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

August 29, 2022/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

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 : #DecisionMaking – When #Managers Should be Fair and When they Should Challenge the Rules…Sometimes the Right Decision isn’t the Most Fair, But it Can be a Tricky Line to Toe.

August 22, 2018/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

From early in life, we are attuned to the concept of fairness. As kids, if one child gets more candy than others, that is met with cries of, “That’s not fair!” And when we ascend to leadership roles, we often strive to be fair to the people who work for us.

But why do we care so much about fairness?

FAIRNESS VERSUS JUSTICE

Paul Woodruff, in his excellent book The Ajax Dilemma, points out that organizations have ideals they strive to uphold. One key ideal is justice, which is the idea that people should receive the outcomes they deserve for the actions they take and the contributions they make within the organization.

As it turns out, though, justice is hard to enforce, because there are no clear rules about how to relate behavior to outcomes. For example, we know it is wrong to kill another person, but the law has gradations for killing. Soldiers who kill in battle are rewarded for killing. People who kill in self-defense are not punished.

Those who kill accidentally are treated differently than those who intended to kill someone else. We even make a distinction between individuals who coldly calculate whether to kill another person versus those who kill in the heat of passion.

It is so hard to make these kinds of decisions that the legal system spends a lot of time and effort training judges to make distinctions and sets up courts of appeals so that the decision of one judge can be reviewed by others.

Most companies do not have the resources to ensure justice for their employees, so they substitute procedures designed to create reasonable outcomes. As Woodruff points out, these procedures are what he calls the doubles of ideals. They are procedures that resemble the ideal, but do not always lead to the same outcome.

In particular, most companies strive for fairness rather than justice. They create rules that apply equally to everyone and take a lot of the weight of decision making off managers.

The advantage of treating employees fairly as a manager is that it is easy to justify the decisions you make. You can point to the rule that you apply to make a decision, and then people dissatisfied with the outcome cannot blame you for the outcome. If they have a concern, they need to take it up with the people who created the rules rather than with you as enforcer of that rule.

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ENFORCING RULES AND QUESTIONING THEM

When you first take on a managerial role, it is useful to strive for fairness. Learning to navigate leadership positions is hard. There are many times in which procedures that seem to be wrong-headed have benefits downstream in the organization that may not be obvious from your vantage point. Enforcing the rules as given is a way to ensure that you do not make decisions that have unintended consequences.

At the same time, when there are procedures that don’t make sense to you, it is valuable to ask questions of the people above you. Find out why particular procedures have been put in place and what alternatives have been tried before.

The reason to both enforce rules and question them is that as you move higher in an organization’s hierarchy, you have to shift your emphasis from following rules to upholding ideals. Companies succeed not just by following the rules of a market, but by disrupting it. That disruption involves breaking the implicit rules of a market.

Similarly, the decisions you make about personnel in an organization have to become more just as you ascend higher in the ranks. You may identify stellar employees who have not yet paid their dues but deserve more responsibility anyhow. Elevating those individuals may not be fair, but it could be the right thing to do.

Many articles focus on the differences between leadership and management. There is no single factor that separates these concepts. One important difference, though, is that managers are typically bound to execute procedures that are the doubles of core ideals. Leaders must develop the wisdom to know when a particular procedure gets in the way of an ideal, and to make good decisions that fly in the face of easily executed procedures.

FastCompany.com | August 22, 2018 | BY ART MARKMAN 3 MINUTE READ

#Leadership : It’s Not Enough to Make Good Decisions, You Need to Make Efficient Ones as Well…In Order to Streamline our Process, We Came Up with Several Different Levels of Involvement & Worked to Minimize Everyone’s Time Commitments Within our #KeyDecisions . We Came Up with Five Levels.

June 6, 2018/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

One of the key lessons I’ve learned over the years as a founder, CEO, and business adviser is that it’s not enough to make good decisions; you need to make good decisions efficiently. Bad decisions are never good, but it’s just as bad to make good decisions late.

The fact is that business is full of decisions. Effective executives and effective leadership teams learn how to make tens, if not hundreds, of decisions every week to keep the business running well and growing. They do this by applying the right amount of energy, brain power, and focus required for each decision and not an ounce more.

As a CEO, one of the key moves I made for company growth was to establish a leadership team within my company. This was the team I worked with to think through the bigger issues and the team that became responsible for key departments. I realized I couldn’t do everything myself. I needed more input and insights into where to steer the business.

However when I first established this team, I made a critical mistake. I assumed that everyone should be involved in all of decisions. I made a long list with copious notes and called our first meeting with all of the senior team members. The first few decisions felt good because everyone was included. We had good discussion, and we found directions that everyone stood behind.

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The problem was that we only had completed three or four items over the course of two hours and we had over fifty items on the list. Clearly, this wasn’t going to work going forward. I realized that I needed to find a way to make both good decisions, and also make them in the limited time we had available.

In order to speed things up, we decided that not everyone needed to be involved at the same level for every decisions. For some decisions, certain people needed to be at the table to discussion, but for other decisions we just needed to collect information from a few people.

In order to streamline our process, we came up with several different levels of involvement and worked to minimize everyone’s time commitments within our key decisions. We came up with five levels.

Input

For many decisions, we needed to collect information from several sources for input into the process. We learned that while gathering the information was critical, the key executives who provided the information didn’t need to be part of the process. Once we had the information, they could go back to other work. This worked well for staffing and planning.

Collaborate

At times, we realized that we needed certain people at the table to discuss options and think through scenarios and possible outcomes. It was more than input, so we made it a higher level of involvement. We used this for deciding project team leads and new clients.

Make

One of the best things we did was get super clear on who was actually going to make a decision. Generally we got it down to one person. They took in all of the data, considered all of the options, and applied all of the criteria discussed to make the final choice. Our rule here was to have the person who was closest to the issue make the decision when possible. What we found eventually is that the person closest to the issue and the person who was going to have to live with the decisions were the best people to put in this role.

Approve

As CEO, I realized that I needed to delegate a lot of decisions if I was going to free myself up to focus on more strategic tasks and to empower the team. However, there were some things I still wanted to give a final blessing to before they were implemented. The rule was that I couldn’t change the decision, I could only approve or vote it. It freed up my time immensely and developed my team’s leadership skills.

Inform

This was a powerful move for the team. We realized that many people were coming to the table just so they could hear the discussion and learn what the final resolution was. Rather than having them sit through the meetings, we promised to take notes, record final decisions, and distribute them to the right people in a timely manner. This greatly reduced the people who needed to be at the meeting.

Once we had these levels defined and agreed to, we found the best strategy was to push people from the middle to the edges, to either to input or inform, if we could. We generally tried to only have one person make the decision and then I would often take approve simply to coordinate with strategy and longer term planning.

Now as a business coach, decision making is one of the main things I help leadership teams get right. The key is to balance quality with efficiency and to know when you’ve hit the “good enough” point so you can move forward onto the next decisions quickly and confidently.

Post Written by Bruce Eckfeldt : Bruce Eckfeldt is a five-time Inc 5000 CEO, Certified Gazelle’s Business Growth Coach, and President-Elect of the NYC chapter of EO

FastCompany.com | June 6, 2018

Your #Career : Using Intuition – Those ‘Gut Feelings’ – To Help Navigate #CareerChoices …The Challenge is That we are Often so Used to #MakingDecisions with our Conscious Mind – Using Logic & Rationality – That we can Easily Dismiss or Miss this Other Source of Crucial Information.

February 13, 2018/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

I once was in an interview process for a job I thought I really wanted. Deep down though I had a feeling that maybe it wasn’t the right job for me. Something just felt off. But I didn’t listen. Instead, I learned the hard way that those small inner nudges and gut feelings we have – they really do know what’s up. And (sometimes at least) we’d really benefit from listening to them.

Collectively, I would call these feelings, inner sense, or nudges our intuition. Accessing our intuition is particularly helpful in situations where our rational/logical mind can craft seemingly well-reasoned, good cases for either side of an argument or for multiple different choices and we’re left feeling confused and unsure. This happens both in navigating major decisions in our career and day-to-day at work. Tapping into the wisdom of our intuition can provide additional insight to take into consideration and help us make the choice at hand.

The challenge is that we are often so used to making decisions with our conscious mind – using logic and rationality – that we can easily dismiss or miss this other source of crucial information.

So, how can we cultivate being more in touch with our intuition?

Reduce Stress

We can’t hear the signals from our intuition when we are stressed. When we are too stressed our body is in survival mode and the only signal it’s sending is to get out of this situation. So reducing stress levels is a primary first step in being able to tune into our intuition. Perhaps you’re thinking that reducing your stress is easier said than done, but even just taking a few slow breaths to calm your nervous system can help you tune in. My next point can also help lower stress levels.

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Meditate

The Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program developed by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School teaches that through meditation we can gain greater awareness of our thoughts. And while we can’t stop our thoughts, meditation can lessen our natural tendency to identify with, believe, or get hooked by them. In my experience, meditation creates space for us to see and feel things more clearly – the space we need to tune out those arguments spinning in our mind and tune in to our genuine selves.

So, if you’re not already a meditator, give it a try. Headspace is an app with some fantastic introductory 10-minute meditations. It doesn’t have to be a lot of meditation time to start being able to tune in. After you’ve experienced the mental space and peace meditation can bring, you can try to access that when you’re in a situation where your mind is chattering away when you’re trying to make a choice.

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meditation creates space for us to see and feel things more clearly – the space we need to tune out those arguments spinning in our mind and tune in to our genuine selves.

Try listening to your intuition and see what happens when you take its cue!

A great way to start getting familiar with your intuition is to start small with “low risk” decisions at work or at home. Maybe as simple as deciding where to take the team for lunch, or what movie to watch with your partner. When a decision point arises, try to tune in, then take the option your intuition is telling you. Observe the result. This builds your muscle for tuning in and builds your experience in taking the actions it suggests. As you experiment you can reflect and fine-tune your ability to read yourself and build more confidence in the information your intuition provides. Over time you can begin to use it for choices that feel more “risky.”

Imagine yourself in future scenarios and observe

When you’re struggling to make a decision, imagine yourself having already made the decision to do X. For example, imagine you’ve already accepted the job (ex. you have the salary, the title, you’ve been at the desk with the window view for 3 months). Now, in this future hypothetical reality, how do you feel? Do this again for each option (ex. with the option of not accepting the job, or accepting a different job). Try to find the option that once taken feels the best.

My life coach mentor and teacher, Martha Beck, calls this kind of technique using your “body compass.” Note: just be aware of fear tripping you up. You can still take an action that feels good and is what you really want, but also have it be a bit scary – fear is often a normal part of stepping outside of your comfort zone or trying something new.

With all of this I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t listen to our mind and logic when making decisions. But, sometimes our intuition can have a lot of helpful information to add to our decision-making process. And I for one on many past occasions in my professional life wished I had checked in and listened to it more.

—

Note: I have completed the Martha Beck life coach training program

This information is being provided to you for educational and informational purposes only. It is to be used at your own risk based on your own judgment.

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And to learn more about my career coaching services for young professionals click here. I’d love to help you!

Forbes.com | February 13, 2018 | Sara Young Wang , WOMEN@FORBES ..

I’m a #careercoach focused on helping you find happiness at work Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

#Leadership : 3 Ways to Guide Your Employees Toward Empowered Decisions…Traditional Top-Down Management can Create a Single Point of Failure within Each Department: a Middle Manager Held Accountable for his Team’s Projects and Products.

December 24, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

According to a Harvard Business Review analysis released in September, U.S. companies are wasting more than $3 trillion every year on excess bureaucracy and management — which is equivalent to 17 percent of our country’s GDP.

That’s an astonishing amount of money, and I believe one of the keys to reversing this trend is addressing a structure that has been an American business mainstay for decades: the corporate ladder.

Today, traditional top-down management can hold companies back. It slows down decision-making, holds back brilliant talent from making an impact and can create an unnecessary single point of failure within each department: a middle manager who is held accountable for delivering all directives and approving all of his or her team’s projects and finished products.

Now that many mass communication and collaboration tools exist to facilitate real-time company-wide work, it’s time to remove the excess layers of approval from your business and thoughtfully empower each individual contributor to take action based on his or her skills and capabilities. Here’s how:

1. Modernize your company through empowerment.

In today’s fast-paced world, a company’s decision-making process needs to be streamlined, swift and agile. The traditional corporate hierarchy hampers all of these things. Its numerous layers cause traditional companies to move at a snail’s pace when making decisions and reacting to market conditions.

Embracing employee empowerment won’t just accelerate your company’s rate of innovation; it will lead to happier teams and attract free-thinking and creative job-seekers to your brand.

That’s important because many of those job-seekers will be millennials. In one study, 76 percent of millennials surveyed reported being more satisfied within a creative, inclusive work culture, while only 28 percent felt that the companies they worked for were making full use of their skills.

The message? You currently have a huge opportunity to attract these future all-stars.

Not that that opportunity will be easy: It takes hard work and dedication to create a culture of autonomous, empowered employees — and that certainly won’t happen overnight. My organization, Lifion, is devoted to achieving this type of atmosphere in our own workplace, and we are excited to help others do the same as we learn what works and what doesn’t.

These three strategies are our focus areas as we progress on this journey:

1. Showcase your mission, vision and values early and often.

An alarming 61 percent of employees say they don’t know their company’s mission. How can these individuals ever feel empowered to make smart decisions without first seeking approval from a manager?

Go out of your way to make your mission, vision and values apparent to your entire team. These three foundational elements describe what you do, where you want to go and how you want to get there — and if employees don’t intimately understand them, empowered autonomy is nearly impossible to achieve.

Put up posters in your office that highlight your values. Frequently refer to your vision when interacting with your team. And post your mission statement on your website for the entire world to see. Then, take it a step further by building tools that help your employees assess whether they’re successfully embodying these principles.

For example, we’ve created surveys of self-reflection for our team that break down our organization’s values into simple bullet points and ask how frequently employees believe they practice each concept.

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2. Develop a decision framework.

A decision framework teaches employees how to make decisions that benefit the company without first seeking approval from their managers. In its most basic form, the framework can be set up like this: If you have high confidence that your initiative will be successful — and the actions you want to take are low-risk — go ahead and make the decision. However, if you’re looking to make a high-risk decision that you have low confidence in, make sure you talk it over with other people and seek approval.

Of course, not all situations are cut and dried, so there should be a gradient of low-, medium- and high-impact/confidence built in.

The key to instilling this framework is to lead by example. Articulate your thought process to your team when you make a decision. This will build their confidence and show (not tell) them how to act autonomously. As a bonus, in doing this, you’ll be coaching your younger employees to become better leaders themselves. Ninety-one percent of millennials aspire to be company leaders, so they’ll appreciate this training.

3. Shrink the approval process.

If employees are accustomed to seeking managerial approval before taking action, it’s going to take a little time to break them of this habit. Consider this a weaning process in which they learn what types of initiatives are guaranteed to be approved and which ones tend to require discussion.

When employees come to you seeking approval during this transition period, ask them why they’re feeling unsure about their project, and then provide your input on whether you agree with their concerns. Eventually, this will help them understand your thought processes and priorities, making them more capable of anticipating what does and doesn’t require approval.

When approvals occur only on an as-needed basis, key decisions and pivots won’t be delayed — and this will lead to growth. A recent study shows that when employees are given the autonomy to make decisions, the companies they work for grow four times faster than companies with traditional management structures. These companies also experience a third of the turnover.

In modern times, the traditional corporate hierarchy can be highly inefficient and wasteful. The business world moves a lot faster than it used to, so it’s essential for today’s companies to streamline their decision-making processes as much as possible — and thoughtfully empowering each individual contributor is a giant step in the right direction.

Instill your values and goals in your employees, and empower them to make decisions that propel your company into the future.

Entrepreneur.com | December 23, 2016 | Amit Maimon

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

August 12, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

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.

“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.

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.

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?”

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?

July 28, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

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.

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 Improve Your Decision Making Skills…In Order for the Brain to Make Decisions, it Often Relies on Short Cuts.

July 17, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

Sometimes we may not have all the necessary information available, other times we only use a limited amount of information offered. This means we regularly make decisions based on just a few facts or what first comes to mind based on our previous experience and knowledge. These strategies are known as heuristics and can be useful for speed and agility, but can also lead to all sorts of errors. It is therefore, useful to be aware of this.

To empower everyone this way will lead to all employees making better decisions quickly and effectively. And think how much life at work will be improved.

If you know that you, like everyone else, is susceptible to cognitive heuristics you can take this into account when making important decisions and seek more information than you think you needed in the first place. It sounds obvious, but is not always acted upon.

Think of an everyday business scenario. You’re confident in your ability to interview people and select the right candidate for the job. You spend time with your new employee, explaining the ethos of the company and what needs to be done. In fact, you pride yourself on your ability to delegate.

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As far as you are concerned you have laid the foundations for success, so why is their ability to make a decision so hard, even on relatively minor things? In fact, it’s driving you to distraction because people are just not thinking for themselves and making a responsible judgment.

Very little is done without a decision being made, so it’s vital that everyone in your team is able to make decisions quickly and skilfully. If you or your people hesitate for too long, money can be lost and morale can plummet. And in our fast-changing world this is more important today than ever before.

Every employee must not only be capable, but also feel confident and clear in making decisions quickly within the guidelines of basic company policy. Of course, the bigger problems will need to be presented to the next level of management. But for everyday challenges the agility of each person’s judgements is vital for a company to run smoothly.

There will be times however, that a decision proves to be difficult and more time is needed. Time for seeking informed opinions from others is sensible, because a poor decision is of no benefit to anyone.

So how do we help our people to develop better decision making skills?

Being aware of how the brain has a preference for short cuts is a useful start. But it is also important that everyone who works for your company understands the bigger picture, the reasons you are selling your particular products or services, where the business wants to be in 6 months, 1 year and 5 years time. When everyone is aware of the ‘grand plan’ they will know where they fit in the great scheme and how they can contribute. This kind of clarity leads to sensible decisions being made.

This can be extended to where the business fits in society and how it benefits others. When we have a balanced outlook on life we are empowered to calmly work things out from experience.

Calm leads to the fourth enabler for decision making. When we work on the first three suggestions printed here, we are more likely to be stress free. If we become chronically stressed, cortisol the stress hormone interferes with our memory, motivation and ability to think clearly. It makes sense therefore, to put these foundations in place so as to remain calm, efficient and even healthy.

To recap, the four suggestions offered are:

Be aware of cognitive heuristics – ask more questions and gather more data than you originally thought you needed.
Make sure everyone in the business is aware of the bigger picture and how they can contribute well.
Look further out to society in general and where the business benefits others. This knowledge and experience will empower improved decision making.
These first three tips will help you stay calm and not succumb to disenabling stressors.

To empower everyone this way will lead to all employees making better decisions quickly and effectively. And think how much life at work will be improved.

Forbes.com | July 17, 2016 | Lynda Shaw

#Leadership : This is How you make Better Decisions, According to Science…Yeah, it Can Really be that Simple: Thinking about How you Would Help Others is Often the Best Way to Help Yourself.

June 27, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

Life would be a lot easier if we just knew how to make good decisions. Research shows we all make a lot of bad ones, according to Chip Heath’s “Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.”

With careers:

“More than half of teachers quit their jobs within four years. In fact, one study in Philadelphia schools found that a teacher was almost two times more likely to drop out than a student.”

In our jobs:

“A study showed that when doctors reckoned themselves ‘completely certain’ about a diagnosis, they were wrong 40% of the time.”

And in our personal lives:

“… an estimated 61,535 tattoos were reversed in the United States in 2009.”

We get a lot of sketchy tips based on unreliable sources. So what does the scientific research say about how to make good decisions?

For starters, you might think you would be better off if you just had more information about the choice at hand.

And you’d be wrong …

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You don’t need more info, you need the right info

In the past 20 years we went from a world where information was difficult to come by to a world where we can’t get away from the stuff. The phrase “TMI” is now more true than ever.

When doctors are diagnosing heart attacks, the glut of information isn’t just a nuisance — it can be deadly, according to “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”:

“What Goldman’s algorithm indicates, though, is that the role of those other factors is so small in determining what is happening to the man right now that an accurate diagnosis can be made without them … that extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues. What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks is that they take too much information into account.”

Solution?

Spend less time trying to amass all the information and more time better defining the problem so you can find the right information.

As Dan Pink explains in his bestseller, “To Sell Is Human“, research shows one of the hallmarks of great advances in both the arts and sciences is spending more time on clarifying problems.

Via “To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others“:

“‘The quality of the problem that is found is a forerunner of the quality of the solution that is attained…’ Getzels concluded.”

And people who focus on the problem instead of the answer end up more successful in their careers.

Via “To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others“:

“In 1970, Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels tracked down these same artists, now out of school and working for a living to see how they were faring. About half the students had left the art world altogether. The other half was working, and often succeeding, as professional artists. The composition of that second group? Nearly all were problem finders back in their school days.”

(To learn what Harvard research says will make you more successful and happier, click here.)

Alright, you’re clarifying the problem and focused on getting the right info. Good. So now you need to be ultra-rational and logical, unswayed by emotion in order to make a good choice, right? Wrong again …

Feelings are your friends

Being calm definitely helps when trying to make good decisions — but ignoring emotions is silly.

As Stanford professor Baba Shiv explains, choices can’t be made without feelings.

Via “The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive“:

“In the late ’80s and through the ’90s, says Shiv, neuroscientists “started providing evidence for the diametric opposite viewpoint” to rational-choice theory: ‘that emotion is essential for and fundamental to making good decisions.'”

And not only do we need feelings to make decisions, engaging them also leads to betterdecisions.

Professor Timothy Wilson, author of “Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change“, says feeling beats thinking when it comes to relationship predictions:

“It was the people in the ‘gut feeling’ group whose ratings predicted whether they were still dating their partner several months later. As for the navel gazers, their satisfaction ratings did not predict the outcome of their relationships at all.”

And matters of the heart aren’t the only place where feelings help. Empathy can be a big positive when trying to make good choices. Research shows doctors who feel empathy make better decisions for their patients.

Wharton professor Adam Grant, author of the bestseller “Give and Take“, told me:

“There is a great study by Turner and colleagues showing that when radiologists saw a photo of the patient whose x-ray they were about to scan, they empathized more with the person. They saw that person as more of a human being as opposed to just an x-ray. As a result, they wrote longer reports and they had greater diagnostic accuracy, significantly.”

Certainly there are times when we need to think things through and be very rational. So how do you know whether to go with your gut or not?

For simple decisions without many factors involved (What soda should I buy?) be rational.
For very complex or weighty decisions (Am I in love?) trust your gut.

Via “How We Decide“:

As Dijksterhuis demonstrated, when you ask the prefrontal cortex to make (complex) decisions, it makes consistent mistakes… It might sound ridiculous, but it makes scientific sense: Think less about those items that you care a lot about. Don’t be afraid to let your emotions choose.

Now what about when you’re tired and it’s hard to think? Don’t worry — research says go with your gut.

And what about when you’re really really tired? Just go to bed. Studies show the old saw is true: “sleeping on it” works.

(To learn the #1 decision-making secret of astronauts, samurai, Navy SEALs and psychopaths, click here.)

Okay, you’ve defined the problem, got the right info and you’re not ignoring your feelings. What’s a key tool most people ignore that will let you know you should trust your decisions?

Know your strengths

Modern science is awesome but here you may wanna take a lesson from the ancient Greeks: “Know Thyself.”

There are few things that can truly guide powerful decisions more than knowledge of who you really are and what you’re good at. And the research agrees.

Definitely trust your gut on a subject — if it’s something you’re an expert at:

A new study from researchers at Rice University, George Mason University and Boston College suggests you should trust your gut — but only if you’re an expert… Across both studies, participants who possessed expertise within the task domain performed on average just as well intuitively as analytically. In addition, experts significantly outperformed novices when making their decisions intuitively but not when making their decisions analytically.

I know what some of you are thinking: But I’m not sure what my strengths are.

No sweat. All you need is a pen, paper and time. Keep a “decision diary.”

Peter Drucker, author of “The Effective Executive“, and one of the most influential thinkers on the subject of management, recommends monitoring what you do and noting what gets results over time:

“Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations… Practiced consistently, this simple method will show you within a fairly short period of time, maybe two or three years, where your strengths lie — and this is the most important thing to know.”

Don’t trust your memory. Write it down. Make it a game. See where you score highly and not so highly.

Good at work decisions but bad when it comes to your personal life? Now you’ll know when you can trust your gut and when you may need some help.

(To learn the 4 lifehacks from ancient philosophy that will make you happier, click here.)

All the ideas so far are great but there’s one critical thing that’s missing: when do you stop deciding? When is it time to pull the trigger?

Make a ‘good enough’ decision

Don’t sweat making the absolute 100% best decision. We all know being a perfectionist can be stressful — and neuroscience backs this up. Trying to be perfect overwhelms your brain and makes you feel out of control.

Via “The Upward Spiral“:

“Trying for the best, instead of good enough, brings too much emotional ventromedial prefrontal activity into the decision-making process. In contrast, recognizing that good enough is good enough activates more dorsolateral prefrontal areas, which helps you feel more in control …”

As Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz said in my interview with him: “Good enough is almost always good enough.”

Sound too easy? Too simplistic? Okay, let’s look at a real world example of how people at the highest levels make decisions.

James Waters was Deputy Director of Scheduling at The White House. (Word on the street is they make some pretty big decisions there.) What did James tell me?

“A good decision now is better than a perfect decision in two days”:

“Being able to make decisions when you know you have imperfect data is so critical. I was always taught that ‘A good decision now is better than a perfect decision in two days.’ Many people I know in business recoil at that statement. Many colleagues in graduate school had come from places where they were analysts at a company and their job was to analyze and analyze and analyze. They couldn’t believe somebody would say that you should actually encourage people to make a decision with imperfect information — but I firmly believe you should. I think that’s really important for leaders to incorporate. It’s something that the White House has to do all the time. It’s great to analyze things but at some stage you’re just spinning your wheels.:

So focus on “good enough” instead of overthinking the problem. And if you do, you get an extra bonus: research shows your decisions are more likely to be ethical ones.

(To learn the four rituals that neuroscience says will make you happy, click here.)

Alright, we covered a lot. Let’s round everything up — and learn the one simple question that can help you make solid decisions when you’re crunched for time …

To sum up

Here’s how to make good decisions:

You don’t need more info, you need the right info: Clarify the problem and get relevant data, not all the data.
Feelings are not the enemy: For simple choices, use raw brainpower. For complex choices, trust intuition.
If you’re an expert in the area, trust your gut: Not sure if you’re an expert? Keep a decision diary.
“Good enough is almost always good enough”: Trying to be perfect makes your brain miserable.

And if you forget everything above, what one thing should you remember?

In my interview with Duke professor Dan Ariely (author of “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions“) he said you’re more likely to make a good decision if you “take the outside perspective.” What’s that mean?

Just ask yourself, “What advice would I give to someone else in this situation?”:

“If I had to give advice across many aspects of life, I would ask people to take what’s called ‘the outside perspective.’ And the outside perspective is easily thought about: ‘What would you do if you made the recommendation for another person?’ And I find that often when we’re recommending something to another person, we don’t think about our current state and we don’t think about our current emotions. We actually think a bit more distantly from the decision and often make the better decision because of that.”

Yeah, it can really be that simple: thinking about how you would help others is often the best way to help yourself.

Businessinsider.com | June 27, 2016 | Eric Barker

#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.

March 30, 2016/in First Sun Blog/by First Sun Team

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.

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