Construal-level theory

Em "awesome people with awesome interests" escrevi:

"Quando era miúdo, tinha para aí uns 10 ou 11 anos, ouvia a minha mãe falar ao telefone com os meus avós que viviam em Angola, a aconselhá-los a regressar à metrópole porque as coisas em África iam dar para o torto. Os meus avós não acreditavam nesse cenário até que, no meio de uma guerra civil em Luanda, tiveram de regressar com uma mão à frente e outra atrás.

A lição que retirei desses acontecimentos traumáticos foi a de que, muitas vezes, o estar próximo das coisas retira-nos alguma capacidade de reflexão e de apreensão da realidade. O estar próximo prende-nos demasiado aos modelos mentais a que estamos habituados e dificulta-nos o partir dessas grilhetas. Como era possível alguém a milhares de quilómetros ter percebido o que quem estava lá não percebeu? Muitas vezes perdemos-nos nos detalhes dando demasiada atenção a coisas menos relevantes e perdemos a capacidade de processar o que corre em fundo."

 Agora em "Decisive - How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work" de Chip and Dan Heath encontro:

"Yet with one question-"What would our successors do?" Grove managed to add some distance to the decision. By imagining what a clear-eyed replacement CEO would do, Grove sidestepped short-term emotion and saw the bigger picture. He knew, in an instant, that they should abandon memories in order to focus on the thriving microprocessor business.

It's odd that such a simple question would have such a huge effect.

Why does "distance" help so much? A relatively new area of research in psychology, called construal-level theory, shows that with more distance we can see more clearly the most important dimensions of the issue we're facing."

"the four top villains of decision-making"

"If you think about a normal decision process, it usually proceeds in four steps:

• You encounter a choice.
• You analyze your options.
• You make a choice.
• Then you live with it.

And what we've seen is that there is a villain that afflicts each of these stages:

• You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options.
• You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information.
• You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one.
• Then you live with it. But you'll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold.

So, at this point, we know what we're up against. We know the four top villains of decision-making. We also know that the classic pros-and-cons approach is not well suited to fighting these villains; in fact, it doesn't meaningfully counteract any of them."

Trecho retirado de "DECISIVE - How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work" de Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

"the way you frame things affects how you make decisions"

"Reframe Your Situation

Most people are loss-averse. Multiple studies demonstrate that the way you frame things affects how you make decisions. The research shows, for instance, that if one treatment for a new disease is described as 95% effective and another as 5% ineffective, people prefer the former even though the two are statistically identical. Every innovation, every change, every transformation—personal or professional—comes with potential upsides and downsides. And though most of us instinctively focus on the latter, it’s possible to shift that mindset and decrease our fear.

One of our favorite ways of doing this is the “infinite game” approach, developed by New York University professor James Carse. His advice is to stop seeing the rules, boundaries, and purpose of the “game” you’re playing—the job you’re after, the project you’ve been assigned, the career path you’re on—as fixed. That puts you in a win-or-lose mentality in which uncertainty heightens your anxiety. In contrast, infinite players recognize uncertainty as an essential part of the game—one that adds an element of surprise and possibility and enables them to challenge their roles and the game’s parameters.

...

Chouinard [Moi ici: Fundador da Patagonia] has learned to face uncertainty with courage—and in fact to be energized by it—because he views his role as improving the game, not just playing it. “Managers of a business that want to be around for the next 100 years had better love change,” he advises in his book. “When there [is] no crisis, the wise leader…will invent one.”"

Depois de ler isto, recordar o que é mais comum em Portugal: resistir, chorar, chamar o papá estado, em vez de abraçar a mudança:

•  "Transforming An Obstacle Into A Design Constraint" 
• Curiosidade do dia
• Engaging emergence 

Trechos retirados de "How to Overcome Your Fear of the Unknown" 

"Better decisions"

"Catastrophic decisions live on in the business lore as testament to the perennial difficulty of making good decisions.

...

1. Make sure you truly understand the problem. There is often an unavoidable tendency to fall into what I call ‘the conclusion trap’. In a fast-changing environment, executives often feel pressured to make decisions quickly. Combine that with years of training and reinforcement with the kind of System 1 (automatic, intuitive) thinking that Daniel Kahneman describes, and you have a perfect recipe for jumping to incorrect conclusions or solutions that can sink an organization. 

Perhaps the most important step you can take in this regard is to go and see. Like a good detective, go to the ‘scene of the crime’ and directly observe the situation. 

...

2. Define a process. We tend to think of decision-making as a fine art that comprises intuition, experience and myriad other unquantifiable factors — rather than as a process that can be improved. Humans are afflicted with far too many cognitive biases to rely on the alchemy of ‘gut feel’. 

...

To mitigate the pernicious effects of cognitive biases, organizations need to view decision-making as a process that can be monitored and improved with appropriate systems and structures. Here are five ideas that will help:

• Send materials in advance. To avoid peer conformity, allow people to think through the issues in advance, individually. Share the relevant information before every meeting and ask people to develop recommendations. Collect these ahead of time and discuss them at the meeting. The different perspectives will lead to more productive and thoughtful discussions.
• Clarify the assumptions. It is essential that everyone starts out with the same assumptions. The materials provided must specify what those critical assumptions are and what the goals are for the decision. Are you striving to maximize market share? Are you anticipating a flat, declining or growing market? People must have the same starting point for their analysis.
• Conduct a pre-mortem. Pretend that the decision agreed to turns out badly. Assess ‘what went wrong’ and why. This discussion will identify weaknesses in the plan.
• Assign a devil’s advocate. A devil’s advocate arguing against your recommended course of action will point out any holes in the ‘solution’. Because the role is assigned, there will be less of a temptation to succumb to peer pressure to conform.
• Define the rules of engagement. Tribal knowledge in organizations teaches people how to behave in meetings.

...

3. Solve at the right level. Decisions should be made, and problems solved, as close to the issue as possible.

...

4. Run experiments. The amount of data available to organizations today enables them to run experiments quickly and inexpensively, enabling them to easily validate new pricing strategies, marketing campaigns or product features. Before committing to a decision, run an experiment with a small group of customers, or with just one factory or geographic region.

...

5. Train and institutionalize these behaviours. Commit to teaching employees this decision-making approach. Make sure they know how to use the tools and structures listed here. Companies provide training for their employees on all kinds of skills, and decision-making should be treated in the same way. "

Trechos retirados de "The path to better decisions" de Daniel Markovitz, publicado em Rotman Management Spring 2021.

E a sua empresa, também é curiosa?

"And this is my problem with the cognitive sciences and the advice world generally. It’s built on the premise that we are chess masters who make decisions, for good or ill. But when it comes to the really major things we mostly follow our noses. What seems interesting, beautiful, curious and addicting?
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Have you ever known anybody to turn away from anything they found compulsively engaging?
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We don’t decide about life; we’re captured by life. In the major spheres, decision-making, when it happens at all, is downstream from curiosity and engagement. If we really want to understand and shape behavior, maybe we should look less at decision-making and more at curiosity. Why are you interested in the things you are interested in? Why are some people zealously seized, manically attentive and compulsively engaged?"

E penso nos fragilistas e nas suas decisões.

Trecho retirado de "Does Decision-Making Matter?"

Poder, decisões e excesso de confiança

"the decisions made by power holders across a multitude of arenas - including businesses, government, religious institutions, and nonprofit organizations - are often marred with overconfidence.
...
urthermore, when powerful leaders are plagued with overconfidence, the consequences for performance can be detrimental. Making important decisions in the absence of adequate information hinders not only one’s own performance and ability to maintain power, but often hurts companies, stockholders, and the general public too,
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the experience of power exacerbates overconfidence.
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After experiencing power, individuals pay more attention to positive and rewarding information, and adopt an orientation toward action. Furthermore, recent evidence shows that experiencing an elevated sense of power – defined as the subjective sense that one is powerful and influential, regardless of whether this is actually the case coincides with confidence-inducing states, such as optimism, risk-taking and exaggerated perceptions of control over outcomes. Building on these ideas, we predict that power will, via an elevated subjective sense of power, lead to an overestimation of one’s accuracy in decision-making domains."

Trechos retirados de "Power and overconfident decision-making"

"Managing for Strategic Success"

Um excelente artigo, relevante para o desafio de co-construir uma estratégia para uma empresa, "What Makes Strategic Decisions Diferent", de Phil Rosenzweig, publicado no número de Novembro de 2013 pela Harvard Business Review.

"the bulk of the decision-making research published to date applies to one type of decision, and it’s not the type that’s most challenging for managers. Their most important and most difficult decisions - strategic decisions with consequences for the performance of the company - call for a very diferent approach.
The fact is that people need to make up their minds in a great variety of circumstances, and it’s a source of confusion that the same word, “decision,” is used for all of them.
...
A decision. The same term is applied to routine as well as complex deliberations, to both small-stakes bets and high-stakes commitments, and to exploratory steps as well as irreversible moves.
...
before we can advise people on how to make better strategic decisions, we need to equip them to recognize how decisions differ.
For that, we need to break the universe of decisions into a few categories. We can then suggest the
best approach for each.
...
Categorizing DecisionsDecisions vary along two dimensions: control and performance. The frst considers how much we can infuence the terms of the decision and the outcome. Are we choosing among options presented to us, or can we shape those options? Are we making a onetime judgment, unable to change what happens after the fact, or do we have some control over how things play out once we’ve made the decision? The second dimension addresses the way we measure success. Is our aim to do well, no matter what anyone else does, or do we need to do better than others? That is, is performance absolute or relative?

Decisions in the Fourth FieldThe crux of our discussion comes into focus when we consider the fourth field. For these decisions, we can actively infuence outcomes, and success means doing better than rivals. Here we fnd the essence of strategic management. Business executives aren’t like shoppers picking a product or investors choosing a stock, simply making a choice that leads to one outcome or another. By the way they lead and communicate, and through their ability to inspire and encourage, executives can influence outcomes. That’s the definition of “management.” Moreover, they are in charge of organizations that compete vigorously with others; doing better than rivals is vital. That’s where strategy comes in.
...
What sort of mind-set do they require? When we can infuence outcomes, it is useful to summon high levels of self-belief. And when we need to outperform rivals, such elevated levels are not just useful but indeed essential. Only those who are able to muster a degree of commitment and determination that is by some defnitions excessive will be in a position to win. That’s not to say that wildly optimistic thinking will predictably lead to success. It won’t. But in tough competitive situations where positive thinking can influence outcomes, only those who are willing to go beyond what seems reasonable will succeed."

Penso logo no desafio de fazer passar a mensagem, em algumas empresas, de que um consultor não pode tirar uma estratégia da prateleira para aplicação.
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Uma estratégia tem de ser co-construída pela empresa, sob pena de não ser percebida, sob pena de não ser apreendida, sob pena do compromisso não ser suficientemente forte... é a tal história sobre a importância de partir pedra.

Um argumento muito interessante

Perante uma decisão estúpida de um qualquer político, talvez seja de assobiar para o lado e deixar a decisão passar, não vá ele lembrar-se de uma muito pior.
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"This sounds cynical, but I’m just being honest. Politicians are constrained by public opinion. When the public rejects the mundane explanations for high gas prices — big boring facts like rapid Asian growth — politicians aren’t going to correct them. The best we can expect is for Washington to try to channel the public’s misconceptions in relatively harmless directions. We could do a lot worse than the gas tax holiday; in fact, we usually do."

Anatomia de uma decisão

O esquema “Anatomia de uma decisão”, incluído na edição do jornal Público da passada quarta-feira encheu-me as medidas!
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Perante um desafio, perante um problema, em vez de uma abordagem parcelar, desgarrada, em vez de um tiro no escuro, em vez de um confiar na sorte. Optar por alguma organização, optar por pôr as cartas organizadas em cima da mesa, para evitar ou minimizar surpresas.
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Por vezes deparo-me com empresas que estão a operar em áreas de negócio sujeitas a muita legislação e que não fazem ideia de toda a moldura legal a que estão sujeitas. Arriscam, fazem figas… talvez não haja problema!
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Não o fazem, necessariamente com alguma intenção dolosa, fazem-no muito simplesmente por falta de organização mental. Falta-lhes um esquema como o do jornal.
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Por isso procuro, à minha maneira, sistematizar a informação na minha versão da “Anatomia de uma decisão”.
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Por exemplo, para uma empresa em particular desenhamos este esquema que pretendia ilustrar como é que interagiam com o ambiente a nível do tema água:
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Perante este panorama, que legislação existe sobre o tema água?
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Agora, há que analisar cada uma destas peças legislativas e listar, para lá dos considerandos, que requisitos concretos existem. Por exemplo, para o caso da legislação associada ao tema ar:
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Do DL nº 78/2004 é possível isolar as especificações concretas: m); n); o); t); u); v); x); y).
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As especificações m) e n) correspondem a actividades de controlo.
As especificações v) e x) correspondem a exigências de envio de documentação para entidades oficiais.
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A especificação o) corresponde a manter registos.
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Simplesmente não consigo, é amadorismo, no sentido mais pejorativo da palavra, tratar de um assunto sem organização.

A vida não é como nos programas de televisão. Neles os convidados têm de estar no palco e "botar" discurso e defender as suas posições durante meia hora, uma hora, duas horas. Depois, o programa acaba, apagam-se as luzes e os convidados podem voltar noutro dia para falar de outro assunto qualquer, ou não.

Na vida das organizações, muito mais cedo do que julgamos ou estamos à espera, a realidade emerge ao virar de cada esquina para trucidar as opiniões pouco fundamentadas, as desculpas esfarrapadas, ou as certezas de amador... "É a vida!!!"

Mesmo quando se planeia, mesmo quando se estuda e prepara de forma profissional... "É a vida!!!"