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#YourCareer : Quit Your Job? Change Careers? This New Book Can Help You Make Better Decisions. GReat REad!

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Laurence Alison is a professor of psychology at the University of Liverpool and the Director of Ground Truth. Dr. Neil Shortland is a world expert on military decision making, who has worked with The Ministry of Defense (MoD), the United States Department for Defense and National Institute for Justice. Their new book, Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On, includes some high-stakes examples from military campaigns, terrorist situations and natural disasters, but offers valuable information for everyday life decisions, including career moves.

If you’re debating whether to take a new job, weighing a change of career or thinking of starting a new business, Decision Time offers specific advice and general frameworks to break down complex, sometimes amorphous decisions into actionable steps. Here are five favorite takeaways from the book that are particularly relevant to career decisions:

“When faced with what seems like a decision, your initial task is to work out whether there is, in fact, a decision to be made at all….We often find ourselves falling into this pattern of agonizing of decisions that are not available to us, or that we do not have the power to make” – Laurence Alison and Dr. Neil Shortland in Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On

 

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Too many unhappy people stay at their jobs because they think the first decision is “Should I take a new job?” or “Should I start that new business?” They fritter away their scarce free time and energy belaboring over how difficult it would be to make such a transition or how much salary they might have to give up or how hard it would be to find something new, rather than actually starting the process. As Alison and Shortland point out, you need to make sure there is a decision to make, and in the very beginning of career exploration, you don’t have an offer to respond to or a new business to launch. Your immediate decision is to get started with something. Quitting your job or putting up funds for a new venture comes much further down the road, but it paralyzes people unnecessarily.

“Five frogs are sitting on a log. Four decide to jump off. How many are left?  Answer: Five. Why? Because there’s a world of difference between ‘deciding’ and ‘doing’.” – Laurence Alison and Dr. Neil Shortland in Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On

 

With complex decisions like a next career move, there are lots of smaller decisions that need to be made first and acted upon before getting to the dramatic crossroads of stopping whatever you’re doing to take up something new. In the case of a new job, this includes figuring out what you might want to do next, researching other companies, looking at job postings, updating your marketing material, refining your interview technique and more. This is where deciding meets doing and what drives a job search forward.

 

“Many people assume that the biggest ‘mistake’ you can make when making a decision is to choose the ‘wrong’ thing. But our experience and research has led us to believe something very different: the biggest ‘mistake’ you can make is to do nothing.” – Laurence Alison and Dr. Neil Shortland in Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On

 

When changing careers – to a new industry, new role, or from employee to entrepreneur (or vice versa) – the potential regret of making a wrong pivot keeps some people stuck where they are. But this just trades the potential of being unhappy for the certainty of staying unhappy! If quitting your job turns out to be a mistake, you can go back – there have been enough people who have done that that the Great Resignation has been met by the Great Return. If you pivot to a new industry or role and prefer your original one, you can rebrand the pivot into a learning experience. If you launch a business and it fails, as long as you avoid financial ruin, you can make back the costs. Jeff Bezos has a useful decision framework about making decisions quickly when they can be reverted and taking extra time and care only when they cannot. With careers, few decisions cannot be unwound.

“Decisions are just as much about when you do something as they are about what you actually do.” – Laurence Alison and Dr. Neil Shortland in Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On

 

Alison and Shortland emphasize the importance of timing in decision-making – the “when” and not just the “what”. Timing is critical in many career decisions. When you lobby for a promotion, the right time is when you have had a big win. It is also before decisions have been finalized so you can make your case while budget and titles can still be allocated. When you make a big transition (e.g., to a new job, to a different career, to launch a business), the better time is when there aren’t other momentous events happening in the household. If your significant other just started a big new job, they won’t be able to provide extra support during your transition. If your child is just entering school or you’re moving residences or a family member needs medical care, you will be pulled in too many directions.

“Ignore the choice and you’re giving up the chance to influence future events – and that’s one of the greatest chances life offers any of us, and never one to turn down.” – Laurence Alison and Dr. Neil Shortland in Decision Time: How to Make the Choices Your Life Depends On

While Alison and Shortland remind the reader that sometimes there isn’t a decision to be made or, due to timing, it’s best to wait and take more time, they also talk about when to be decisive and make that choice. The book outlines different types of decision-makers so that readers can see what their tendencies are, the advantages these tendencies might convey and the disadvantages to watch out for. The book also offers different models for making decisions so that readers have frameworks to follow when a choice can be made. Because career moves have so many moving parts, the insights and information in Decision Time create a scaffold to help readers think through the different moving parts more carefully and objectively.

Make more informed choices. Neither rush, nor delay, but show impeccable timing. Recognize that no choice is actually a choice and likely a mistake. Take action once a decision is made. Only decide when you actually have something to decide. These are all excellent tips for making smart career moves and are covered exhaustively and engagingly in this highly recommended book.

 

Forbes.com | August 29, 2022 | Caroline Ceniza-Levine

#Leadership : Ask Yourself These Five Questions Before Making Any Major Decisions…Asking these Pointed Questions will Illuminate your Choice and its Implications in a Totally Different Way.

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 Everyone hits a crossroad from time to time. We get stuck in a state of indecision on a problem that seems to have no correct answer, and at times, it can be maddening.
Free- Direction Rail Tracks

The most important decisions, whether in work or in life, never really seem to fall in the black or white. They linger in the gray, where they can remain for a dangerously long time. The journalist Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, “A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”

Instead of letting circumstance make your next vital decision, Joseph L. Badaracco, the John Shad professor of business ethics at Harvard Business School, believes that the answer will reveal itself after answering five important questions.

As Badaracco writes in the Harvard Business Review:

Where do these questions come from? Over many centuries and across many cultures, they have emerged as men and women with serious responsibilities have struggled with difficult problems. They express the insights of the most penetrating minds and compassionate spirits of human history. I have relied on them for years, in teaching MBA candidates and counseling executives, and I believe that they can help you, your team, and your organization navigate the grayest of gray areas.

1. WHAT ARE THE NET, NET CONSEQUENCES OF ALL MY OPTIONS?

The first step in making any important decision, suggests Badaracco, is to objectively analyze all of the possibilities, and consider their real-world outcomes. He explains that this process needs to be distinguished from a cost-benefit analysis, and shouldn’t be limited to outcomes that can be measured or counted. After all, if numbers and data could solve this query, they wouldn’t be in the gray zone in the first place.

“Your job is to put aside your initial assumption about what you should do, gather a group of trusted advisers and experts, and ask yourself and them, ‘What could we do? And who will be hurt or helped, short-term and long-term, by each option?” writes Badaracco.

While this task is more difficult than it seems, it’s a strategy that chess players learn to master. The game requires players to look at the board and reimagine how it will shift based on theirs and their opponent’s decisions.

“You’re constantly looking two, three, four moves ahead,” entrepreneur and former star of the youth chess circuit Justin Moore once told Fast Company. “If you do this move, what’s the countermove? What are all the countermoves? And then for all of those, what are all of my potential countermoves? Chess is constantly teaching you to think about what comes next, and what comes after that, and what the repercussions could be,” Moore explained.

 

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2. WHAT ARE MY CORE OBLIGATIONS?

Whether it’s your boss, your shareholders, or your children, the decisions we make in life will often affect those around us, and we must consider our obligations to each stakeholder, says Badaracco. He adds that we will often be tempted to only consider immediate stakeholders, most likely the ones that sign our paychecks, but big decisions require us to consider the deeper responsibility of our actions.

“How can you figure out specifically what these duties oblige you to do in a particular situation?” he writes.

By relying on what philosophers call your ‘moral imagination.’ That involves stepping out of your comfort zone, recognizing your biases and blind spots, and putting yourself in the shoes of all key stakeholders, especially the most vulnerable ones.

3. WHAT WILL WORK IN THE WORLD AS IT IS?

This question requires us to consider the contextual circumstances of our decisions in a realistic way, the way the world really exists today, rather than the way we would like it to.

“After considering consequences and duties, you need to think about practicalities: Of the possible solutions to your problem, which is most likely to work? Which is most resilient? And how resilient and flexible are you?” writes Badaracco. “To answer those questions, you need to map the force field of power around you: Who wants what and how hard and successfully each person can fight for his aims.”

4. WHO ARE WE?

This self-reflective question, explains Badaracco, forces us to consider how our decisions shape the person or organization we really are, and not the one we want or imagine ourselves to be. By acknowledging that such decisions shape our sense of self, he believes that an understanding of the self is vital in the decision-making process.

“This question asks you to step back and think about your decision in terms of relationships, values, and norms,” he writes. “What really matters to your team, company, community, culture? How can you act in a way that reflects and expresses those belief systems? If they conflict, which should take precedence?”

To help arrive at this answer, Badaracco suggests thinking about the decision as a chapter in a person or company’s history, and how that chapter would fit into the overall narrative. “Of all the paths you might choose in this gray area, which would best express what your organization stands for?” he writes.

5. WHAT CAN I LIVE WITH?

Good judgment, Badaracco writes, is as much about understanding and analyzing the situation as it is about staying true to our values and ideals. Ultimately, the big decisions force us to determine what matters most and what matters least.

“How will you figure out what you can live with?” asks Badaracco. “End your conversations with others, close the door, mute the electronics, and stop to reflect. Imagine yourself explaining your decision to a close friend or a mentor—someone you trust and respect deeply. Would you feel comfortable? How would that person react?”

via: Harvard Business Review

 

FastCompany.com | August 15, 2016 |  JARED LINDZON 08.15.16 5:00 AM

 

 

#Leadership : 7 Things Deeply Intuitive People Do Differently…Steve Jobs Once Said that Intuition is More Powerful than Intellect.

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As it turns out, Jobs was onto something, and the scientific community backs him up. It seems that we’ve been giving intuition far too little respect.

Free- Man with Feet in Snow for Direction

“Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.” — Jonas Salk

In a Salk Institute study, participants were asked to play a card game where they pulled cards from two different decks. The decks were rigged so that one would “win” more often than the other, but the participants didn’t know that — at least, not overtly. It took about 50 cards for participants to consciously realize that the decks were different and about 80 to figure out what that difference was. However, what was really interesting was that it only took about 10 cards for their palms to start sweating slightly every time they reached for a card from the “losing” deck. It was about that same time that they started subconsciously favoring the “winning” deck.

Related: 8 Habits of Incredibly Interesting People

While that’s all very interesting in a clinical setting, you have to ask yourself if it holds true in real life. Apparently, it does. When it comes to making major decisions, your intuition can matter just as much as your intellect.

The science is clear: intuition is a powerful force of the mind that can help us to make better decisions. Fortunately, intuition is a skill that you can hone by practicing the habits of highly intuitive people.

In one study, car buyers who relied on careful analysis of all of the available information were happy with their purchases about 25% of the time, while buyers who made quicker, more intuitive purchases were happy with their purchases about 60% of the time.

Intuition comes from the primitive brain; it’s an artifact of the early days of man when the brain’s ability to detect hidden dangers ensured our survival. These days, we use this capability so little that we don’t know how to listen to it properly.

Whether you listen to it or not, your intuition is healthy and functioning. If you want to make better decisions in life, you’d do well to brush up on your intuition skills. You can start by emulating some of the habits of highly intuitive people.

1. They slow down enough to hear their inner voice. Before you can pay attention to your intuition, you first have to be able to hear it amid the cacophony of your busy life. You have to slow down and listen, which often requires solitude. Taking some time away from the everyday, even something as brief as going for a walk, is a great way to turn up the volume of your intuition.

 

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2. They follow their inner voice. One of the primary reasons that some people are more intuitive than others is that they actually listen to their gut feeling instead of dismissing or doubting it. And that doesn’t mean that they ignore their analytical mind and their critical thinking skills; there’s a difference between using reason as a system of checks and balances and using it to talk yourself out of what your intuition knows to be true.

Related: 9 Signs You’re Successful — Even If It Doesn’t Feel Like It

3. They practice empathic accuracy. I’d probably lose you if I said that highly intuitive people read minds, so I’ll use the scientific term: empathic accuracy. It’s not magic; it’s an intuitive awareness of what other people are thinking and feeling, using cues such as body language and tone of voice. It’s an extremely powerful form of empathy that helps foster deep connections with other people.

4. They practice mindfulness. “Mindfulness” sounds even more New-Agey than trusting your intuition, but it’s really just a fancy term for focusing on being in the moment. Mindfulness is a great technique to filter out all of the distractions in your environment — and your brain. When you do that, you can hear your intuition loud and clear.

5. They nurture their creativity. Did you ever have one of those paint-by-number kits when you were a kid? Talk about turning art into a science — all you have to do is put the right color in the right little space. You may end up with a pretty painting, but the only intuition involved is guessing what colors you’re supposed to use in those really tiny spaces. No paint-by-numbers kit in the world can make a skilled artist create something as novel and monumental as the Sistine Chapel or the Mona Lisa. The missing ingredient is intuition. And, just as intuition is the secret ingredient in creativity, being intentionally creative strengthens your use of intuition.

6. They trust their gut. Have you ever made a decision and immediately started to feel sick, maybe even kind of clammy? Well, that affective experience is the body’s way of informing you that the decision your analytic mind came to is at odds with your instinct.

7. They analyze their dreams. If you accept the science that demonstrates the power of intuition, it’s not much of a leap to accept that our dreams are often manifestations of intuition. Sure, sometimes dreams are nonsense, but they often try to tell us something. Intuitive people don’t just think, “Wow, that was a weird dream!”; they ask themselves, “Where did that come from, and what can I take away from it?”

Related: 7 Amazing Things That Happen When You Spend Time Alone

Bringing It All Together

The science is clear: intuition is a powerful force of the mind that can help us to make better decisions. Fortunately, intuition is a skill that you can hone by practicing the habits of highly intuitive people.

 

Entrepreneur.com | August 12, 2016 | Travis Bradberry

 

#Leadership : A 3-Step Technique for Deciding Which Advice to Follow…If you Ask 10 People for Advice, you’ll Get 10 Different Prescriptions. You can’t Act on All of Them so Which Person Do you Listen To?

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Whether it’s getting the green light for a new venture or securing the next round of funding, entrepreneurs are constantly faced with the challenge of communicating their business ideas and plans with stakeholders – board members, advisers and investors.

Free- Thinking Plasma Ball

In addition to serving as a status update, stakeholder interactions are huge learning opportunities for entrepreneurs, but they are largely underutilized for two reasons.

First, we tend to only share good news with our stakeholders and hide any bad news from them – for as long as we can anyway. In the Lean Startup world, we call this “playing success theater.” When you don’t expose the problems in your business, you close yourself off to new ideas that might become your next breakthrough insight.

“A business should be run like an aquarium, where everybody can see what’s going on.”
– Jack Stack, The Great Game of Business

Second, when we do get advice, we tend to want to follow all the advice we are given, especially when it’s coming from someone we respect or someone who is paying the bills. Left unchecked, this does more to distract and derail you than help.

“Advisor Paradox: Hire advisors for advice but don’t follow it, apply it.”
-Venture Hacks

If you ask 10 people for advice, you’ll get 10 different prescriptions. You can’t act on all of them so which person do you listen to? Should you listen to the advice coming from the person who had the most recent exit, or the person who made the most money?

Here are three ways to overcome this advisor whiplash problem.

1. Expose the problems.
Don’t pitch your advisors or simply seek validation by asking them what they think about your solutions. When you present skewed or selective data to advisors, you create bias, and their advice will be much less helpful.

Instead of simply pitching your solutions, objectively share your business model progress story, and let them uncover any problems. An effective way of telling this story is with a one-page diagram of your current business model depicted below using the Lean Canvas worksheet.

When sharing your business model story, don’t just read the Lean Canvas aloud, because people can read faster than you can talk. Instead, use your canvas as a visual aid. While your advisor is scanning the canvas, share the backstory behind your business. Answer the following questions:

How did you stumble on this customer or problem?
What’s been done so far?
What’s keeping you up at night?

2. Solicit possible solutions.
You can usually deliver an effective business model progress story within five minutes. With that out of the way, you are now ready to solicit their advice. This is the heart of the conversation.

Leaving the Lean Canvas open, in front of people, almost always evokes a reaction because it helps them visualize the entire business model, and they typically always have an opinion.

“A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.”
– Charles Kettering

If needed, ask them specific questions to trigger the conversation.

What do they consider to be the riskiest aspect of this plan?
Have they overcome similar risks? How?
How would they go about testing these risks?

3. Test big ideas with small experiments.

The key is not taking the feedback you receive as judgment or validation but rather as a means for prioritizing what’s riskiest in your business model. If eight out of 10 advisors raise similar concerns, there’s a high likelihood those problems are worth prioritizing.

However, it’s still your job to own your business model. Remember that you are the ultimate domain expert of your own business. You don’t get a gold star for following advice but for achieving results.

Using validation techniques, such as customer interviews and split tests, it’s possible to test any idea or strategy by conducting multiple small, fast, additive experiments.

Your next course of action should be crafting such an experiment to test the efficacy of the advice. Then double down on the best advice (and advisors), and ignore the rest.

Entrepreneur.com | July 28, 2016 | Ash Maurya

#Leadership : How To Handle Good And Bad Mistakes…Mistakes Happen. Every Day, they Do. It is What Happens Next That Is the Critical & a Too Often Missed Leadership Piece of the Puzzle.

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Yes Virginia, there are good mistakes. They need to be handled differently than do bad mistakes. In general, encourage intentional mistakes with minor impact and consider, excuse or prevent the rest.

Free- Boat going Nowhere

Mistakes happen. Every day, they do. It is what happens next that is the critical and a too often missed leadership piece of the puzzle. Do we overlook them, acknowledge them, take action to reset the course, and/or learn from them for maximum impact with clear accountability? Therein is the opportunity for the mistake to set the exceptional BRAVE leaders apart.

Intention and impact

While most mistakes are unintentional, evolution and survival depend on continual learning and adaptation – often from intentional mistakes. At the same time there’s a material difference between the impact different mistakes make. One of the Gore Company’s guiding principles is that everyone should consult with other associates “before taking actions that might be “below the waterline”–causing serious damage to the company.” Hence our general guidance above.

 

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Encourage intentional mistakes with minor impact

Even if you are sure plan A is right, push your team to test plans bracketing plan A. These might include things like increased and decreased investment plans at the same time as your “right” approach. Two of the three approaches will be mistakes. That’s how you get cheap learning and growth out of intentional mistakes.

Handle intentional mistakes with minor impact by encouraging others to make them.

Consider intentional mistakes with major impact

There are going to be times when you must bet the ranch. There are going to be times when that bet goes wrong. One of the hallmarks of BRAVE leadership is an ability to take and manage those risks.

Handle intentional mistakes with major impact by understanding the risks below the waterline, gathering objective data, consulting with others with diverse perspectives and considering your options carefully. Tapping into diverse perspectives is one of the best ways to get around groupthink. If all you’re going to do is talk to people that agree with you, don’t waste everyone’s time. Instead, listen carefully to those with different points of view.

 

Excuse or apologize for unintentional mistakes with minor impact

In a recap I circulated about my earlier article on Why You Should Eliminate Your Chief Innovation Officer, I mistakenly referred to eliminating ChiefInformation Officers. Several people pointed out the misplaced word. Many even defended Information Officers. While the mistake was completely unintentional and all my fault, it had the benefit of allowing me to reconnect with all sorts of people. I thanked them, apologized, and moved on.

You can get away with unintentional mistakes with minor impact – once. Own up to the mistake, fix the issue and make sure it never happens again. In these cases it’s never the mistake that gets you. It’s the cover up.

Prevent unintentional mistakes with major impact by deploying redundant systems

These are the mistakes that sink ships or companies or reputations. You read about these every day: the trading company that suffers a computer glitch; the otherwise well-run company that misunderstands the true financials of a big acquisition; VolksWagen completely failing to live up to its own values. These can be what Warren Bennis and Steven Sample refer to as “final failures”.

Handle unintentional mistakes with major impact by mitigating risk. Knowing there are going to be some unintentional mistakes, build in redundant systems to check or protect things. The builders of the Panama Canal had redundant systems all over the place so no ship could unintentionally knock open the door to a lock and wipe out everything down hill. Learn from them.

Here’s the advice:

  • Encourage intentional mistakes with minor impact.
  • Consider intentional mistakes with major impact.
  • Excuse or apologize for unintentional mistakes with minor impact.
  • Prevent unintentional mistakes with major impact by deploying redundant systems.
Minor Impact                 Once      Cheap Learning
Major Impact   Redundant Systems   Considered Choice 
          Unintentional            Intentional

East Tenth Group’s Michelle Tenzyk sums it up well:

Mistakes happen. Every day, they do. It is what happens next that is the critical and a too often missed leadership piece of the puzzle. Do we overlook them, acknowledge them, take action to reset the course, and/or learn from them for maximum impact with clear accountability? Therein is the opportunity for the mistake to set the exceptional BRAVE leaders apart.

 

Forbes.com | March 30, 2016 | George Bradt

 

 

#Leadership : How to Train your Brain to Make Better Decisions…Researchers have Shown this Growth-Mindset #Strategy of Changing How you Interpret an Event will Change Negative Response Patterns.

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Overcoming obstacles is synonymous with entrepreneurship. The ability to engage with difficulties and stress in an empowering way is described as the biggest factor for success in life — more significant than your IQ, social networks, physical health, or socio-economic background.

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When you encounter stressful situations, there are two basic ways your brain will respond: fight or flight. Whether you fight or flee can be boiled down to how you’ve been conditioned from past experiences. This negative pattern of responses is known as “learned helplessness.” If you’ve given a terrible presentation at a business meeting, you’ll have a stress-induced flight response in similar future scenarios.

To create a pattern of empowering “fight” responses when you encounter a stressful or difficult situation, adjust your explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic, at three key points: the cause (internal vs. external); the timeframe (stable vs. unstable); and the context (global vs. specific).

If left unchecked, this pattern of “learned” avoidance behaviors will lead to passive and poor decisions. You cannot dominate in entrepreneurship and leadership if you have a pattern of unhealthy risk-averse decisions — always fleeing from challenges.

The good news is, researchers have found that learned helplessness can be short-circuited depending your “explanatory style” or “attribution style.” After encountering a stressful situation, before a passive behavior is “learned,” you first have to interpret the experience, and that interpretation can be changed. Your fight-or-flight respond is visceral, until you learn to stop and ask, “Why?”

These explanatory or attributional styles can be categorized in three ways:

1. Internal vs. external.

This is how you explain the cause of an event, where you attach the “responsibility.” Making it internal means you see yourself as the cause, rather than an external factor. Example: “I’m terrible at giving presentations” (internal), as opposed to “the material was challenging to explain” (external).

2. Stable vs. unstable.

This is how you explain the lifespan an event; whether an experience has permanent effects, or is transient. Example: “I always forget names, I was born with a terrible memory” (stable), as opposed to “I didn’t get enough sleep last night, my memory is a little off this morning” (unstable).

 

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3. Global vs. specific 

This is how you explain the context of an event; whether the situation is universal across all environments or unique to one environment. Example: “I don’t enjoy meeting people at conferences” (global), as opposed to “I didn’t enjoy meeting the people at that last conference” (specific).

What’s the best explanatory style?

Explanatory styles can be divided simply into optimistic and pessimistic. So, a person who responds to challenges with pessimistic attributions will believe they were born “dumb;” that their lack of intelligence is permanent; and will never succeed in any job. This person responds with a “flight-response.”

Reframing the cause, the lifespan, and the context with an optimistic lens means this person believes they were born with great resilience; that their struggles are temporary and change happens over time; and they have the ability to succeed in any career, regardless of past failures. This person responds with a “fight-response.”

These reframing techniques can sound like wishful thinking or making excuses, but researchers have shown this growth-mindset strategy of changing how you interpret an event will change negative response patterns.

To create a pattern of empowering “fight” responses when you encounter a stressful or difficult situation, adjust your explanatory style from pessimistic to optimistic, at three key points: the cause (internal vs. external); the timeframe (stable vs. unstable); and the context (global vs. specific).

Read the original article on Entrepreneur. Copyright 2015. Follow Entrepreneur on Twitter.

December 19, 2015 | Thai Nguyen, Entrepreneur