What if you’re the crazy one and they’re the sane ones?
Do you find yourself dealing with people who are (from your totally objective, if not god-like, point of view) making short-sighted or irrational decisions? What if their decisions come from where they stand in the organisation/world, rather than from some inherent flaw in their decision-making apparatus?
How to stop people from being so patently freakin’ crazy
1. Put yourself thoroughly in their position – think what information they receive in a timely way and what’s delayed or never reaches them, what they’re rewarded for doing/not doing, what’s visible/invisible to them… In short, work out how the (mad, stupid, loco) decisions they are making are the logical, rational ones to make.
1b If possible, verify your understanding of their situation with them. Find out what’s missing from your model of their model of the situation.
2. Work out what information is obvious to you in your position that they might be missing.
3. See if you can find a way of communicating that missing information to them in a way that is relevant to them.
4. Step back. Breathe. See if anything changes.
***
There is a concept in systems thinking called bounded rationality (coined by Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize winning economist, apparently).
Bounded rationality means that people make reasonable decisions based on the information they have from where they stand in a system (a system being a collection of connected processes – an organisation, a political system, a relationship…)
The problem is that they (we) don’t have perfect information, especially about distant parts of the system.
It is, for example, the structure of your company that forces people to make decisions that affect the whole organisation negatively. They only receive/are interested in detailed information about their area, and receive incentives to fulfil objectives that optimise the performance of their area. What’s missing is how those decisions affect the WHOLE system.
People in IT make the decisions you would make if you were in IT. People in the business make decisions you would make if you were in the business. Management make management decisions, staff make staff decisions.
The final word today goes to Dana Meadows, author of Thinking in Systems (my book-of-the-week):
Suppose you are for some reason lifted out of your accustomed place in society and put in the place of someone whose behavior you have never understood… Perhaps having been an environmental critic of big business, you find yourself making environmental deicsions for big business…
In your new position, you experience the information flows, the incentives and disincentives, the goals and discrepancies, the pressures – the bounded rationality – that goes with that position…
Although we think we’d make different decisions, remember our previous point of view, the likelihood is that the position would govern our thoughts…
There is, Dana says, some hope…
It’s amazing how quickly and easily behavior changes can come, with even slight enlargement of bounded rationality, by providing better, more complete, timelier information.
***
Whose behaviour do you really not understand? What happens when you think things through from their perspective? How might you be able to supply some needed information about the wider situation?
***
0 Responses to “Why people make weird decisions”