Decisions, decisions

Science is saving us and life will soon return to normal. That’s one version of the future, and those who miss it badly would like it to come back ASAP.

What they’re more likely to experience, though, is a return to a changed and in many ways unfamiliar world. And in this new world, on this new planet, will loom tall, stone monoliths in the mist, immovable as the Moai on Easter Island: decisions.

Cut the red wire or the green wire? Sophie’s Choice. Decisions are full of drama for human beings, and the pools of research and writing about them indicates we’re quite interested in how decisions are made, and how we can make the best ones.

Some surgeons and traders have jobs that require them to make decisions on an hourly basis. Conversely, there are those who spend their careers and lives trying to delay or avoid decisions.

One approach is to gather all the evidence and data you can before making a serious choice. But there is evidence that the longer we take to make a decision, the less likely we are to be certain about it. Also, even when we think we’re at our most rational and analytical, emotion is likely to be playing a large role in the process.

Daniel Kahneman achieved a world-wide bestselling smash with his book?Thinking Fast and Slow . In his new book,?Noise , he discusses how “variability in judgments that should be identical. . . can be found wherever people make judgments and decisions”. Thus doctors give different diagnoses for the same condition in identical patients and judges hand out different sentences depending on whether it’s morning or afternoon.

But wait! There’s another view, espoused by?Yuval Noah Harari , among others. We are beings with merely palaeolithic brains, ruled by instincts and emotions. And these poor brains are attempting to navigate a world of big data, A/B testing and the illusion that one can have a thousand friends. These brains are hardly out of the caves in evolutionary terms. Kahneman wants us to make better decisions by ‘thinking slow’ more. But can we really do that to any meaningful degree?

Back to Easter Island. The pandemic gave us a template for living and we will soon have to come up with our own again. At least some of us are out of practice, especially when you throw all the new stuff in. Businesses (and especially governments) accepting that employees can work from home more, for example, is a very big change indeed, one that raises questions small and big for individuals and families.

Where shall we live? Town or country? How do I want to work? How will I split my hybrid week? How much do I need other people? Shall I cling to the old ways? If I don’t have to spend 15 hours on trains each week, how do I want to live? Where will I focus this energy that is returned to me? How do I want to spend my time on earth?

It’s at once exciting and also enough to prompt existential crises. After so many years on the 07:28 from Bishop’s Stortford, it may not have seemed likely but it seems such periodic transitions and upheavals are inevitable.

Making decisions about content for your organisation might feel like a smaller deal but decisions will still be needed if you want to stand out. An absence of decisions will mean that the content you produce (or that is produced for you) will jump around all over the place or – worse – have zero impact, being only borrowed light from others.

Perhaps, as well as gathering evidence, it’s as important to gather ideas. Good ideas are generally far less common and harder to find than evidential data. They are less common than people imagine, and organisations make poor decisions, or more often no decisions, about content all the time, even when what’s at stake is important to them.

Collective Content’s attention was drawn to profiles of men on a number of dating apps, where you would assume people would want to stand out. Lots of men with bikes. Lots of men with dogs. Lots of pictures of men staring down on Machu Picchu. Get in touch with us to chat before you make any big decisions about content. We'll happily provide you with a few ideas.

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