Beating the number one barrier to good decisions at work

When my headstrong daughters were in their toddler years, they did not enjoy following directions. I quickly realized that presenting them with a limited set of choices worked better than issuing orders. It was was an effective way to let them exert a degree of independence while still obeying. "Would you like to wear a blue dress or a red dress today?" was better framing than "It's time to get dressed."

Throughout my work day, I find myself presented with a similar set of narrow choices: Should we partner with this organization or not? Should we choose campaign A or campaign B? Should we invest in that marketing service or not? It's the grown-up version of blue dress/red dress options. Only in this case, it's not productive framing. And it can be the source of some very bad decision-making at work.

According to Dan and Chip Heath in their new book, Decisive, narrow framing is the number one villain in bad decisions. It's not the narrow question of what color dress - or which campaign - to choose but rather far broader questions that lead us to wiser conclusions.

Dan and Chip Heath give the example of the Quaker Oats acquisition of Snapple. The framing at the time was, "Should we acquire Snapple for $1.8B or not?" (Quaker decided yes and later sold it off for a mere $300 million. Ouch.) The Quaker CEO who oversaw the acquisition later said "We should have had people arguing the 'no' side." The question wasn't actually whether or not - which would have been better - nor was it the optimal, broader framing of, "Is this the best way to spend $1.8B?" It was yes vs. yes.

The Heaths cite a study by Paul Nutt that found only 29% of organizations considered more than one alternative when making essential business decisions. Apparently a lot of us are stuck in too many binary, "whether or not" sets of choices. That's not good: Nutt found the decisions based on "whether or not" reasoning failed 52% of the time over the long term, vs. only 32% of the decisions with two or more alternatives. Widen your options, urge the Heath brothers.

So how do we do that? Their book Decisive has good advice. Like thinking about opportunity costs. And asking yourself what you'd do if you didn't have the binary option in front of you. And always being wary of the word "or."

I'd also ask, is this one of those blue dress/red dress moments? Because if it is, save that framing for someone in the terrible twos. The rest of us need to think bigger - and broader.

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