In her research on the concept choice, Sheena Iyengar dived into a deeper examination of the implications of having a greater variety of choice, and found that more is not necessarily better. In fact, choice overload can arguably lead to poorer choices or no choice at all. One simple but interesting example she gave was how grocery customers, when presented with a selection of six versus twenty four different jams, were more likely to make a purchase when they had fewer choices.
Through these observations, she proposed four different techniques for application in business to improve the choosing experience. The first technique was to make cuts, not in an across the board manner necessarily but to trim back extraneous choices that had little positive impact, e.g. a product that had poor sales or cost more to make than it profited. The second was concretization, that is, illustrate clear consequences related to the decision being made, in her example what a person could do with extra money saved away. Some additional choices can be useful though. In a third technique, Iyengar suggests categorization by way of taking a large pile of potential choices and breaking them into multiple categories. In her example, she believes it is better to have 400 magazines with 20 categories rather than 600 with 10, for there is greater distinction and better choice opportunities. Finally she suggested conditioning for complexity by giving the less complex before the more difficult ones, as this helps avoid a level of decision fatigue where the chooser keeps going with the "default choice."
I could see the techniques of cutting and concretization as having some notable implications for myself and my organization. Knowing myself, I know that it doesn't take a lot for me to start feeling a little "whelmed" by decisions involved with a project or a problem, and I may well procrastinate until I'm forced to make a decision. By consciously breaking down a problem into the fewest number of available courses of action, I would expect it to be easier to make any necessary comparisons and make a decision more efficiently. Expanding upon that, by having fewer decisions in the pool it yields a reduced workload in anticipating concrete consequences from those decisions, another important variable in making a selection. In short, I would ideally reduce my decision chain to include only the most viable or reasonable courses of action, and if queried about consequences it will be easier for me to give concrete answers to provide justification or gain buy in.
There are also organizational implications for these two techniques. In my line of work, there are some problems that crop up which may be beyond my expertise, or may require a higher level of authority or influence. At the point I come to my commander or other senior leadership, there's an increased expectation that I come to them with possible solutions as they are inherently very busy people and can't do all of the problem solving for me. By cutting back the possible decisions being presented to them and being able to vocalize the concrete consequences as well as any possible second or third order effects, that enables them to more rapidly make a decision or to execute any necessary actions to help move things along. Additionally, by helping them out, that also ideally creates greater tolerance towards providing their inputs or expertise when I come to them with a problem that has me well and truly stumped.
To summarize, cutting and concretization techniques will, while not necessarily guaranteeing me the best decisions ever, will help me to actually make an informed decision in the first place at a reasonable pace, or at least give me a framework with which to provide my leadership useful options and enabling issues to be resolved at the lowest level possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment