Ideas

There is a potential paradox with being powerful: a powerful person is more likely to make a decision, but he or she is also more likely to be wrong! It’s easy to see how, in evolutionary terms, power was helpful: small nomadic groups benefitted from sticking together and without a powerful leader, the group might easily fragment.  Even now, a company that can take action quickly can steal a march on its competitors. Anyone who has ever served on a committee will appreciate, the larger the group of people who feel they have a role in determining the group’s direction, the more tedious and protracted the process of making a decision becomes.  Sometimes it’s a miracle that larger committees achieve anything at all. So, having powerful people is vital for efficient progress but, as we all know, powerful people can become blinkered and make decisions that are questionable.  The problem […]

Psychology is a fundamental part of sport. Yesterday I was at a tennis training session with an astoundingly good tennis coach: he was pointing out the difference in the way most of us higher team players hit our returns of serve and next shots in matches, compared to when we’re hitting consecutive shots in the warm up. In the warm up for a doubles match we will happily drill balls at our opponent as he stands at the net to practice his volleys.  In a match, we hit our returns well and then try and conjure up an entirely different shot when the ball comes back to us.  Burdened by a desire to bring about a particular outcome, we try and force the point and frequently fail to pull it off. Of course, this isn’t the result of a conscious decision to play in a particular way.  Our unconscious minds […]

Much has been written in recent times about the so-called wisdom of crowds.  This is the theory that aggregating the information in groups from individuals will result in decisions that are better than would have been arrived at by any individual member of that group.  Some claim that such decisions will also be better than those from experts or expert committees. The difficulty with all of these theories is priming. The information that is imparted to extract the view of the crowd has the capacity to influence the outcome.  If this ‘prime’ information is wrong the ‘wise crowd’ won’t correct this bias. It’s one thing when the answer being solicited is basic and straightforward: for example, “How much does this ox weigh?” It’s quite another when the question is more subjective and complex: “Is this the right political party to reverse the country’s economic troubles?” In the case of more […]

I have believed for a long time that asking people what they think is a desperately unreliable way to go about understanding what they really think. Jessica Rabbit, the main love interest in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit famously complained, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”. I feel very similarly about people’s capacity for inaccurate portrayals of themselves, “They’re not bad, their brains are just designed that way”. Of course, accepting that people are poor witnesses to their own thoughts is problematic: It requires us to accept we might be similarly afflicted. It means a lot of what passes for good judgment in terms of understanding consumers is not very good at all. Once you start accepting the role of the unconscious mind in your own behaviour it can be very helpful. There are ways of guarding against making bad decisions (such as by making checklists) and when you’re […]