Using a defined deliberation process allows you to make effective decisions, act with confidence to overcome obstacles, and open up new paths and opportunities.
We all like to think that we are effective captains of our own ships—capable of making decisions to steer ourselves through any condition to reach our desired destination. But here is some bad news: All of us engage in thinking habits that do not serve us well in terms of making decisions that keep us on the best course headings. We are far less rational and effective as decision-makers than we would like to admit, or even know, and most of us unwittingly fall into many of the same thinking traps over and over again. Simply put, our thinking is unreliable. The good news is that we can improve the reliability of our thinking with many of the principles and practices outlined in the book.
This final agency principle, Deliberate, Then Act, guides you on how to assess your current situation, generate and weigh your options in a contemplative, rational way before you make important decisions, and take clear, decisive action when required. Some decisions result in a minor course correction, while at other times you must make a more substantial decision that sends you in a totally new direction. Proper deliberation before taking action on matters large or small will help you avoid experiencing the regret many feel after acting on impulse.
All the other agency principles you have learned about thus far come to bear on your ability to make good decisions for yourself. Effective decision-making is so essential and foundational to the expression of human agency because we are, in many ways, the sum total of all the decisions we make during our lives.
In the course of our interviews, we uncovered valuable ways that expert decision-makers make decisions. Interestingly, we discovered areas of overlap common to effective decision-making. Read on and you will become familiar with some of the thinking skills and techniques that judges, physicians, police detectives, and business executives use in the course of their work. You will learn to refine your thinking skills and adopt a decision-making process to make important life decisions, much like these experts, to more effectively pursue your desired course.
For a moment, imagine yourself wearing a black robe and presiding over a courtroom as a sitting judge.
Your first case involves a woman in her midthirties who is in front of your bench for a bail hearing on first-degree murder charges. She’s been indicted by a grand jury in Massachusetts for the murder of the father of her friend. The man had been stabbed to death while sleeping in his bed. There was a lot of evidence pointing to the woman, yet the case had gone cold for several years with no arrest. Police reopened the case after learning that this woman had issued a threat to her ex-husband: “I will kill you just like I killed that guy in Massachusetts.”
Your task is to decide whether you will grant or deny this woman bail. Keep in mind that it is rare for someone accused of first-degree murder to receive bail. What do you think? Bail or no bail? And if you grant bail, will you make it high, like $1 million? Before you read any further, say aloud what your gut decision is.
If you are like most people, you are likely to automatically lean toward denying her bail or setting bail at an astronomical amount. Reading the basic details of the crime evokes emotion. Recall from previous chapters how System 1 thinking (fast, impressionistic, intuitive) operates and how it often quickly steps in when your emotions are stimulated. Thus far, System 1 is most likely the primary driver for your thinking about this case.
Now stop for a moment and ask yourself these questions:
• Can you describe the specific rationale or mental steps you used to arrive at your decision? Were you aware of any particular underlying beliefs that led you in the direction of making your decision?
• Are you in a positive mood at the moment—seeing people positively? Your frame of mind matters. What feelings emerged as you read the basic outline of the case? Did what happened to the victim shift your thinking toward being more negative?
• And lastly, do you believe in this: It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer. The English scholar William Blackstone wrote this in the late eighteenth century, and his writings have been highly influential in the development of U.S. law.
Now let’s look a bit more deeply into the case. Below are a few more facts for you to reflect on before deciding the fate of this woman.
• The murder happened fourteen years earlier, and during most of the intervening years, the police were not actively pursuing the case.
• There were several other people also present in the house at the time of the murder. All evidence against the woman is circumstantial.
• The comment “just like I killed that guy in Massachusetts” was reported by a friend of the woman’s ex-husband and is considered hearsay under the law.
• This woman was nineteen years old at the time of the crime, thirty-three years old at the time of her arrest, and she had no criminal record. She was living openly in Florida under her real name. Statistically, because she has a young child in her care, she is not a high flight risk.
Do these additional details change your thinking about whether to deny or issue bail in this case? Or not at all? In either case, your thinking likely has slowed down, shifting from System 1 into System 2 thinking (methodical, logical, and analytical). You may be reconsidering your initial judgment. There obviously is a lot at stake. Your decision could potentially take away an innocent person’s freedom and consequently result in a minor child being taken from her mother’s care.
For retired superior court judge Beth Butler, this case is one she is able to clearly call to mind years later. A perceptive, energetic woman with a warm smile, she met with us in a conference room at an old New England town library near her home.
“My ninety-four-year-old aunt often uses the word discernment,” Butler said. “That’s how I prefer to think of it. Judges and juries have to be discerning when assessing the credibility of witnesses and when weighing various evidence. You might have a hundred witnesses who were at the scene of a crime saying X but only one witness saying Y. And yet, that one witness may be the most credible.”
Judges work to ensure that the trial process doesn’t overload their minds or those of the jurors. They decide up front what evidence gets through the gate and what does not. They do this with a clear, transparent process that follows the rule of law. Up front, the legal process filters information to keep out that which is extraneous—and hence to also keep in the facts and evidence that are most relevant. This helps ensure that the deliberation process can be most effective and that our highly emotional, biased, and often irrational brains can arrive at a just decision.
Use Your Agency: Too much information can derail your thinking and confuse matters. Don’t give everything you hear, see, or read equal weight. Weigh credible sources more heavily. Pare information down to the facts most relevant to the decision you are considering. Filter out less relevant information up front to help yourself focus.
“The safest thing to do in that case of the woman charged with murder,” Butler recalled, “was to set an incredibly high bail or deny it altogether. There is considerable precedent for that—in fact, it is customary practice. That decision would have presented a low risk of public criticism, and it would have eliminated the risk of her fleeing, but at the same time, it would have had the highest chance of violating the rights of a potentially innocent person.” Interestingly, Judge Butler was at this time in her career presiding over one of the most historic courtrooms in the United States. It was in this same courtroom in 1921 that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two first-generation Italian Americans, were sentenced to their deaths in the electric chair in a world-famous trial for a crime they did not commit.
Butler had a process for helping her make her decision. First, she gave herself time to decide. Important decisions need time and resources. She considered what decisions had come before in this situation—legally, these are called precedents. Good prior decisions can help guide future decisions, although she knew she should decide this case on its own merits. She talked with other judges. “I asked them what they thought and what they would do,” she said. “Consultation is so important. We can learn from one another how best to decide.”
After much deliberation, Judge Butler decided to set a low bail amount for the accused woman. It wasn’t an easy decision, bucking the strong anti-crime public sentiments of the day. She told us that in recent memory she couldn’t recall a time where this had happened in a first-degree murder case.
In the subsequent legal proceeding where all evidence was weighed and the credibility of the indictment against the accused woman was openly evaluated, the woman was formally acquitted of all charges. She returned to living her life in Florida and raising her child. Judge Butler reported that the state prosecutor’s demeanor post-trial indicated to her that he did not believe that an injustice had been served in the case.
The trial outcome is not the sole reason one could say that setting an affordable pretrial bail was the right decision. Judge Butler’s difficult choice was made by scrupulously following the framework of the law as well as by using her own logical thinking process. She ensured that her emotions did not dominate. She did not allow a herd mentality to unduly influence her thinking process.
Put another way, Judge Butler’s process is a good model because she slowed down and allowed herself to engage in more deliberative System 2 thinking, staying away from a snap judgment.
Your own process for deliberation should be as thoughtful, and you can keep it as simple as possible. You can start by asking yourself, What am I seeing here? Do I need more time? Or even asking just two words: What’s happening?
The other six principles in this book all feed into Deliberate, Then Act. As we’ve laid out in earlier chapters, we live during a time of increasing complexity and uncertainty. For most of us, the environments we inhabit are not conducive to good decision-making. Much too often, our brains are overstimulated by an excess of information and from the rapid rate of change and dislocation that we observe around us. Living in such an environment is mentally and emotionally taxing—and it increases anxiety. This stress and heightened emotion reduces the amount of personal energy available to reflect and deliberate in a methodical way on the more important decisions we must make. The result is that suboptimal or poor decisions are made with greater frequency.
Decision fatigue has become a growing problem. There are more choices confronting us every day that require us to navigate complex decision mazes. Health insurance plans, for example, typically are presented in detailed spreadsheets with a mind-numbing array of variables to consider. Just giving thought to it can be an exhausting undertaking. Multiply that many times over for the number of decisions we make each day, many with similar sets of complex options. When our energy is depleted, the quality of our decisions plummets.
The fact that life requires us to deliberate, decide, and make frequent choices means that developing an effective personal decision-making process has become critically important. The more grounded we are in terms of accurately perceiving what’s happening around us and the more self-aware and less rushed we are, the better our overall judgment and decisions are likely to be.
One final point on what we are up against: A proliferation of powerful media platforms producing a cacophony of different voices in the virtual public square exist today, all vying for your attention and seeking to influence you. Fraud abounds. Gullibility has become an issue of such concern that it is being studied and debated by many experts. What is real and true cannot be assumed to be widely known and commonly understood. In this context, it has become necessary to define that most fundamental building block of effective thinking: facts. Facts are the bedrock of logical, intelligent thought and decision-making. Facts are verifiable. They are not someone’s wishful interpretation of events. Facts enable us to use our minds to separate reality from fantasy, and we must make an effort to determine them if we are to exercise agency through making good decisions in our lives.
Judge Butler gave us insight into the way a judge weighs a complex decision. We can also learn from expert medical practitioners, who frequently make life-or-death decisions for the people in front of them.
As chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Recanati chair of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Jerome Groopman is highly regarded both for his clinical prowess and for his outstanding writing about the practice of medicine. We caught up with him at his office a few blocks from historic Fenway Park. He recalled it was about ten or twelve years back when he undertook a deep dive into studying the decision-making practices of his physician colleagues.
It came about after he had been conducting medical rounds with interns, residents, and medical students. Something unexpected—“disturbing,” as he put it—had occurred to him. Why weren’t his students, this next generation of physicians, challenging each other, listening more carefully to patients, thinking openly, and reflecting more deeply about medical diagnosis and treatment? As an instructor, was he failing his trainees in some way? Was rigid reliance on evidence-based medicine and algorithmic decision trees constraining his students’ thinking to the point it would prevent them from growing into discerning physicians, capable of thinking outside the box? That moment put him on a mission to find out more. He started turning to his colleagues in different areas of medicine and asking them, How do you think?
Surprisingly, Groopman told us, “Not one doctor to whom we posed that question had a clue as to how to answer. There was no metacognition.” Metacognition is the mental task of stepping outside oneself and literally thinking about one’s own thinking. “There was little self-awareness of the process of how they made their decisions, no triggers to warn them when they were moving into cognitive pitfalls, no stopgaps or breaks to question their own process of making a diagnosis,” he said. “These are highly trained physicians, and even they were just as susceptible to the evolutionary shortcuts we all take.”
Bias in decision-making and lack of awareness of how one thinks may help explain why medical diagnoses can be wrong and result in life-or-death consequences. For example, in a 2015 study of 286 patients seeking a second opinion from the Mayo Clinic, over 20 percent of initial diagnoses that had been previously assigned by the patients’ primary care physicians were wrong. Medicine is part art and part science and is very complex and always evolving, so 100 percent accuracy in diagnosing may be impossible to achieve across all patients or all problems, but one has to wonder how many errors in medical decision-making can be avoided by teaching physicians to be more self-aware of their thinking processes and to follow simple rules in terms of how they think.
Groopman’s wife, Dr. Pamela Hartzband, is also a medical doctor (she’s an attending physician in the Division of Endocrinology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center), and she came up with a way to push back against automatic decision-making. “Pam developed a simple procedure when she was an intern in medical school many years back,” Groopman says. “To her, it was like a game she played to stay sharp. She asked herself, What if that other doctor who made the diagnosis is wrong? What else could it possibly be? She made a concerted effort to always question before accepting an answer.” Hartzband and Groopman collaborated on the book Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You (New York: Penguin, 2011), which emphasizes how partnering with other trusted, thoughtful, open-minded thinkers improves the decision-making process. They have introduced courses at Harvard Medical School to teach medical school students and practicing physicians about thinking rules that foster cognitive self-awareness, recognize bias, and increase the accuracy of making diagnoses.
Their approach to bringing awareness to decision-making is applicable outside of the medical field. A car mechanic should consider multiple causes of why an engine isn’t running as it should. A contractor should ask what might be happening before replacing warped floorboards. A teacher ought to recommend testing if a student is falling behind in his or her reading level to help ascertain why. An unhappy worker should consider what’s underlying her decision if she’s thinking of quitting on an impulse.
People with agency often report using this feat of mind to better understand themselves and their thinking style more objectively, even if they didn’t know the technical name metacognition.
Reflect back on a conversation you had earlier today and try to analyze it objectively. How did I sound? Was I being defensive or aggressive when I was talking with my coworkers? Metacognition will help you keep better track of—and help reduce—errors in your thinking and help you be more emotionally balanced and stable. Sometimes we call it insight, and it builds agency by giving you a more accurate read on how you think and feel. It keeps tabs on how others are likely perceiving you as well. When you metacognate, you are like your own consultant or trainer, giving helpful feedback to better yourself.
Metacognition steers you onto more realistic, thoughtful paths—facilitating critical thinking and putting you more in control. If you observe an emotion or thought that isn’t helpful, flag it and alter it. If you observe yourself to be rushing to judgment, slow your thinking process down. Keep a critical eye on the quality of your thinking. People with greater agency monitor themselves more frequently to help them not veer off into irrational thinking.
To practice metacognition and think about one’s own thinking, here are some takeaways from our conversation with Groopman:
• Don’t get seduced by shortcuts, and don’t favor efficiency over accuracy. Know when you’re placing too much confidence in attractive charts, graphics, preset protocols, and computer algorithms. Are you accepting without questioning someone else’s “frame” of the problem? Are you relying on others to do your deciding for you by accepting their conclusion too readily?
• Name your mental steps. How did you arrive at your decision? If you can’t name your steps that led to a decision, be suspicious of that decision.
• Always question your decisions and question how you make them. Ask yourself, Did I miss something? What if I’ve been making my decisions based on an erroneous starting point or piece of bad information? Are there other ways to approach making this decision? Am I questioning deeply enough?
• Recognize and remember your mistakes and your misjudgments. Incorporate these memories into your current thinking to improve decision-making.
• Stay open and self-aware. Be open to learning from everyone. Be an active listener. Try to value many opinions. Also ask yourself, What’s my thinking style, my personality? What are my biases? Do I not ask questions because I want to be seen as competent? How might my personality and ways of thinking influence how I make assessments and reach conclusions?
From our interviews with experienced decision-makers, all emphasized the importance of not rushing. Taking your time—even when others or circumstances are rushing you—is essential to making accurate decisions. Consider the story below of another physician wrestling with this issue within the context of a hectic emergency room.
Thinking under extreme time pressure is not optimal, but it is inevitable that we will find ourselves in this situation at times. As Groopman suggested, it is always best not to rush and get seduced by mental shortcuts. Use all the time available to you in making a decision. That means slowing things down when possible. It means not allowing the external setting to dictate the terms of your thinking. Speed typically decreases accuracy—there is a direct relationship there.
Peter Shearer, M.D., is the associate director of the Mount Sinai Hospital Emergency Department in New York City. Athletic, with intelligent brown eyes and a compassionate demeanor, Shearer was surprisingly relaxed as he discussed a typical hectic day in the Mount Sinai ER. Over any given two-hour period, ER physicians like Shearer treat as many as sixteen patients and are interrupted as many as forty times. Shearer’s decision-making needs to happen in a focused, organized manner and at a rapid, intense pace, and it needs to be highly accurate. In his work, knowing when to settle on a firm diagnosis versus deferring to gather more information versus knowing when to take immediate and direct action has life-and-death consequences. Knowing when to pause and reflect more deeply to ensure adequate deliberation has occurred can also make all the difference for him and the patients he is treating.
Recently, a twenty-three-year-old student came to the Mount Sinai ER asking for postexposure meds to prevent HIV and other STDs. She explained to Shearer that she’d had sex with a guy she’d met the night before and, upon waking, discovered drug paraphernalia lying around in his apartment. She was worried about HIV and hepatitis. She explained that she’d been out drinking the night before. The alcohol had clouded her judgment.
“While she was telling her story,” Shearer explained, “something was telling me that things weren’t quite adding up.” The trainee who’d first taken her story missed it. Shearer reflected on an important intuitive moment. “There I was talking to her about something painful, embarrassing, and scary for her—in this crowded, noisy place, hoping to have a more private conversation and wanting to get more information from her. She relayed the same story to me again, but something inside kept telling me to ask her, ‘Any chance you were coerced into sex?’ Once I posed the question, everything changed. It was like a floodgate opened. She confided in me that she’d been date-raped. He was a friend of a friend. He’d been drinking heavily, too, and she couldn’t get him to stop.
“Sometimes,” Shearer said, “your intuition tells you to ask the more awkward question that most people don’t want to ask. Even doctors feel awkward about asking certain questions and prying, but what I’ve learned is that the patient is often waiting for you to ask. Glad I picked up on that and did ask. For every one we catch, there are probably ten we miss.”
Shearer was able to get this young, traumatized woman psychological counseling in addition to appropriate medical care, which helped set her on a better course than if he had simply treated her with postexposure medications. During his assessment, he was able to control external stimuli and not allow the hectic emergency room environment to force him to rush. This allowed him to pay greater attention to his expert intuition that told him something was amiss. He then applied his slower, more logical, deliberative thinking to the situation.
We’re all fast thinkers. We prefer to take mental shortcuts. We like to reach conclusions quickly but are often sloppy in our thinking habits. By contrast, slow thinking is simply harder to do. It requires more effort, and it’s tiring. To give something deep thought—as when we learn something brand new or confront a puzzling, complex situation—takes more focus, concentration, and literal physiological energy, considering the fact that our brains eat up 20 percent of our bodies’ energy. When Dr. Shearer hit the Pause button in the ER, took a moment to reflect on what he’d just heard from his twenty-three-year-old patient, and gave it his full attention, he lowered his risk of making an error, and he got it right. It was a conscious decision on his part to devote more energy to considering the patient he was treating. Devoting more of his brainpower to the task was the harder road to take, but it yielded a far better outcome for his patient.
As we’ve noted earlier, in 1974, Israeli psychologists Tversky and Kahneman published groundbreaking work on the ways that people make errors in judgment and decision-making. Despite possessing the talent to think logically, human beings often rely on mental shortcuts, or, as Kahneman refers to them, rules of thumb. While this greatly simplifies and dramatically speeds up the process of making thousands of judgments a day, it often comes with a significant amount of error.
Kahneman and Tversky describe the source of these errors in thinking, which take on predictable patterns, as cognitive biases. When you add time pressure and overstimulation into the mix, you can begin to imagine how often thinking errors occur for most of us.
The fact that these errors tend to be systematic is good news for achieving greater personal agency. If we are aware of our most common biases, we can work to keep our errors in thinking to a minimum, at least on the most important things. There’s a glossary of biases here. These are the biases we most often come across in our work, and they are worth having a look at to see which of them you might inadvertently be using. For example, when things work out well, do you catch yourself taking a little more credit than you might actually deserve? Likewise, when things don’t go well, do you sometimes push the blame onto others for things that perhaps they don’t have much control over? If so, don’t be hard on yourself, but own up! These are just two of the many human biases that influence our thinking. Knowing where you are biased allows you to bring it to the surface to ensure that it doesn’t lead you astray.
Deliberation is an active process that requires energy. It can be learned and practiced. The overall goal of effective deliberation is for you to make appropriate and judicious use of both System 1 and System 2 thinking. In order to do this, you need to learn to use them together in a self-aware manner. The vast majority of the time, you are using System 1 (“fast”) thinking because your brain has evolved to most readily perform this function. Your environment requires you to use mental shortcuts to think fluidly in your day-to-day life where you must make decisions frequently. Otherwise, you’d be thinking intensely about every detail or every single decision, and not much would get done. And yet, you can’t and wouldn’t be well served by living your life making only quick, intuitive decisions. There are clearly times when it is best to shift into intentional, slower thinking—thinking more analytically and methodically to arrive at a better decision. The key is knowing when it’s worth the additional effort that this requires and learning how to do it effectively.
Ideally, you should call up System 2 thinking when you need to make bigger decisions and when the stakes are high. System 2 thinking also helps you sort out and make sense of the massive amount of information hitting you each day. Generally, System 2 thinking requires you to seek out accurate information to make an informed choice.
Review this checklist of questions. These are typical of the questions we ask our clients to get them thinking more about (and improving upon) their critical-thinking skills.
• How good are you at engaging in slow, deliberate thinking?
• Do you believe you have the capacity to think critically?
• Do you use a particular method?
• Do you take the time to pin down the most relevant facts?
• Is this something you do consciously for the bigger decisions?
Or
• Do you generally rush to a decision because it’s quicker and easier and you just want to get it off your plate?
• Do you find yourself often getting distracted by the next thing demanding your attention?
• Do you tend to put off decision-making for as long as possible?
Be fair to yourself. If a highly educated expert like Dr. Shearer worries about making errors in his judgment, where in your life might you be making serious errors because you don’t slow down your thinking or don’t question how you think?
Again, in our experience, most people have not developed a reliable system to follow to keep their decision-making under their control. Few people try to step outside themselves to regularly observe how they employ their thinking skills. Surprisingly, many people don’t even seek out the best information up front before making important decisions. In short, most people have serious gaps in their ability to think critically. We continue to be surprised how many people we work with find themselves rushing to judgment and looking back with regret.
One concept has come up again and again throughout this book—critical thinking.
The potential to think critically resides in us all. While some may be better at it than others, anyone can learn to improve. Critical thinking is most important in situations where we have strong emotions about a topic and perhaps are getting our knowledge through taking mental shortcuts (politics, for instance). The most fundamental principle of critical thinking is to question things for ourselves and to be aware of the assumptions we are making. The goal here is not to question absolutely every last thing but to be a prudent person who is aware of the limitations of one’s knowledge.
To engage critical thinking, your emotions and beliefs need to be held in check. This means that you need to start by suspending your fast, emotionally driven, and automatic thinking. In its place, engage slow, logical, and intentional thinking. The easiest way to do this is to get yourself somewhere quiet, uncluttered, and private, and tell yourself you’re going there with a singular mission. You are going to spend time engaged in deep, reflective, logical thinking where you will question assertions, claims, and assumptions for their veracity and figure out a path forward. Below is a simple process that will help you to activate and engage your critical-thinking skills.
There are many articles, books, courses, and adult education classes on how to develop critical thinking skills. Consider any or all of these resources and start simple. The points we describe below are inspired by the work of two experts, Linda Elder and Richard Paul, and are based on their article “Becoming a Critic of Your Thinking” from the Foundation for Critical Thinking.
Start by clarifying your thinking. Watch out for “vague, fuzzy, formless, blurred thinking,” as Elder and Paul say. This is the type of thinking you’re likely to have when rushing, distracted, and fatigued. One example is when you rely on overgeneralizations, such as All banks are exactly the same, doesn’t matter which you choose. Resist thinking superficially. Challenge yourself to go deeper. Verify if your thinking is clear by running it by others and asking them if it sounds reasonable.
Also keep from straying off topic, and avoid making unjustified leaps in thinking. In other words, stick to the point. Don’t meander. Stay focused and relevant to the main issue you are trying to critically think about.
Become a more adept questioner as well, and don’t accept what others tell you unexamined. As Elder and Paul say, question questions. Ask yourself, Have I asked the right questions, the best questions … enough questions? Welcome questions (and feedback) from others, but be discerning and stick only to the questions or feedback of others pertinent to the topic and that really help to move you toward better thinking.
And last, try to be reasonable. This is easier said than done. First, acknowledge your fallibility. Realize you don’t have all the answers. Don’t be closed-minded. Be aware of your beliefs and biases. Elder and Paul note that the hallmark of a good critical thinker is the willingness to change one’s mind upon hearing more reasonable explanations or solutions. An earlier-discussed agency principle, Manage Your Emotions and Beliefs, will also help you monitor and control strong feelings and beliefs that can derail your critical thinking.
Superintendent Colm Lydon has a position with an enormous set of responsibilities. He’s the chief of the Bureau of Intelligence and Analysis for the Boston Police Department, kind of the head of homeland security for the city. Critical thinking is second nature to him—something he engages in every day and all day. There is not much he has not seen, having served as a police officer for more than thirty years: terror attacks, homicides, gang violence, organized crime.
“Every single police officer is essentially a problem solver,” Lydon told us. “Detectives are specifically trained to solve complex, ambiguous problems where there’s little to guide them and when getting to resolution takes focus, time, persistence, and lots of patience.”
The detective’s process is similar to the judge’s and to the mindful physician’s, too. Here is a list of the key things Lydon focuses on: Use all the time you have at your disposal when making a decision. Hypothesize from initial evidence by envisioning all the ways something could have happened. Don’t prematurely close off possibilities. Work toward planning several steps ahead in your thinking. Be open to new learning from others, and use good communication skills to draw people out. Be organized and aware of your mental steps as you study a situation. Have a curiosity and a drive to uncover and pursue the meaning behind the facts. Adhere to a code of values. Face problems directly, and prepare to take action. Put a process in place to learn from your mistakes. Persevere.
Like Judge Butler, detectives rely on a framework to guide them. They use scientific procedures to gather and maintain evidence, and they must be aware of and adhere to the rules of law. They are always thinking ahead in terms of putting their evidence together to make a case for the legal system and a possible trial.
One thinking framework in wide use by police officers, cited by Lydon, goes by the acronym SARA (Scan, Analyze, Respond, and Assess). Published in 1987 by William Spelman and John Heck, its tenets fit nicely into the principle of Deliberate, Then Act, and they can be applied to anyone working to solve a personal problem, particularly when feeling stuck. The model helps to keep your thinking organized as you reason through a complex issue. As you read through the four steps of the framework, test them out by applying them to a problem you are currently struggling with.
Start with scanning. Put attention to what you may be ignoring. Identify patterns and recurring issues. Be a tough-minded and astute observer. Identify relevant facts. Acknowledge openly and put a name to the problem. If you are dealing with a multipronged problem, prioritize the biggest issues. Once you have identified the problem, your second step is to start a non-emotional analysis. Put together the data points you have and start to identify potential causes and define the scope of the problem. The problem I have in my marriage is possibly because ______. Work is a struggle because _____. In your attempt at analysis, hypothesize what could be the root cause. Third, based on your analysis, brainstorm options and respond by identifying possible plans of action to achieve your desired outcome. If X happens, I’ll do Y … If Y happens, I’ll do Z. Run your plan by trusted others for feedback. Once you feel ready to move forward, go ahead and implement it. Finally, ask yourself, How successful were the actions that I took? What resulted from it? This is the assessment step. Do I need to change my strategy or my plan? What should I modify to achieve a better outcome next time? And most importantly, What should I do from here?
Take the story of our friend Carla. She’d been married for just ten months when her husband, Clay, accepted a job in a rural town hundreds of miles away. He then moved to the town, telling her he was going to scout out the area and find a place for them to live. Shortly after Clay got settled, he became increasingly evasive. He texted that he was busy with his new job and couldn’t commit to when he could come back to see her or when he’d have a place for them to live. Then he went completely silent. Clay had family in the area, so Carla checked in with them, but they, too, were evasive.
Below, we apply the SARA model to the details of Carla’s real-life situation. Again, this model can be helpful when attempting to assess and use logical reasoning to figure out an ambiguous, emotionally charged problem where you have little information to go on.
Carla started by connecting the distancing behavior she was experiencing to some of Clay’s earlier behavior. She recalled in their courtship how he’d often needed “space.” She recalled that he’d only had one previous short-term relationship, and he never spoke much about the other woman. She pieced together relevant facts. One fact that stuck with her was when Clay first proposed moving, he had passed up many other positions that were geographically closer. She read through his text messages and listened to his voice mails, sifting them for potential meaning.
Carla started to reflect on possible causes of what was happening. She considered that perhaps Clay had another life. Maybe he was having an affair? She also wondered if she had done something offensive inadvertently that had damaged their relationship. She compared various hypotheses to see what fit better with the facts and made more sense.
Carla sought guidance from close friends, who urged her to meet with a counselor for emotional support and to help her sort out what was happening. Meeting with the counselor helped her to think more clearly about options. Carla took certain actions. She reached out to Clay with carefully worded texts to document their correspondence. She started with positive and neutral texts, hoping to get a response. Miss you. Just wondering how you are. How is the new job? Hope your family is okay.
Clay finally responded and agreed to talk. He acknowledged he was having cold feet about being married and was feeling ambivalent about the move as well. Carla felt he sounded defeated. Having this new information allowed Carla to begin to assess the situation more accurately and consider her next steps. Carla decided to continue engaging with Clay before making any final decisions.
Using a model like this would make Carla less likely to make a rash, impulsive decision, such as taking preemptive legal action. While that’s still an option, it’s only one of several possible paths for her to take. Complex issues like these can take considerable time to figure out. It can be helpful to have a model that gives you a road map with steps to gain more information before taking decisive action. This is one reason why the SARA model has endured as a reliable method for police officers to use when facing complex problems.
A real estate investor and businessman named Tim told us that he was aware of the role that emotions and bias play in his thinking. “The capacity for situation analysis makes all the difference,” he said when assessing the potential upside of a business opportunity. This helped him stay grounded and limit his losses in the real estate boom and subsequent 2008 economic crisis. “Sure,” he added, “while there’s a certain seduction to sizing something up fast and uncritically, because it gives you a green light to forge ahead quickly, it doesn’t typically work out so well in business.” Here, Tim preferred to use his critical-thinking faculties combined with a healthy amount of metacognition. He frequently questioned his own thinking. What am I missing in my thinking about certain properties? What if I’m wrong?
In this way, Tim exemplifies the agency principle of Deliberate, Then Act. While not an economist or even someone with an advanced business degree, over time through self-study and experience, he developed valuable expertise in the real estate business. Critical thinking and metacognition carried over to a solid awareness of himself and the social world. He was observant and thoughtful to the point of often being trenchant in his perceptions of larger trends, and he used his observations to inform his business decisions. He frequently pulled himself back from following the crowd. He described having made many mistakes over the years, but he consistently made an effort to learn from all these mistakes. While he appeared to move into action quickly, he attempted to do so thoughtfully rather than impulsively.
Tim, like the others whose stories we’ve shared in this chapter, operates with a framework that guides his decision-making. That’s another thing these expert decision-makers share in common. Tim’s framework ensures that certain conditions are true before he moves forward on a business idea. Are you a frequent viewer of the popular TV show Shark Tank? If so, what frameworks could you infer the investors use to guide their decision making? Masterful decision-makers, such as physicians, judges, and detectives, operate with the frameworks that their professional disciplines provide. But there are subtler frameworks in operation behind the scenes as well that function as critical infrastructure in decision-making.
A framework is many possible things. In general terms, it is something that helps you to organize your thinking, decision-making, and actions. It provides a structure that establishes boundaries to help you to see, appreciate, and focus more on what is inside the frame. In business, a framework can be as simple as a marketing strategy, a quarterly goal, a policy, or a process. It can also be more complex, like an overarching foundational premise, or a set of values and ethical guidelines, or an overall culture. In most practical terms, it’s a lens to help you see more clearly to assess, plan, and take action in any area.
Paul’s Notes from the Field: Continuous Learning as a Framework for Business Success
I caught up with two friends recently while on a consulting assignment in Virginia. John Luke, Jr., former CEO of MWV Corporation, is currently chairman of the board of WestRock Corporation and a member of several other corporate boards. Linda Schreiner, a business strategy expert, and now senior vice president of strategy at Markel Corporation, was chief human resources officer and a member of John’s senior leadership team at MWV for many years. Along with a team of other talented executives, they built a strong organization culture around the framework of continuous learning.
John operates with the premise that senior-level executives don’t need to have all the answers, “because it is impossible to know everything. Instead you must focus on partnering with others from whom you can learn—and from whom you can get help in making the kind of decisions you need to make.” John referenced the Harvard Business Review article “In Praise of the Incomplete Leader” as providing an instructive framework for business leaders to meet the demands they face. Linda concurred on the relevance and applicabilty of this framework and added, “I’ve always seen my role as focused on bringing new learning into organizations to help other leaders to be more effective. For me this is a strategic imperative.”
While Linda’s expertise in business strategy informs all her thinking, her primary framework for much of her career has revolved around the work of organizational theorist Peter Senge of the MIT Sloan School, who wrote The Fifth Discipline in 1990 (and who co-authored the article referenced above). Building a “learning organization” culture to support the business strategy has been her passion in each of the organizations where she has been a leader. “In business, as in life, you must define the current reality and your desired outcomes and then deal with it. There is a need for a framework—even though there may be times when you need to adjust, or even throw out your framework, if it is getting in the way of the kind of inquiry you need to undertake.” Senge, who is an engineer by training, has practiced meditation for thirty years. His model emphasizes the vital importance of active inquiry and deep reflection to effect transformational change in organizations.
Linda and John, through their leadership, augmented the learning organization framework with a focus on collaboration company wide to promote a learning-focused culture. They supported this culture with a core set of values and a strong business strategy that laid the groundwork for the type of tough-minded inquiry necessary to success. It allowed them to create an organization of strong decision-makers at all levels of the company focused on sustainable growth and profitability. With this they were able to shepherd the company through many business challenges and changes including complex mergers and significant acquisitions. All the while, their framework and collaborative approach helped them to create a successful business that was a rewarding and growth-inducing place for people to work.
Decisions are more prone to error when your emotions are running high. Emotions like anger, happiness, and fear speeds up your thinking. Elevated emotions make your brain think it needs to give you an answer now! Faster thinking pushes you to decide and take action prematurely, sidelining slower, deliberative thinking.
When you’re upset, agitated, giddy, head over heels in love, or scared, know that you will tend to think more shallowly.
Psychologist Jennifer Lerner, cofounder of the Harvard University Decision Science Laboratory, describes two different types of emotions we should be on the lookout for when making important decisions: integral emotions and incidental emotions.
Integral emotions are relevant emotions. They arise from the decision at hand and should be considered and integrated into your decision-making process. For example, you may have positive associations to a neighborhood you grew up in as you return and give thought to potentially moving back there. Or perhaps you’re deciding between two job offers at different companies. One job is with a company whose culture you immediately related to and felt comfortable in while the other left you cold. Those feelings should be factored in and integral to your decision. It is reasonable that they be factored in. Just don’t let integral emotions completely drive the decision-making process.
Incidental emotions, on the other hand, aren’t relevant to the decision you are making. They can be feelings carried over from something that simply happened to you earlier in your day. For example, if you are tense, suspicious, or irritated because you just spent forty minutes stuffed in a crowded, noisy subway car that broke down during your commute to work, it might not be the best time to interview prospective candidates for a key position at your start-up company. And yet, quite often people carry negative, unrelated emotions from one space into another and then attempt to make important decisions, unaware that incidental emotions are at play in the background.
There is not an exemption for positive feelings. Maybe you are in a happy-go-lucky, carefree mood. Maybe you’re feeling excited after chatting with an attractive person on that same crowded train. It’s put a spring in your step and left you in a highly optimistic state. That’s terrific, but unless you are self-aware, your positive incidental emotions might bias you when it’s time to make a judgment on the quality of a new candidate you’re interviewing a few hours later. In short, incidental emotions—positive or negative—can make you think less incisively.
When Emotions Cloud Decision-Making
Hakim is an extroverted and highly reliable “black car” livery driver. He works for himself and has a large, stable group of satisfied clients. An eager learner, he enjoys engaging with his customers and always has an anecdote or two to relate. He shared this story on a recent trip to the airport.
Several years ago, shortly after he immigrated to the United States from Algeria, Hakim was having a conversation with his friend Omar, who worked with him in the same business. Omar had been in the United States for fifteen years and had methodically built up a business around his ownership of three taxi medallions. Owning a taxi medallion has long been a means of establishing wealth, and Omar felt proud of his accomplishment and secure financially knowing that each taxi medallion he owned was worth close to a million dollars.
“Are you aware of this whole Uber thing that is happening?” Hakim asked his friend. “You may want to think about if it is wise to continue holding on to all your medallions.”
“Well, Hakim,” his friend replied with skepticism and irritation, “I’ve lived here much longer than you, and medallions have been around for a long, long time. My uncle came here fifty years ago and is a wealthy man because of them. I know I’m safe holding on to them.” Omar had his facts straight in terms of the points he made; medallions had certainly increased in value over the years in Boston. But was Omar correct that he was safe by being conservative, taking a wait-and-see approach? Why was he so angry at Hakim for raising the issue?
“A couple of years passed,” Hakim continued, “and the value of Omar’s medallions sank like a stone just like I warned him they might. He went bankrupt and lost his business, his home, too, and had so much stress that he had a stroke. It’s a very sad situation. He just wasn’t able to hear what I was trying to tell him—he couldn’t see what was happening around all of us.”
After all was said and done, Hakim and Omar had a conversation two years later about what had happened. Omar offered a regretful explanation, admitting that he had held an unshakable belief that taxi medallions were a stable store of wealth. His uncle had convinced him of this, and he trusted his uncle with his life. When Hakim called this into question, Omar had reacted with fear and anger. The whole idea had made him so intensely anxious that he angrily suspected Hakim might have had an ulterior motive, perhaps to buy them from him cheaply. Omar’s fear, he told his friend, had been paralyzing. Not knowing what to do, the compromise position he reached within himself was deciding that simply waiting it out would be the safest thing. A massive shift in the taxi business had simply never occurred before, and therefore, he wanted to believe it was highly unlikely.
Omar had made a mistake that many of us frequently make—we believe we know more than we actually do and can fail to imagine what could possibly transpire. This, combined with his misdirected anger at Hakim, prevented him from taking in new learning and applying it to his situation.
To expand on earlier themes, living amid change and uncertainty encourages people to seek validation from others. More and more, this is being undertaken online through social media, often unwittingly. While online engagement might seem helpful, it often leaves people simply following like-minded individuals as opposed to truly opening themselves to new learning.
To the extent you compare yourself to others, and everyone does, beware of your need to be validated and how the opinions and feedback of others can influence your judgment and decision-making. In an age of overwhelm, people unconsciously seek more and more validation. They’re feeling worried, off base, insecure—and the natural human tendency to want to check in with others is high. Social media becomes an easy go-to for this, but this approach comes with serious downsides. People snipe, are sarcastic, don’t think through their feedback or the posts they send out quickly, or, even more frequently, inflate themselves (which makes the rest of us feel less than adequate). We’re not suggesting you need to entirely unplug from social media, but we are recommending that you turn to people you trust when you are looking for support, in real time and in real ways (such as with more phone contacts and face-to-face meetings).
Arriving at a good decision is the prerequisite to taking positive, productive action. Obsession, perfectionism, impulsivity, and procrastination—these are some of the most common and at times debilitating impediments to taking decisive action. At one time or another most of us have experienced these hindrances to our ability to exercise agency. Some of us experience one or more of these on a recurring basis. The underlying sources or pathways to “the big four” impediments are various and they do matter. This is where emotional awareness enters in. Your ability to reflect on and understand the source can allow you to identify and let go of it and move forward. For example, sometimes procrastination is caused by hypersensitivity to how you believe you are perceived or will be received by others. She has written me off and no longer wants to hear from me. This may be an erroneous perception that, through reflective scrutiny, can be rejected, allowing you to move into action. Simply stated, greater emotional granularity can often help you to reduce the grip these have on you.
For example, people who experience recurring obsession and perfectionism may be frequently anxious and worried. These people, in our experience, have a brain style that focuses on details and tends to think too far forward, worrying about future negative possibilities. Some people have so much fear of making the wrong decision that they obsess and overthink things to the point that they freeze, unable to pull the trigger on any action, even after they’ve effectively deliberated. Others focus on reaching perfection at all cost and their unrealistic expectations keep them stalled out in the deliberation phase. These are but a few examples of the underlying reasons why people get stuck.
Use Your Agency: If you tend toward being perfectionistic, beware of getting too caught up in slow, deliberative thinking. The goal is not to analyze absolutely everything to achieve perfection, as this can stymie important action you need to take. It will also use up considerable time and biological energy.
On the other end of the spectrum, impulsive people tend to be totally in the moment and do not engage in enough planning for the future. They often rush into action prematurely, have low risk aversion, and are impulsive—not fully thinking through the consequences of their actions. For example, people diagnosed with ADHD have a neurological style that can interfere with step-wise, slow decision-making, especially when they are frustrated by sitting for long periods or stuck indoors behind desks and screens or attending long meetings. People with this brain style seek out and require higher stimulation to keep their brains fully engaged. That’s why, in our experience, we find them to be best at fluid, creative thinking rather than slow methodical thinking (they often prefer it!), although there are exceptions.
Procrastinators tend to avoid taking action until the last minute. Instead of rushing, they postpone engaging in the slower thinking that effective deliberation demands, especially if the task isn’t interesting or of immediate appeal to them. Sometimes procrastination also happens because people are too distracted or busy, or unmotivated or depressed, or just plain exhausted. In short, there are many reasons behind why people procrastinate.
Where are you in this? Is there something that gets in the way of you taking positive decisive action? No matter what trips you up, here are key points of which to remind yourself:
• Life isn’t about making the best decisions perfectly every time. It’s recognizing that as you make each decision, new doors open up, and this is a good thing.
• There’s a strong human bias against closing down options. We stay stuck in indecision because we fear losing something by closing doors. Should I move or stay where I am? Should I seek a new job? We often fixate on what we might lose rather than imagining ourselves in a new place with new possibilities after having made a choice. But the research is clear that when we are willing to be decisive and close down some options we end up in a better place, more satisfied with our decisions and more optimistic.
• The goal of good decision-making is not to completely avoid risk. In many cases, the goal is to understand and embrace good risk. Taking calculated risks won’t guarantee each and every outcome that you desire, but it increases the chances, and the rewards are reaped over the long term, not necessarily the short term.
One of the most basic distinctions that you can make regarding the four impediments is to determine if, on balance, you tend to rush into action or if you avoid it. If you tend to rush, be aware that actions taken too quickly aren’t likely to be effective, and you are all the more likely to act with impulse when you are angry, according to Jennifer Lerner, whom we mentioned earlier. The reason is that anger makes us perceive less risk and therefore we end up taking greater risk. Our thinking speeds up, and we have a false sense of control.
In short, don’t make big decisions when you are angry or upset. Sleep on it, as the old saying goes.
Making Decisions When Angry and Frustrated
Kayla is a forty-two-year-old senior manager for an upscale restaurant group in New Mexico. She works hard and takes pride in having helped the company prosper, but she often catches herself stuck in work mode. Things move fast in the competitive restaurant world. She is valued for her ability to think on her feet and reach decisions quickly.
Kayla was recently having her phone repaired, and her fifth-grade son tagged along. He was admiring the new phones on display. He started begging and lobbying really hard—guilting her was the term she used—to buy him his first mobile phone. That was an opportune moment to put on the brakes and engage System 2 thinking. Leave the store. Get calm. Get more information. Ask around. What’s a good age for a child to get a mobile device? What problems could arise? Should I draw up a behavior contract for my son to follow to ensure more appropriate use before purchasing the phone? Maybe he should spend some of his own chore money to buy it?
Instead, her son’s high emotions in the store stimulated her own emotions. She became frustrated, a bit angry. The salesman drove up her emotions further when he told her about time-limited offers and better data plans. She felt like she needed to act. All these emotions were incidental, not integral, to any decision she should be making about buying her son a phone. Before she knew it, her son was walking out with her to the parking lot carrying his new phone in a shiny store bag, and Kayla was already feeling she probably had made a mistake.
Procrastination is one of the most common impediments to taking action. We come across this continually in our work and sometimes in our own personal lives. Books abound to help with this: to help us get more motivated, to get into shape, to meet goals, to get organized. What is less commonly recognized is that the root of procrastination can be anxiety. In the age of overwhelm, we shouldn’t be surprised that millions of people are shutting down, freezing up, avoiding, putting off, and becoming ever more unable to stay focused long enough to get themselves into productive action.
When anxiety is at the root of procrastination, consider a review of the first three behavioral principles to manage anxiety and high stress that may be stopping you from getting things done. Start by opening space in your mind to think more clearly and calmly (Control Stimuli). Secondly, secure social support and encouragement of others to support you in getting motivated (Associate Selectively), and thirdly, use movement (Move) to get energized and decrease feelings of helplessness. Now, take some action. Any action, no matter how small. If you’re still stuck, break down your action into even smaller steps; for example, don’t try to clean the whole house—clean one room, or clean one area of the room, like a desk or closet. Reward yourself for completing the smaller steps and then move on to the next.
Here we are, nearly at the end of this book, and all roads have led to this simple but powerful thought: Effective deliberation is crucial when trying to do anything of importance. While many people with agency do not necessarily think of themselves as following a prescribed deliberation process, many of them are surprised to realize that they actually do in practice.
We have put together a model that incorporates a series of steps drawn from best practices to help you with your decision-making.
The capacity to see beyond your present circumstances—to see what “could be”—is central to agency. No matter where you are in life, no matter what you are dealing with, you can develop this ability. It is a critically important starting point when seeking to accomplish anything of significance.
Pulling from the ways that physicians, judges, and police officers think (and make decisions), coupled with the implications of Kahneman’s fast-versus-slow dual-thinking framework, we have defined a six-step model to help you think in a more organized and deliberative manner:
1. Set the stage. Put yourself into a frame of mind and an environment conducive to reflection and exploration. Try to set enough time aside so you are not rushed. Take your emotional temperature, and try to get yourself into a relaxed, calm state.
2. Focus, define, and deploy. Focus on the issue at hand to adequately define and frame it. Deploy critical thinking to test out your assumptions. To do so, make sure that you:
• Clarify your primary objective and what is at stake.
• Ask open-ended questions (of yourself and others) to ensure you are giving adequate thought to framing the issue in the best possible way.
• Find the opportunity often embedded within the problem.
• Gather pertinent facts.
• Perform a bias check. (See the glossary of biases here.)
3. Generate options. Allow conflicting ideas to surface. Put them all on the table. Position Yourself as a Learner by seeking counsel from others with related experience. Don’t rush to judgment by narrowing the scope of your inquiry too soon. Check in with trusted others along the way for feedback on your thinking process.
4. Manage emotions. Ensure that strong emotions are not driving your thinking process. Be aware of both integral and incidental emotions (see here) that may be at work behind the scenes influencing your decision-making. Resist engaging in binary (either-or) thinking.
5. Draft a plan. Write out your thoughts. Read them out loud. Putting your thoughts and decisions into words (handwriting is most powerful) and hearing these words spoken aloud helps engage critical thinking. Your plan should simplify your options and incorporate the most important facts. You should be able to envision yourself successfully implementing it. Once completed, put your plan aside and focus elsewhere for a while. When you return to your plan, does it feel spot-on or does it need further development? If it does, don’t be discouraged. Work through the changes and be glad that you didn’t act prematurely.
6. Take action. When your plan feels solid, move into execution mode. You don’t have to be 100 percent certain. In ambiguous situations or when information is less than perfect, higher-agency people typically follow an 80/20-type rule: They act when they have about 80 percent of the relevant information or when they feel 80 percent ready or justified to take action. Plan to make midcourse corrections as needed.
It’s nearly impossible to be 100 percent correct or to perfectly anticipate all outcomes. Think through possible midcourse corrections during the deliberation phase, which bolsters your confidence to move forward. Once you are in the action stage, reassess as you go, making changes as necessary.
Effective decision-makers don’t see the world as a binary place in which a right decision versus wrong decision will always be clear at the outset. They take action believing that there is most often a way to fix, salvage, change, and improve an outcome as they move forward.
As a twenty-one-year-old single, unemployed mother, Kris found herself with only a few dollars in her pocket, resting alongside a rural road with her three-year-old son. Having set out on foot more than an hour earlier to buy breakfast at the nearest market, both she and her son were tired. He pointed to an orange tree across the road, loaded with ripe oranges glistening in the California sun. She told him it wouldn’t be right to take the fruit—the oranges didn’t belong to them. But he was hungry. She looked into his eyes and, in that moment, she says, a surge of something akin to knowingness passed through her. We are going to be okay, he and I. The torturing self-doubt about her capability to build a life where she could adequately care for him somehow lifted. A small kernel of a plan emerged. Kris gathered herself.
Kris picked the orange and decided at that moment that everything had to change. She went that day to a shopping mall, applied to every single store, got a job, and eventually made enough money to go back to the Midwest where she had family and could start taking classes and get a steady job.
Thirty years later, Kris is now director of process improvement for a global Fortune 200 manufacturing company. With no formal college degree, she has achieved Six Sigma Master Black Belt certification, the highest level of proficiency in the empirical, statistical quality management techniques of her field. With a rich and fulfilling personal, spiritual, and community life, Kris helps entire functions and departments within her company to intelligently work through challenges to realize their goals. And she volunteers her time and skill to help disadvantaged communities all over the world to become stronger, healthier places to live.
Kris encountered many tough trials along the way requiring her to take stock, cope with tough challenges, and make difficult decisions. From her father, a career military man, she learned discipline and order, as well as the importance of enjoying life along the way. From her mother, a remote, withholding person, she was called upon to dig deep to overcome emotional scars, gaining life-changing insight through therapy and spiritual practice. Experimenting with various paths, she developed a passion for figuring things out and for bringing order to disorder.
Pause to imagine the intelligence and perseverance it took for Kris, an African American woman on her own from an early age, to succeed both within corporate America and on her own terms in pursuing a role of great personal meaning for her. That’s where her passion and agency took her.
In addition to agency, Kris demonstrates grit. According to author Angela Duckworth, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, grit is “passion and perseverance.” In her 2014 TED Talk, Duckworth said that grit is “having stamina … sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years.”
We have seen this resolute persistence in many people with high agency once they have decided on a well-considered, definitive goal and are ready to act.
Agency requires that they exercise good judgment by not calling upon this persistence in the wrong set of circumstances, to avoid getting stuck on paths not authentic to who they really are or who they want to become. Agency requires the patience, courage, and wherewithal to experiment and try out different identities. It also entails the capacity to know when to quit doing something and set new goals.
Mal had a different path to creating a life on his own terms. Unlike Kris, Mal was born with a script that his father had written about the way his son’s life should unfold. He experienced a privileged post-war 1950s New England childhood where opportunity abounded. After attending Dartmouth College on a hockey scholarship and graduating with an MBA, he landed a prized job on Madison Avenue as an account manager for Young and Rubicam, a premier advertising agency. Think Mad Men, the popular TV series, and you get the picture. As a young man in 1960s Manhattan, Mal was living many people’s concept of the ideal life. Great money, two-martini lunches, Broadway plays. But there happened to be a problem, he says: I felt it wasn’t my life. Mal and his wife spent a week in 1968 at the Esalen Institute, a retreat center in Big Sur, California, taking part in a series of seminars as part of the human potential movement.
Within a year of his first trip to Esalen, Mal had taken a leave of absence from his job on Madison Avenue, never to return. Following a teaching position of many years at Esalen, he took himself to study at an Ashram in India, living for ten years in a rural town with cows moving around unpaved roads. “I saw people living on almost nothing and they were very much enjoying their lives,” he recalled, a tone of surprise suffusing his voice these many years later. “It killed the American dream for me—the pursuit of material objects. I asked myself, what would I be missing?” He went against all the expectations of his father and the society around him. Many people simply didn’t understand and reacted with anger, but Mal remained resolute. “I experienced an epiphany that I couldn’t put into words. I found something I was looking for but hadn’t even known I’d been looking. It was the truest part of myself, beyond what I might think, beyond concepts or beliefs I held.”
As a teacher he has had a profound impact on the lives of many. Now living with his wife in the San Francisco Bay Area, he told us, “I have become the man I wanted to be. I gained more fulfillment, more self-respect, by the path I followed—even though it involved a great many difficult moments and may not have come for twenty years.”
People with high agency like Kris and Mal step back, reflect, and think for themselves. They don’t reflexively follow other people’s expectations or the societal “script” laid out for them. They tap their intuition and trust themselves, and enlist their decision-making skills to move onto paths of their own choosing.
Personal success is not equivalent to high achievement. As Grit author Duckworth emphasizes, you must be passionate if you are going to stay focused and persist long enough to make something your own, whatever that may be. That’s where agency comes into play. You need to locate what you are truly interested in pursuing in your life. It isn’t following the herd or your family’s expectations automatically. It requires equal parts reflection, learning, and experimentation to come to know your true passion. Rest assured, your intuition will let you know when you’ve found it, as it did for Kris and Mal.
People with high levels of agency focus on determining both where they stand and what their options are. They possess confidence in their ability to make decisions and to act upon them. This capability is a key differentiator in terms of the ability to take one’s life in the desired direction.
For this reason, the seventh principle is of critical importance in your journey to build greater agency and create the life you most want. The more you work on this last principle—and the more you can move fluidly among all seven principles highlighted in this book—the more nimble and effective you will become in your approach to decision-making, and the more natural and obvious will be your awareness of when you’ve arrived at the moment for action. In fact, you will be setting the agenda and becoming the leader to whom others look for guidance, and on your way to discovering and leveraging the agency within you.
YOUR AGENCY TOOL KIT
GET A PROCESS: Establish, and become skillful at using, a specific deliberation process to make effective decisions.
DIVIDE IT UP: Separate your deliberation process from taking action on important matters.
BE AWARE: Know the salient differences between objective facts and your emotions, beliefs, wishes, and desires. Know how the latter influence your decision-making.
FEED YOUR BRAIN: Eat, exercise, rest, and get adequate sleep to ward off mental depletion so that your mind is prepared to do the heavy work required to make decisions.
CREATE SPACE: Make room in your head for competing thoughts and feelings to help you generate more creative ideas and solutions.
LEARN FROM MISTAKES: Engage in after-action reviews to learn from your errors as well as your successes.
BE ON ALERT: Know when your emotional System 1 thinking is being stimulated or manipulated by an outside source.
ENGAGE METACOGNITION: Accurately assess the quality of your own thinking.
BE EMOTIONALLY AWARE: Guard against allowing your feelings to derail your thinking process and cause you to make poor decisions.
KNOW YOUR THINKING TRAPS: Be familiar with the more common thinking traps you fall into so that they don’t impede a reliable and accurate deliberation process.
BE DECISIVE: Once you have thoughtfully deliberated, don’t get stuck in indecision by engaging in endless what-ifs. Act before events unfold and act on you.
VERIFY: For big decisions, don’t rely entirely on someone else’s opinion (even if they are an expert) without verifying the facts and thinking it through for yourself.