We have covered all the villains and their counter actions and all that is left to do, is to work on keeping these villains out of our decision making efforts.  To get more anecdotes and tips that will resonate for you pick up the book by Chip and Dan Heath yourself: Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.  They also have a great set of tools to support the reading at their website.

I needed one last post to pull all lessons of this great book together.  Each piece of advice will improve your decision making, but if you do not include people in what you are doing the tools will only help you with personal decision making.  As product managers, it is how we help others that will really make a difference at what we do each day.  So please resist the trap of thinking you don’t have time to add these steps into your product management process. Because there never is enough time in the day, a product should have shipped yesterday, the development team is screaming for more stories, and there is always someone calling for decisions to be made faster.  Resist the temptation to make a snap decision. Teresa Torres also draws attention to this area from her review of Decisive and argues it is an area product managers need to be mindful of.  Taking time to consult with people on the decision(s) to be made creates buy in.  Buy in helps with execution and will save you time in the long run.

We often find ourselves having to communicate decisions to those not necessarily involved directly in that moment.  Here the procedural justice approach can be really helpful in allowing people to understand the path that got you to that point.  They may not like the decision outcome itself, but if they understand what went into it, it will help with acceptance of the decision.  One tip that was called out here, was to not only highlight the good sides to the decision but also the downsides or weaknesses.  Again, this allows others not directly involved in the decision know what the triggers might be for changing the direction.  While we might fear this will lead to sabotage of the effort, it can lead to the opposite and helps with gaining support.  Because now, those impacted by the decision can help with preventing the negative outcomes.  And sharing the consideration that went into the thought process buy in is more likely. By having everyone on the team keeping an eye out for tripwires, you actually have empowered your entire team/organisation to ensure you keep doing the right things at the right time.

So the last pieces to remember to include people in the process are:

• Bargaining yields buy-in (seems painful to the decision making timing, but helps with implementation/execution)
• Procedural justice is another way to show that thought has been put into a decision (think of a judge system here, when the reasons are clear and considered, both sides of the case feel heard).
• Highlighting some of the downsides of a decision can be another way to get buy-in by calling out areas that might be a trigger or tripwire for reconsidering in the future

“Decisive is a way of behaving.  Better to try and fail than to delay and regret.” 

In summary of the entire blog series we have covered the 4 villains and how we can counteract them:

• Post 1: Narrow framing is defeated by Widening your options
• Post 2: Confirmation bias can be overcome by Reality testing your assumptions
• Post 3: Short term emotion is diffused by Attaining distance before deciding
• Post 4: Overconfidence is countered by Preparing to be Wrong.
• Post 5: Brings it together and reminds you to involve people in the process (this post).

Thanks for reading and please feel free to add comments on any of these areas below or let us know if there is anything else you would like to see us cover.

So we have got to the last and final villain of decision making: Over confidence. This is the moment you need to prepare to be wrong!  But don’t worry – being wrong is not a bad thing – it is a time to learn and being prepared is part of your success strategy.  To review how we got this far check out the previous posts Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

The book by Chip and Dan Heath can be purchased here: Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.

The last blog post will wrap up with a couple of key take-outs from the book overall and summarise what we have covered so far.

We are middle of the way through reviewing Chip and Dan Heath’s excellent book Decisive. To review previous posts check out Part 1 and Part 2.  This section is about short-term emotions and how they can get very much in the way of making a good decision, which is especially perplexing when you have made significant effort to overcome self-confidence.

This next villain, short term emotion is an important one for product managers to think about as we are always introducing new things to an organisation. Short term emotion or loss aversion lead to strong bias against change. So even if you personally have managed to overcome your own bias against change, others are going to express their resistance strongly, and having some tips to work through it will help you be an effective leader of change.

One of the ideas the Heather brothers suggested here is to introduce familiarity, or as they more eloquently put it make use of the exposure principle. By introducing concepts gradually it can help overcome strong emotional responses. One of our group shared an experience, where they kept printed copies of all the pieces they were working on stuck up on their cubicle wall so that everyone could see what they were busy with at any time. This meant that by the time more formal presentations occurred, there were no surprises and thus less resistance to what was new.

The example in the book called out that the approach to breeding familiarity can take many different courses. In this case, new words were shared with students by chalking them up on the lecture board each day.  When the students were introduced to a new author to read, they felt they already knew who this person was, as the author’s name was one of the words that had been on the chalkboard each day (familiarisation done over a period of a few weeks). That might seem an odd approach but the key is that it doesn’t matter where the familiarity comes from, it helps with the acceptance of the book and author anyway. This particular tool resonated for many in the group, when we discussed it at our Product Anonymous session, and people could see some new possibilities for improving on their previous efforts at introducing the new.

So you have overcome confirmation bias thus far and those ugly Short-term emotions cloud your judgement, so some of the ways to help Attain distance before deciding (or as I like to call it “Phone-a-Friend”) are listed below:

• sleep on it
• what would you tell your best friend to do?
• Exposure principle + loss aversion leads to a powerful bias against change
• 10/10/10 rule: how would you feel about this decision in 10 minutes, 10 months or 10 years
• short-term emotion may distract you from long term aspiration
• core priorities (I hear vision in this tool, what is the product and its purpose)
• the what will I stop doing in order to DO the things I said I will now do

Just in case you haven’t been convinced to own it for yourself because I cannot cover everything, the book can be purchased here: Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by the Heath brothers.

The next blog post will be about the last bias of them all Over confidence and how to Prepare to be Wrong.

Welcome back, we are diving into the next bias in the decision making process that Chip and Dan Heath cover in their fabulous book Decisive.  We cover each of these areas as it helps us become better people, better product managers and better advisors to our peers.  To review the first post check out Part 1.

Confirmation bias is a terrible villain and one that is quite difficult to avoid. When listening to feedback in an user review session we are psychologically primed to only hear the positive comments rather than anything that does not affirm what we already believe to be true. This is why user testing and research studies suggest pairing when performing these activities. One of our attendees also made the suggestion to deliberately seek out a colleague to review what you are working on, to help you counter your own bias.

The idea of building prototypes, and smaller iterations in development (using Agile or other methods) to get the idea tested early is one that resonates well amongst a product management group. The word Ooch was the terminology the Heath brothers had picked up from an entrepreneur who had had success validating an idea before scaling up. I like the word myself and reading through some of the examples in the book it reminded me there are other ways to reality test your assumptions than only those I knew of from an agile approach. I think that is useful to remember because once you have gotten a development team up and running and your in motion it can be hard to change course if any new information comes up to suggest the project or product you are working on is not a good one to continue with. In some ways, it creates another form or confirmation bias where you continue the path you are on despite all other warnings to the contrary. Kodak would be a good example of this, where when they first reviewed the market, digital cameras were not taking off.  However, they needed to add a trigger or tripwire to let them know that it was time to review that point of view.  We will talk about triggers in a later post.

There were many great tools in this part of the book that are helpful not just for decision making, but also innovation and idea creation in your role as a product manager (or any other role where you build things).  Such tools include learning from experts (this was also covered in the IDEO HCD course as a key step), “ladder up” from the problem, see if you can find an analogous or totally other way to solve the problem in front of you (again an IDEO HCD step to reality test ideas), essentially see what others have done when solving the same problem and if the option they chose succeeded.  This will help you make a better decision, and if you still follow the same path, help plan for any of the obstacles you have now learnt about.

Other ideas or ways to Reality test your assumptions and help counteract your Confirmation bias are listed below:

• actual attempt to make a mistake (a great way to challenge assumptions)
• go for an outside or expert view but avoid prediction questions. have an expert remark on baselines, and talk about what they know. ALL people are terrible predictors of the future.
• close ups are useful to colour the averages, the data and the overview
• be a user yourself, to gain “expertise” and see it that close up (Bounty example, which is a paper towel product, where they used the competitor product in house, and removed confirmation bias of their own product. All scientific comparisons showed they were the better product but until they put competitor product in house, and had everyone from marketing to development using it for themselves)
• Ooch! before leaping – test and learn

Don’t trust my posts on this book, get it yourself, there is so much valuable insight within: Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by the Heath brothers.

The next blog post will be about the villain Short term emotions and how to counteract them with Attain distance before deciding.

We make decisions every day.  Not all them need to be done better but some of them, both personal and professional decisions could be improved upon.  Surely you have got caught in either making a decision that you later regretted or not sure the best decision was made by others.

Our last Product Anonymous catch up was a book club session on Dan and Chip Heath’s book Decisive, which helps guide you to better decision making by providing some tricks to avoid the key villains involved.  The great part about learning these tricks is that you will learn to make  better decisions as a product manager, which is a great feeling since you are making them everyday, and you will also become a better advisor to others.  We will cover each bias and counteract pair in a separate blog post.

Pick up a copy of the book here: Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by the Heath brothers.

The next blog post will cover the villain Confirmation bias and its counter move Reality test your assumptions.

Steve Bauer recently led a session at Product Anonymous on decision making for Product Managers.  The result was an exciting discussion about some very common issues that we face every day.  Steve has turned this discussion into a series of blog posts that we are going to host here.