Deliberation does not always makes sense
Aug 18th 2022
Humans have been honed over millions of years of evolution to respond to certAIn situations without thinking too hard. If your ancestors spotted movement in the undergrowth, they would run first and grunt questions later. At the same time, the capacity to analyse and to plan is part of what distinguishes people from other animals. The question of when to trust your gut and when to test your assumptions—whether to think fast or slow, in the language of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist—matters in the office as much as in the savannah.
Deliberative thinking is the hallmark of a well-managed workplace. Strategic overhauls and budget discussions are built on rounds of meetings, memos, formulas and presentations. Processes are increasingly designed to stamp out instinctive responses. From blind screening of job applicants to using “red-teaming” techniques to pick apart a firm’s plans, rigour trumps reflex.
Yet instinct also has its place. Some decisions are more connected to emotional responses and inherently less tractable to analysis. Does a marketing campaign capture the essence of your company, say, or would this person work well with other people in a team? In sticky customer-service situations, intuition is often a better guide to how to behave than a script.
Gut instincts can also be improved (call it “probiotic management”). Plenty of research has shown that intuition becomes more unerring with experience. In one well-known experiment, conducted in 2012, volunteers were asked to assess whether a selection of designer handbags were counterfeit or real. Some were instructed to operate on instinct and others to deliberate over their decision. Intuition worked better for those who owned at least three designer handbags; indeed, it outperformed analysis. The more expert you become, the better your instincts tend to be.
However, the real reason to embrace fast thinking is that it is, well, fast. Instinctive decision-making is often the only way to get through the day. Researchers at Cornell University once estimated that people make over 200 decisions a day about food alone. The workplace is nothing but a succession of choices, a few big and many small: what to prioritise, when to intervene, whom to avoid in the lifts and, now, where to work each day.
To take one example, when your inbox brims with new emails at the start of a new day, there is absolutely no way to read them all carefully. Intuition is what helps you decide which ones to answer and which to delete or leave unopened. Emails that are part of existing threads: open. Messages from people directly above and below you: open. Reminders from the chief information officer that cyber-security really, really matters: delete.
Instinct is also at work on those occasions when people have completely zoned out. They might be working on something else during a Zoom call, or playing chess on their phones, or simply admiring the ceiling pattern. Suddenly they are aware of a silence, and realise that they have been asked something or are expected to make a contribution. This is the office equivalent of coming face to face with a lion. Those who are fit to survive will say something plausible like “I’d like to understand how we are measuring success,” prompting murmurs of agreement from everyone else who hasn’t been paying attention but senses this might be a good answer.
Fast thinking is not just about self-preservation. It can help the entire organisation. The value of many managerial decisions lies in the simple fact that they have been made at all. Yet as data gushes from every pore of the modern organisation, the temptation to ask for one more bit of analysis has become much harder to resist. A well-established psychological phenomenon known as “verbal overshadowing” captures the danger of overthinking things: people are more likely to misidentify someone in a line-up if they have spent time writing a description of their faces. Managers often suffer from analytical overshadowing, mulling a simple problem until it turns into a complex one.
When to use intuition in the workplace rests on its own form of pattern recognition. Does the decision-maker have real expertise in this area? Is this a domain in which emotion matters more than reasoning? Above all, is it worth delaying the decision? Slow thinking is needed to get the big calls right. But fast thinking is the way to stop deliberation turning to dither.■
深思熟虑并不总是有意义
2022 年 8 月 18 日
人类已经经过数百万年的进化磨练，可以对某些情况做出反应，而不用想太多。如果你的祖先发现灌木丛中有动静，他们会先跑，然后再发出咕哝的问题。同时，分析和计划的能力是人类区别于其他动物的一部分。何时相信自己的直觉以及何时检验自己的假设——用心理学家丹尼尔·卡尼曼（Daniel Kahneman）的话来说，是快思考还是慢思考——在办公室和在大草原上一样重要。
深思熟虑是管理良好的工作场所的标志。战略改革和预算讨论建立在多轮会议、备忘录、公式和演示文稿的基础上。流程的设计越来越多地旨在消除本能反应。从对求职者的盲目筛选到使用“红队”技术来挑选公司的计划，严谨胜过反射。
然而本能也有它的位置。一些决定与情绪反应更相关，本质上不太容易分析。例如，营销活动是否抓住了您公司的精髓，或者这个人是否会与团队中的其他人一起工作？在棘手的客户服务情况下，直觉通常比脚本更好地指导行为方式。
直觉也可以得到改善（称之为“益生菌管理”）。大量研究表明，直觉随着经验变得更加准确。在 2012 年进行的一项著名实验中，志愿者被要求评估精选的设计师手袋是假冒还是真品。一些人被指示凭直觉行事，而另一些人则被要求仔细考虑他们的决定。对于拥有至少三个名牌手袋的人来说，直觉更有效；事实上，它的表现优于分析。你越是专家，你的直觉就会越好。
然而，拥抱快速思维的真正原因是它很快。本能的决策通常是度过这一天的唯一方法。康奈尔大学的研究人员曾估计，人们每天仅对食物就做出 200 多项决定。工作场所只不过是一连串的选择，一些大的和许多小的：优先考虑什么，何时干预，在电梯中避免谁，以及现在每天在哪里工作。
举个例子，当你的收件箱在新的一天开始时充满新电子邮件时，绝对没有办法仔细阅读它们。直觉可以帮助您决定要回答哪些问题，哪些要删除或不打开。属于现有线程的电子邮件：打开。来自您正上方和下方的人的消息：打开。首席信息官提醒网络安全真的非常重要：删除。
在人们完全分心的情况下，本能也在起作用。他们可能在 Zoom 通话期间正在处理其他事情，或者在手机上下棋，或者只是欣赏天花板的图案。突然，他们意识到一片沉默，并意识到他们被要求做某事或被期望做出贡献。这相当于与狮子面对面的办公室。那些能够生存下来的人会说一些似是而非的话，比如“我想了解我们如何衡量成功”，这引起了其他没有关注但认为这可能是一个很好的答案的人的低声表示同意。
快速思考不仅仅是自我保护。它可以帮助整个组织。许多管理决策的价值在于它们已经做出的简单事实。然而，随着数据从现代组织的每一个毛孔中涌出，要求进行更多分析的诱惑变得更加难以抗拒。一种被称为“口头遮盖”的成熟心理现象抓住了过度思考事物的危险：如果人们花时间写下他们的面孔描述，他们更有可能错误地识别出排队的人。经理们经常遭受分析的阴影，考虑一个简单的问题，直到它变成一个复杂的问题。
何时在工作场所使用直觉取决于其自身的模式识别形式。决策者在这方面有真正的专业知识吗？这是一个情感比推理更重要的领域吗？最重要的是，推迟决定是否值得？需要缓慢的思考才能正确地做出重大决定。但是快速思考是阻止深思熟虑转向犹豫不决的方法。■
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