How To Lead an Evidence-Based Life

If I had to boil down what I'm about to say to a single message it would be this.

The way you live your life is wrong. And that's okay. Well, until it isn't. 

What i would like to talk to about you today are the situations in which you make your decisions based on the best of your understanding of the situation, when you apply your capabilities in order to solve a challenge that life throws at you, and you're doing a great job. But also about situations in which you fail miserably at making decisions. I would like to talk to you about making a distinction between these two situations and also what we can understand about this difference in order to make our lives better. 

Human beings are fascinating species. Since we appeared on the face of the Earth, we've made an incredible progress. Just a while ago, a couple of seconds ago in geological terms, we roamed the savannas and the steps, we hunted on our feet following the prey, and we were really at the mercy of the environment and at the mercy of other predators. 

Thanks to science, thanks to technology, we're now living in a world where we modify our crops, where we cannot control the weather - yet - but we can more or less predict it. And, as far as the means of transportation go... well, I don't know if you know but our cars are about to drive themselves. It's a huge progress.

But we haven't stopped there. Just a while ago, remember, we landed on the moon! And almost two years ago we landed a probe on a comet. I'll let that sink in. A probe. On a comet. It's like throwing a speck of dust and hoping it will land on the raindrop. How cool is that?

Yet for some reason I don't quite understand there are still some domains of our lives that we leave to intuition. Some domains of our lives in which we stop being homo sapiens sapiens, we stop being that thinking, reasoning being, and we just follow our intuition. The domains like health. Management. Public Policy. Personal relationships. 

And i find it puzzling. 

I find it fascinating. 

The fact is we would never send a probe to a comet using intuitive physics. The majority of us wouldn't go to a doctor that graduated from international medical school of intuitive medicine. But we have absolutely no problem with making management decisions based on our guts. With making our interpersonal relationship decisions based on our feelings. With making our political decisions based on our emotions. 

But there's a better way. 

Before we go into that I would like to ask you a quick question. 

A racket and a ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The racket costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? 

Ok so how many as you have answered 10, please, raise your hands. 

Let me tell you this: you're in a very good company. More than fifty percent of ivy-league students also have answered wrong. 

Because the right answer isn't 10. It is five cents. And I would like to make it very clear: this is not a trick question. If you look at the question again and follow it step by step you'll see that we're dealing with primary school level math. If it were ten cents the racket would cost a dollar more a dollar and ten cents, altogether a dollar and twenty cents - it's wrong. However, if it's five cents and the racker is a dollar and five cents together a dollar and ten tents. Primary school level math. But for some reason those of you that have answered 10 are looking at this slide right now and are thinking. Na-ah that's just doesn't feel right. Although you know the answer.

There's something going on in our brains and it happened in my brain when I first saw this task. Because 10 is so obvious. And it reflects the conflict between the two ways in which we think about the world. 

We tend to have two modes of thinking about the challenges that we come across during a lifetime. System 1 is very fast and intuitive. It provides us with rapid answers to anything that happens in our lives. The second mode of thinking, system 2, is deliberate. It's slow, it's systematic, and it provides us with better answers. But in a way that a lot of us find as too damn slow. 

Those two systems of our thinking are in constant conflict with each other. And one of the systems usually wins. I think that you know which. 

Intuition. 

Emotions are very good at winning the conflict between the two systems for the reason that the author of this distinction, Daniel Kahneman, calls the law of the least effort. 

I don't know if you agree with me, but thinking is hard. Thinking is a pain in the ass.

If you need to, you can force yourself to systematically think about reality, but emotions always come easy. They help us make decisions in our day-to-day lives. And that's cool. That's fine.

In majority of situations system I saves us time.

Let's imagine we go to a grocery store with a simple task of choosing the right cheese for supper. And imagine that system 2 gets involved and says "Okay, cool, that's an easy task, so let's start with creating an Excel sheet, let's separate the kinds of cheese, let's analyze the nutritional value, then maybe create some regression analysis and then order the results from the best to the worst and then let's make the final call."

Well that would take eternity.

System 1 says "Let's use some shortcuts. Let's use some stereotype like <<There has never been a bad cheese from Italy>>", and you go to the grocery store and say "Hey, that's cheese from Italy!". Case solved. 

It's not only that system 1 can save time - it can save lives.

Imagine this. You're going down a dark alley and you see a young person at the end of the alley, and and they are wearing a sweatsuit. That's cool, but they also have a baseball bat with them. Is it still cool? 

So let's imagine the two systems analyzing the situation. 

System 2 would say, "Okay, let's think about it. So what is the probability that a young person in the sweatsuit would go to a baseball match right now? What is the frequency of baseball fields around this place? So let's think about..."

System 1 would say "Okay guys let's just get the hell out of there."

If you followed System 1, maybe you have just hurt some baseball player's feelings. Maybe he was just like "Oh man, not again...". But maybe, System 1 just saved your life. 

And that's not a problem.

You know when we have a problem? Wen we start to use system 1 to solve system 2 challenges.

When we use system 1 to answer system 2 questions. Questions like should we ban abortion in Poland. Questions like what provides me with happiness. Questions like, how should I motivate my employees. Complex questions that ultimately lead to very important consequences. 

When you use your intuition, your gut feelings, your emotions for that, you tend to end up with suboptimal solutions. 

I would like to use an example that I face a lot in my experience. Being an organizational psychologist and sociologist, I tend to be asked two types of questions. One is how to be a better leader - how to manage better - and the second one is how to be a better person - how to be happy. And I don't know if you agree with me but according to me, these are system 2 questions, because they are complex and complicated, but at the same time they lead to very important consequences for people and for organizations. 

I believe that we should address those types of questions with an evidence-based approach that tends to have three separate steps that I would like to talk to you about now.

Step one: question. Step two: learn. Step three: experiment.

Let me unpack it for you. 

When I say "question," I mean - try to get to the bottom of the source of information about a given subject. So, when it comes to leadership, when it comes to happiness, there is a lot of information out there about what works and what will get you results. 

When it comes to management and leadership you will hear management gurus all over the world talking to you about what works. Things like "you should be more inspiring,", "you should be more authoritative," or "you should be focused on meditation because if you meditate enough ultimately you'll be a better leader". My "favorite" suggestion is that you should be more emotionally intelligent because the leaders that have high levels of emotional intelligence are the greatest leaders in the world. 

So in step 1 of my approach you should ask how do you know that emotional intelligence leads to better decisions in leadership. And actually, if you ask this question to the proponents of emotional intelligence, they will probably say: "Well, because we have bunch of studies done". Okay, and but when you ask them "Could you show us the results of the studies, the data?", they will say "No no, they are top-secret, we have them right there in the back, but we will never show you". And that's suspicious. 

With happiness it's even more complicated. Because you have all the gurus in the world talking to you about the things that you should do in order to achieve happiness. Things like "you should get a job" or "you should get married and have children" or "you should get rich or die trying". But then you might ask: how do you know that? And they very often quote their own experience, their own anecdotes how they found the path to happiness. But anecdotes do not ever ever constitute evidence.

In step two, and there is no easy way of saying this, in step two you have to learn what the state of the knowledge is. So you have to have some level of scientific literacy in order to understand what has been established in the area right now. So for example in the case of leadership we know what might work. For example we know that leaders who are convinced that their team is great behave in the way that makes teams great. So we have this self-fulfilling prophecy of leadership. We also know that you can develop charisma. For many people this is surprising because we tend to believe this myth that you are either born with charisma or not; you're either charismatic or you will never be charismatic. That's not true, you can actually train charisma which ultimately leads to better performance as a leader.

With happiness it's similar. We have established some facts about how to achieve it. Things like - if you have money to spend, spend it on experiences and not things. If you have 2,000 zlotys, do not spend it on a smartphone, spend it on vacation. Even better, spend it on charity, because that boosts your happiness like crazy. Be grateful, start a gratitude journal - we know that this has tremendous effect on happiness. 

After you establish the facts you can move to step 3, which is: experiment. 

Because even though you have established some facts about various important domains of your life you don't actually know whether it will work for you or for your own organization. This is why you have to be your own experimental scientist. Take the conclusions from the second phase and apply it in your own life in your personal life in organizational life and then measure what the results are. Experiment. Reframe. Verify and find the solution, an evidence based solution that's right for you.

There's a great quote from Stephen Hawking and it goes like this:

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge". 

And if you apply this three-step approach to this quote the first thing that you'll find is that Stephen Hawking never actually said that, although we can find it all over the web. This quote is misattributed.

But at the same time the truth behind it is still there.

You should always question the accepted truth about the domains that are important. You should seek out established knowledge about the domains that are important. Ultimately, you should test whether those truths work for you and for your organization.

This is the path to answering any question.

This is the path to evidence-based life.