Why the Best Decision-Makers Are a Little Irrational 📌 With Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Johnson

I don't have you know the psychologist  Roy Baumeister has a lovely phrase I'm   gonna botch it it's something like a useful  degree of delusion and the useful degree of   delusion is an observation made that when you  look at happy couples for example and you ask   them about their spouse what you discover  is that their image of their spouse is not   grounded in reality they think their spouse is  far more attractive than they actually are far   more intelligent than they actually are boid of  all sorts of flaws etcetera etcetera etcetera and   they are deluded but there it deluded in a lovely  and useful way you could make the same observation   of course about entrepreneurs that if enough to  an entrepreneur was rational they wouldn't start   the company because most companies fail you if  you're rational you would go to dentistry school   right that is the rational route or become an  account now actually dentists is the best people   are always gonna need to have the teeth fixed and  it's a steady income there's a need for dentists   and then you can make up new uses when they  if they brush your teeth and they don't have   cavities then you cap the teeth right you're gonna  cleansing it's a fantastic business but the other   day I don't think there's any dentists in this  room most people who have chose to do something   just a little bit irrational right so if they were  entirely rational decision makers and if they went   through an exhaustive rational process wouldn't  we have suboptimal outcomes people would never get   married and they wouldn't start any businesses and  we would all be single dentists [Laughter] yeah   I think I think that's probably right I hadn't  thought about it in terms of the dentist model but   I think that I I guess I wouldn't describe what  I'm arguing for in this book as a purely rational   process because what it really is trying to do is  I mean the word that keeps coming up in the book   again and again is diversity right like trying to  approach the problem you're wrestling with from   diverse angles from diverse perspectives to have a  team of people around you that are analyzing from   different ways to challenge yourself to build  alternative stories about how things could turn   out and because you know the flip side of that  you know irrational exuberance and confidence   is overconfidence and confirmation bias and you  get really excited about an idea and you jump   into it and it turns out you've missed something  important and so a lot of what I write about in   the book is trying to actually have just kind of  weird or perspectives on and and and a kind of   wider range of perspectives on the problem that  you're looking at so so like one of the examples   in in in the book and talk about scenario planning  which is this technique that was developed in the   in the seventies largely is a kind of business  technique and it's really a storytelling exercise   right you're like confronting this big choice and  you as an exercise you tell three or four stories   about the future if we decide to you know launch  this new product or if we decide to do this in our   lives tell three or four different stories about  how that might pan out and the part of that one   of the exercises that I love is one where you  tell three different versions of the story one   where things get better one where things get worse  and one where things get weird right and and that   exercise of trying to imagine what that future is  where things get weird even if it doesn't happen   ends up opening you to kind of new possibilities  or seeing things that you might not have seen and   helps you can just perceive the landscape more  clearly I don't I don't think I don't see that to   me doesn't strike me as being irrational you know  it's like I've computed the answer to this problem   and that you know with 97% probability I think  this is the right choice what they're doing right   is considered yeah yeah it's it's it's considered  its deliberative its creative its it's a narrative   kind of process I mean the other technique that  that Gary Klein developed that that you wrote   about in blink as well in the in the basement fire  story is this pre-mortem technique right which is   you've decided that this is a path you're gonna  go down everybody's excited about it you run this   exercise called a pre-mortem where you basically  you're you're told in two years this decision   we were about to make turns out to be an utter  failure or a complete catastrophe tell the story   of how that catastrophe happened and when you  do that exercise it turns out to be a much more   effective way to get people to think about the  decision they're about to make and instead of just   saying hey we're about to make this choice do you  see any flaws when you ask people to answer that   question they're like no it's great it's fantastic  let's go you know I'm really excited about this   when you force them to tell the story about how it  all goes south and becomes a disaster they end up   actually being more perceptive and so to me that  that's about just widening your field of vision   it's not about some kind of fully rational process  yeah yeah which I would think you'd be cool with [Music]

Channel: Next Big Idea Club

Views: 33,418

Keywords: next big idea club, transformative ideas, world’s great thinkers, life-changing insights, book community, interviews with writers and thinkers, smart talks, book authors interviews, ideas that will change your life, malcolm gladwell, revisionist history, american innovations, steven johnson, farsighted book, enlightenment, decision-making, decision theory, Conversation With Steven Johnson, Betaworks Studios New York, Steven Johnson’s book, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions

Id: yNJPzBsDzdM

Length: 5min 13sec (313 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2019