hear. Of how little attention we pay to what we don’t want to know. Of just how caught up in our past we can be, and how this can disable our ability to process the present or imagine the future.

Being aware is a start. But there’s more that we can do to ensure we see with eyes wide open.

One thing we can do is to give ourselves more time – time both to gather the right information, and to consider it. I know that for many of us time feels like a luxury we just don’t have any more. But as Dr Alter makes explicit, ‘In order to think well, especially in hectic circumstances [and he’s talking about decisions made by doctors in the ER here], you need to slow things down to avoid making cognitive errors.’59 (#litres_trial_promo)

You need time to ask yourself what you may not have thought about, time to consider alternatives, time for your eyes to dart around the picture.

Time pressures encourage tunnel or distorted vision, while the best ideas often emerge after a reflective pause.

So, can you take a beat before you make your decision?

More generally, is there a way you can give yourself more time so that you can properly take in what it is you need to?

Barack Obama advised David Cameron that ‘The most important thing you need to do is have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. Without that you lose the big picture.’60 (#litres_trial_promo) And without the big picture, as we’ve seen, we risk not seeing those snakes.

So, can you batch your emails and respond to a group of them in one go? Is there anything more you can delegate to others? How else can you carve out your own thinking time? Many of us feel that this just isn’t possible in our hyper-hectic lives, but if the President of the United States can find the time, surely you and I can too?

Alternatively, can you just slow down your decision-making process? Who or what can help you take that pause? Doctors and pilots have been found to profit from following a checklist even when doing things they have done many times before. By slowing them down, the list makes them more methodical and less vulnerable to making the kind of cognitive errors we discussed earlier.61 (#litres_trial_promo) Might a system like that work for you?

You should also ask yourself who can help you interrogate your own ways of thinking, help force you to see everything in the jungle, not just what you’re most drawn to. Who can serve as your Challenger in Chief, as we explored earlier?

Before we move on to the next Step, it’s also worth reminding ourselves of the following.

First, that the further into the future the outcome of your decision will play out, the less likely that what worked before will prevail. It’s a basic law of probability – so if you can make your decision as late in the day as possible, do.

Second, that decisions are best made with built-in flexibility. So, if possible, don’t fix yourself to Plan A. In a world as fast-changing as ours, try whenever you can to have Plans B, C and D in your back pocket.

Third, bear in mind that in order to work from the best intelligence possible, you’ll need to make assessments on an ongoing and continuous basis. This means keeping your eye on the present and the future, not only on how things once were. Actively ask yourself, ‘What is different now?’ ‘What could be different tomorrow?’ And then think through the implications of this for the decisions you’re currently making and the information you’re presently seeking out.

And finally, give yourself permission to break from the past and try something unprecedented, especially if it’s an affordable punt. The pay-off can be quite remarkable. Bloomsbury Publishers made a multi-million-pound return on Barry Cunningham’s initial £2,000 investment.

As Barry said to me, ‘Probably the best investment in publishing ever.’

Takeaways

In a world of data deluge, distraction and uncertainty, a world in which we increasingly have to determine ourselves which information we should use to make our decisions, it’s understandable that we tend to focus on particular forms and types of information over others. Ultimately, it’s a kind of coping strategy.

But what we are most naturally or most instinctively drawn to may not actually be the best information to help us make decisions. What’s in the foreground, what’s most glittery, what’s biggest and boldest, stands out the most and grabs our attention, as do numbers over words, information that reinforces what we want to hear over information that jars, and the past, with its promise to be our lodestar. Yet all of these are potentially tigers consuming all our attention, while a snake slithers dangerously towards us on the ground.

We need to be aware of this; to re-calibrate how it is we see the world, re-adjust our focus and deploy others around us to help pull off the blinkers.

But once our blinkers are off, there’s more to consider. In keeping with life’s complexity, making smart decisions can be thwarted for other reasons too. For we are massively influenced by how others shape and form what it is they convey to us – by the words they use, the colours they choose, and even, as we will see, by touch. By factors in the ether that we’re not even aware of.

How to strip bare what we are told, so that we can evaluate the information before us, see beyond packaging and wrappers and spin and misleading cues, is what the next chapter is about.

QUICK TIPS FOR SEEING THE TIGER AND THE SNAKE

• Look beyond the most obvious data. What you are most drawn to will not necessarily be most relevant. Ask yourself what additional information might be of use. Challenge yourself to think about what you might have missed.

• Practise becoming more observant. Introduce a regular mindfulness technique to your day, such as the ‘raisin practice’. This will have a tangible effect on the quality of your decisions.

• Remember that numbers only tell a partial story. What are the numbers not telling you? What other information do you need to consider?

• Be aware of the form in which you’re receiving your information. Is it too reductionist? What is the PowerPoint slide not revealing? What is the Executive Summary not telling you? Who can provide you with the requisite nuance or detail? Is there a more in-depth report you need to get your hands on? If so, can you set the requisite time aside to read it and properly absorb the information?

• Don’t confuse a generally happy disposition with unrealistic levels of optimism. When you’re next told that something bad could happen to you, remind yourself of our natural tendency to ignore or underplay this kind of news. Try to contemplate whether your assessment would be different if you took your optimism down a notch or two. Who around you is of the glass-half-empty mindset? They might have a more realistic take on the information. Are you touching base with them frequently enough?

• Don’t just seek out information that confirms what it is you already believe or think. It’s vital to actively seek out information that could prove you wrong. Who in your life can act as your ‘Challenger in Chief’ to remind you to do this?

• As a general rule, carve out more thinking time for yourself. If Barack Obama can prioritise this, so can you. Can you batch your emails so as to free up thinking time? Schedule thinking time into your diary as you would any other appointment? What on your to-do list can be postponed or ditched?

• Slow down, to avoid making thinking errors. Give yourself time to consider alternative diagnoses and possibilities. We risk accepting the most easy-to-reach answer because we are so rushed for time. Develop a strategy that helps you avoid this. For some it may be a checklist, for others it may be that Challenger in Chief to talk the options through with.

• Identify those day-to-day distractions which take up too much of your focus. Can you limit the number of times you check Facebook or the football scores? How about downloading software that stops you from being able to surf the web for specified periods?

• Don’t use the past as too fixed a steer. There is great danger in assuming that the past will light the way to the future. Think of your favourite Dick Zanuck movie, or that special magician from Hogwarts, as a way of avoiding this thinking error.