Switch - Chip Heath [20]
Scene 3: A local bar. It’s speed-dating night. Singles meet a series of other singles one-on-one, spending perhaps five minutes with each person, in hopes of making a romantic connection. But decision paralysis thwarts even Cupid. Young adults who meet eight other singles make more “matches” than those who meet twenty.
Bottom line: Decision paralysis disrupts medical decisions and retail decisions and investment decisions and dating decisions. Let’s go out on a limb and suggest that it might affect decisions in your job and life, too.
Think about the sources of decision paralysis in your organization. Every business must choose among attractive options. Growing revenue quickly versus maximizing profitability. Making perfect products versus getting products to market faster. Being innovative and creative versus optimizing efficiency. If you fold together lots of those tensions, you create a surefire recipe for paralysis. It took only two medications to fuzz the doctors’ brains. How many options do your people have?
Think about your local school board. Every year, the problems and solutions multiply. You can just imagine the mental conversation: “Property tax revenue is falling, but the teachers need a 3 percent cost-of-living raise, and we can’t forget about extracurriculars (cutting the marching band last year was a killer), but we must continue to invest in our new science magnet school—if it doesn’t work, there will be egg on our face—yet it’s ridiculous to consider any of this until we fix our crumbling infrastructure and address our overcrowded classrooms.” For the frazzled school board member, it suddenly looks a lot more attractive to roll over last year’s budget with a 1.5 percent increase on every line item.
As Barry Schwartz puts it in his book The Paradox of Choice, as we face more and more options, “we become overloaded. Choice no longer liberates, it debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.”
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The status quo feels comfortable and steady because much of the choice has been squeezed out. You have your routines, your ways of doing things. For most of your day, the Rider is on autopilot. But in times of change, autopilot doesn’t work anymore, choices suddenly proliferate, and autopilot habits become unfamiliar decisions. When you’re on a diet, the habitual daily trip for Nachos Bell Grande is disqualified, and in its place is left a decision. When you’ve got a new manager, the way you communicate stops being second nature and starts being a choice.
Change brings new choices that create uncertainty. Let’s be clear: It’s not only options that yield decision paralysis—like picking one donut from 100 flavors. Ambiguity does, too. In times of change, you may not know what options are available. And this uncertainty leads to decision paralysis as surely as a table with 24 jams.
Ambiguity is exhausting to the Rider, because the Rider is tugging on the reins of the Elephant, trying to direct the Elephant down a new path. But when the road is uncertain, the Elephant will insist on taking the default path, the most familiar path, just as the doctors did. Why? Because uncertainty makes the Elephant anxious. (Think of how, in an unfamiliar place, you gravitate toward a familiar face.) And that’s why decision paralysis can be deadly for change—because the most familiar path is always the status quo.
Many leaders pride themselves on setting high-level direction: I’ll set the vision and stay out of the details. It’s true that a compelling vision is critical (as we’ll see in the