What did I read? April Edition

One would think that being safe at home for a solid month would’ve allowed me to make a serious dent in my reading list. Not so. Because life happens.

You may recall that in March, I dove into some tragic fiction that turned out to be super depressing as the world turned upside down around it. In April, I found solace in trying to learn a new skill--and then in understanding what was happening in my brain while I was trying to learn a new skill.

So what did I read in April 2020?

The Cartography of Negotiation by Scott Wayne

A number of years back, I took a class with Scott on the principles of negotiation and found it riveting. I love a good story and Scott had plenty of them to illustrate the mutual creation of value (or failed attempts at it).

The class came with a companion reader, The Cartography of Negotiation. Scott suggested that negotiation is iterative and circular—and doesn’t lend itself to rigid step-by-step processes. So he designed his book to be more of an interactive workbook, with tools and exercises for sketching out values and strategies. I’m a visual learner, so I loved the idea.

...until he stumped me on page 11. The first lesson of negotiation is to know thine own self in order to understand what you truly want. So just a few pages into Chapter One, he laid out some seemingly innocuous questions: Who are you? What is your higher calling? What will your legacy be? And I didn’t have answers, at least not ones that didn’t sound like interview responses for the position of my own life. Quarantined at home realizing this, it triggered some existential dread.

But he warned that that might happen. He noted that understanding what motivates you is the first step towards empathizing with others and establishing common ground. So after some soul searching and conversations with my wife—I still don’t really have authentic answers. But at least now I know that I don’t. Which is something, I suppose.

In The Cartography of Negotiation, research into oneself is followed by equally diligent research into the other party to identify overlapping and diverging interests. Scott then touches upon psychological biases of anchoring, priming, and framing as factors that can be consciously deployed for setting up successful negotiations. He also provides practical advice and considerations for setting the environment, materials, teams, agenda, and overall atmosphere and flow for negotiations.

I particularly enjoyed the section on the various types of power dynamics. I think we all know people that are influential to us—and you can probably identify people that regard you as influential—but I never thought about breaking down and categorizing the types of power in the context of a negotiation: people who influence us because they know more or can offer more, versus people who influence us because they are charming or hold more status. Scott only scratched the surface, but he also included helpful suggestions on how to re-balance that power. (My favorite: when negotiating with highly charismatic people, draw out negotiations. Because charm is difficult to maintain over long periods of time.)

In no way is The Cartography of Negotiation comprehensive—but it doesn’t aspire to be. In fact, it includes A Negotiator’s Library of other resources the reader is encouraged to reference. Instead, it quite successfully aims to be a handy guidebook for our everyday opportunities to create value at home and in the office. At a bare minimum, check it out to try to get to better know yourself—but be warned that it may be harder than it sounds.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

I mentioned back in January that I am fascinated by how people make decisions and the irrationality of human behavior. This fascination led to me buying this highly regarded book a few years back, which I received, promptly thought “man, that’s a mighty thick book…,” and left on the shelf ever since.

But Scott had included Thinking, Fast and Slow in his Negotiator’s Library in the appendix of The Cartography of Negotiation, which I took as a sign from the universe that it was time to dive in.

Thinking, Fast and Slow describes the Nobel Prize-winning research of psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman and his longtime friend and collaborator Amos Tversky. The two “protagonists” of the book are dual systems of processing in the human mind:

• System 1, responsible for “fast-thinking.” the auto-pilot decisions you make in your subconscious without truly being aware of them. If you’ve ever been in deep conversation with someone on your usual drive home and you realize that you don’t remember anything about the drive, that’s because System 1 was navigating, braking, checking mirrors, and (hopefully) using your blinkers.
• System 2, responsible for the more considered and analytical “slow-thinking.” If you’ve ever been parallel parking in a tight spot, you became hyper-aware and tuned out everything but the act of parking itself. That’s System 2 taking over your concentration.

System 1 generally runs the show, but because it uses shortcuts like heuristics, biases, and assumptions, it's often untrustworthy. System 1 can tag in for System 2 for more reliable thinking, but it’s more taxing on the mind. A lot of System 2 thinking can drain your energy. Over eons of evolution, these two systems work in partnership to make things simpler and avoid risk, pain, and confusion.

Here’s a very high-level example, pulled from my own world: suppose someone asked you “how much money would you be willing to give to protect the James River?”

What just happened is that your System 1—not a fan of calculations—substituted an easier question—“how much do I like the James River?”—which of course is going to vary depending on the individual. Your System 1 responds to this easier question based on the experiences and beliefs most readily at hand in the databases of your mind--memories, conversations, stories, facts, images--that form a quick picture of your personal experience with and understanding of the river. They don’t even need to be recent experiences—they are simply the first file folders that System 1 sees when it pulls open our mental filing cabinet.

 System 1 is able to easily correlate a dollar amount with that scale of “like,” which is also different from person to person. That dollar amount is based on an anchor point that is tied to your experiences and circumstances. Among two people who equally like the James, one might think that this feeling correlates to $20, and the other might think $200.

This quick assessment is handed off to your System 2, serving as the more analytical “proofreader” of System 1’s estimate. More often than not, System 2 says “yep, this checks out. Let’s go with that.” System 2, while more thoughtful, is generally pretty lazy and is more than happy to say “close enough” to System 1 rather than exert any more energy. But if it does overrule, it’s because System 2 is making more considered comparisons against other data points that may be relevant to the question—“Do I really believe that the James needs saving?”—or may not be—“I was just reading about the looming recession, so I should probably give $20 instead of $50.”

And all of this happened in your mind in a fraction of a second when you read that question, without you being consciously aware of it. You just blurt out a number.

Of course, Kahneman explored the vastly greater theories, quirks, and biases that make decision making infinitely more complicated—and less rational. Although the relationship between fast thinking and slow thinking is consistent, the outcome could change dramatically in different circumstances:

• If you were suggested a certain dollar amount to give, you now have a specific anchor point that will change your relative perception of the value.
• If you had just an article about the James River, you’ve been “primed” and when System 1 asks itself how much you like the James, you’ll recall it more readily--even if you don't consciously connect the dots between the article and the question, which can change how much you're willing to give.
• If you were asked to make a comparison against another environmental cause, System 1 now makes a joint evaluation and you’re no longer considering how much you like the James as a single variable; you’re comparing how much you like the James versus the other cause, which changes how much you’re willing to give to protect it.
•  If you’re asked to make a comparison against another cause that’s not environmental, it’ll change how System 1 assigns a dollar amount because the two are no longer “apples to apples.”
• If you especially like or dislike the person or organization that’s asking you the question, that halo effect will weight how much you’re willing to give.
• If the question compared the plight of the James to other bodies of water, you’ve shifted from narrow context to broad context, and System 1’s assessment of the need will change. You may give more if you believe the James needs more protection than other rivers, or less if you believe that the James is better off.
• If you were asked how much you’d give for merchandise that benefits the James River, your System 1 will evaluate the cost to get something differently than it will the transfer of your money for a cause.
• Even if you’re simply tired, hungry, or stressed, it will adversely affect how much you’re willing to give as compared to if you weren’t.

This is of course barely scratching the surface of the concepts covered in the book. Kahneman frequently made tongue-in-cheek comparisons between “Econs,” the mythological beings driven by logical, predictable, utility-driven decisions that live in economics textbooks, and “real homo sapiens” that make inconsistent and counterintuitive decisions based on context and circumstances, as his work and the work cited by others seems to support. Although we have a better understanding now of how we make decisions, there's an enormous body of work concluding that there are innumerable variables that affect the rationality of decision-making. So although there are data-driven implications for marketers and how they should frame their messages to navigate these Systems, one of the broader—if not more discouraging—takeaways is that the success of marketers (as well as gamblers, day traders, and CEOs for that matter) may be more influenced by chance and the rule of large numbers than by skillful decision-making.

Did you have a System 1 “gut reaction” to these books? Or a more critical System 2 reaction? Let me know below.