We’ve all done it – and will no doubt do it again. Despite our best thinking, we make bad decisions. And when our job is to make the sale or manage the sales process, bad decisions can have ramifications that everyone else in our organisation can see.
It was always handy for Captain Kirk to have an un-emotional, rational lieutenant in the form of Mr Spock to guide his decisions as they went boldly where no one had gone before. Today, Vulcan side-kicks are hard to come by – and they can have their own peculiar problems.
However, perhaps there’s a way for us to channel our inner Mr Spock and apply a little more intention to our decisions – and get better results in the process.
Recent research presented in the Harvard Business Review by Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead and Sydney Finkelstein, has shown that there are reasons why we make poor decisions – and outlines actions we can take to reduce our chances of making bad decisions. This article will review some aspects of this research and apply the findings to a sales and sales management setting.
The core of the problem with human decision making, say Campbell and his co-authors, lies with two hardwired processes that we all rely on when we make decisions. Our brains lead us to do two things:
- recognise patterns, based on our experience; and
- interpret these patterns in an emotional manner – again based on personal experience.
Both these things have been developed to allow us to operate in a complex world. In a more primitive setting it’s important to be able to quickly recognise whether a person is a friend or a foe; whether the pretty berry we’re about to eat is sweet or poisonous; and whether the charging woolly mammoth is heading our way.
In today’s organisational setting, we also make quick decisions. Is the meeting the boss has called really important – or can I afford to skip it; can I incorporate the data from last month’s report in the new report I’m writing; can we reallocate our warehousing space to defer a move to new premises for another 12 months.
We make thousands of decisions every day. Many are inconsequential in the larger scheme of things; some will have unintended consequences which may be good or bad; and yet others will have major consequences – again good or bad – and often we don’t give some of these the decisions the attention they deserve.
The reason?
Pattern recognition and emotional tagging.
Pattern recognition helps us make quick decisions – which are usually appropriate. It helps us know which foods are safe to eat, and to know which meetings to make sure we attend. Our very survival can depend on these decisions, and we make them without thinking at all about the information we’ve processed, the conclusions we’ve drawn and the actions we’ve taken.
The typical journey from home to office is full of life and death decisions that we don’t think about. We wait for the light at the crossing to turn green before we cross – and even then we take another look in case an impatient driver is late for their arrival. We choose to wait until it is safe before we alight the tram. And again we take care to avoid passing traffic. We take care to avoid the icy pathway, and go another way. And so it goes.
As well as our experience of previous patterns making our life easy – and safe – as we journey to work, we also make some decisions based on previous emotional experiences. We choose not to walk down a particular laneway which would make our journey shorter because it felt unsafe when we used it 12months ago. We avoid sitting in a certain section of the tram carriage because we nearly missed our stop when we sat there on another occasion – even though it may mean standing up.
We are creatures of habit – based on past experience which informs our behaviour today. Continue Reading…
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