When & How Decisions Matter
Life presents us with decisions that matter in different ways, but making necessary distinctions can be hard, and what the heck is "satisficing" anyway?
Before we get to today's main topic, some miscellaneous things worth your attention…
TikTok is launching a live, "American Idol"-type music competition. As the Hollywood strikes continue, we can expect to see more such attention-share-grabbing moves from the digital platforms.
Geoffrey A. Fowler has a disturbing piece in The Washington Post about how Generative AI shows information to eating disorder patients that makes them sicker, which is an outrage.
Apple's iOS 17 will feature "Personal Voice," which allows you to clone your own voice to have a cybernetic version of you read things aloud. Apple is presenting this as a tool for people with diseases that will rob them of their voices, and for those patients this is a great idea. However, the high potential for misuse and identity theft disturbs me.
Got fired? I enjoyed this piece by Kerri Pollard, with whom I had the pleasure of serving on a board, about reframing a career transition.
I'm dejected that the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has ended because it was just so, so good. If you haven't seen this show, then you can get a weeklong free trial of Paramount+ and binge both seasons. Golly is it great.
Speaking of great, before he left for a big trip my son and I caught up on My Adventures with Superman (Adult Swim and Max). Episode 7 is both entertaining for a general audience and also (for the nerds!) full of nods to different incarnations of the characters dating back to the early 1940s.
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine is magnificent science fiction: I'm nearly done with this and already grabbed the sequel. (H/T Molly Wood for the recommendation.)
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On to our top story...
When & How Decisions Matter
In an "Advanced Networking" presentation I do for startup incubators, one moment always startles the assembled founders: I describe my simple test to determine whether or not their products are unique. "If your head of sales is good looking," I say, "then your product is a commodity."
No startup founder wants to hear this because she or he is working long hours with no vacations for years to get to sustainable revenue or a Series A or an exit or whatever. But it's true.
To get up in the morning, founders must believe that their products are unique, differentiated, distinct. Marketers are similar: to create ad campaign after ad campaign they must believe that their brands are special. It's part of the seller mentality: the more you believe, the more you sell.
The buyer mentality is different: a skeptical buyer is hiring a product to do a job for which there are multiple applicants. Often, it's hard to tell the different candidates apart, but the buyer has to pick something... so she or he relies on external and irrelevant criteria to forge a distinction, one of which is "how hot is the salesperson?"
In a B2C environment, an attractive salesperson who says, "those pants look great on you" is more likely to sell a second pair of pants to the customer (who either wants to look like the salesperson or wants to flirt with the salesperson... and please notice that I'm being thoughtful about pronouns here). Pants are a commodity.
In a B2B environment, where the buyer is going to have the salesperson infest her or his office every few months for the foreseeable future, the irrelevant-but-it-still-happens question is, "which person do I want to look at across my desk?" This happens when the product is a commodity.
There's a psychological component to this familiar to anthropologists and people who play Dungeons & Dragons: sympathetic magic. Voodoo dolls, rain dances, and draping a bathing-suit-clad blonde over the hood of a red convertible are all examples of sympathetic magic where the practitioner (shaman, startup founder, car salesperson, marketer) hopes that the qualities of one thing (in our example, the good looks of the salesperson) will magically infuse the product. It is unclear to me whether this works more frequently with sales than with the other examples.
If the criteria you're applying to a decision are external to the functional attributes of the products among which you're deciding, then the products are commodities, and the decision is arbitrary.
In contrast, if a company is selling a unique product with capabilities that the competition doesn't have, then the salesperson can look like The Elephant Man after an unfortunate incident with kerosene and a book of matches, and it won't matter.
"Matter" is the most important word in the prior paragraph and in the title of this piece. It's also vague because decisions can matter in different ways. Knowing this can help you make better quality decisions.
Some decisions matter because of time pressure. Facing these decisions, people "satisfice"—a word the great twentieth century polymath Herbert Simon invented as the verb form of "satisfaction," which literally means "made enough" in Latin.
As I was occasionally heard to say back when I was first an editor in chief, picking the lineup of what articles would run on which day the following week, "Some days I'm choosing between owl shit, pigeon shit, and bat shit, but somebody's gotta pick, and that's me." In such situations, which decision you make is arbitrary. What's important is that you decide already so the wheels of the organization keep turning. (These decisions are akin to the Eisenhower Box.) "It's good enough; keep moving."
Other decisions matter because the stakes of the outcome are high regardless of time pressure: where you're going to live, what you'll do to make money, who you're going to spend your life with. Usually, you can only choose one of those things to optimize at a time. ("Optimizing" is the opposite of Simon's satisficing.)
The vexing challenge
A lot of the time it's difficult or impossible to tell whether the decision you're making is a time pressure (satisficing) decision or a high stakes (optimizing) decision.
It gets worse: we have a limited amount of decision-making energy each day, and once we use it up we start making crappier decisions. (Daniel J. Levitin's remarkable book The Organized Mind explores this in detail.) Former President Obama and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs famously wore the same sorts of clothes over and over again to save decision-making energy.
Our brains don't distinguish between time pressure decisions and high stakes decisions: we don't have different line-item decision energy budgets for the different types.
If you have a high stakes decision in front of you, then here's an effective way to approach making it. At the end of your day, clear your desk, set up a blank sheet of paper and a pen. At the top of the paper, write out the question that you need to answer or describe the decision that you need to make.
Go to sleep for the night. The next morning, get to your desk before you look at your phone or any other screens. (I confess that I make coffee first.) Don't turn on your computer. Don't look at your email. Just look at the question.
Then write.
Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.