From Shane Parrish’s Decision Making Course
How to Avoid Stupidity
You can be the smartest and most prepared person in the room, but certain predictable situations will reduce or eliminate this advantage. Why?
Because certain situations overload our mental processing capability. Unlike inanimate objects which break when under too much stress, our brains can become overwhelmed without us knowing. And when our brains are overwhelmed is precisely the time we are the most likely to overlook or dismiss some bit of crucial information. You could actually define stupidity as, “overlooking or dismissing conspicuously crucial information.”
When our cognitive functions become overwhelmed, we make mistakes. The functions most compromised are awareness, comprehension, reasoning, and remembering.
The seven warning signs of being in a bad situation are:
- You are under physical or acute mental stress.
- You are focused or preoccupied with something.
- You are operating in the presence of a group.
- You are in a rush.
- You are operating outside of your normal environment.
- You are operating in the presence of an authority figure
- You have information overload.
These might seem simple and obvious, and they are. And yet, even the best of us still fall victim to them. Individually they’re more powerful than we imagine, and together they compound to push us past our cognitive limits.
Let’s explore them briefly.
1st- Are you physically and mentally in the best position to decide?
If you’ve ever had a fight with your spouse, only to find out that after eating or sleeping you don’t remember what you were fighting about, you know exactly what I mean.
This may seem so simple it’s almost stupid — but if you simply check in with your physical body and take care of it’s immediate needs before making a decision, you’ll cut down on a lot of egregious and avoidable conflicts and mistakes.
You also aren’t likely to make good decisions in the wake of severe and unusual mental stress. If you’ve just lost a loved one, or gone through a bad breakup, you aren’t going to be in a great position to make long-term financial decisions. Emotions like acute grief, anger, and loneliness distort our perception of reality and negatively impact our cognitive abilities.
If our bodies and minds are in a state of physical or mental stress, we’re not only more likely to act without thinking things through– and close ourselves off to better opportunities as a result, but we’re more likely to miss crucial information.
So check in with yourself before you make a decision: Are you hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? Stressed?
2nd- Are you fixated or preoccupied with something?
We’re more likely to overlook crucial things when we’re fixated on one thing. In medicine these are called fixation errors — you concentrate on one thing to the detriment of other more relevant factors.
Someone walks into your office while you’re on the phone asking you to sign off on a project. Your spouse just called, angry with you about a cancelled dinner plan. You’re ruminating over how you’ll respond, while being on a deadline to determine your company’s personnel strategy for the next quarter.
In the case of the KLM and Pan Am collision in 1977 — evidence from the control tower audio suggests that the operators in the control tower were watching a soccer match.
When we become too focused on one thing, we become blind to other things.
3rd- Are you operating in a group?
We have a tendency to outsource a lot of our thinking to others, including groups. But because we’re social creatures, doing that means we are susceptible to human tendencies like wanting to be liked by the group, being limited by our hierarchy in the group, and more.
As Warren Buffett has said, there needs to be more belching in the corporate boardroom. He was discussing group decision making in the boardroom and how much discussion there was around the CEOs ideas. And he said saying no to the CEO is “a little bit like belching at the dinner table … you can’t do it too often. If you do, you find you’re eating in the kitchen pretty soon.”
The reality is we can only pick so many battles. If you object to everything, even if you rationally disagree, people eventually stop inviting you and no one pays attention to you. So you save your ammo for when it really counts and end up compromising on things you feel are wrong because mentally you’re horsetrading.
The other odd thing about groups is we often lack the skin in the game that’s necessary for us to really care because we know we won’t own it. If a group makes a bad decision, we can go back to our individual tribe in the organization and tell them a story, true or not, about how we tried to prevent it. And if the decision happens to be a good one, true or not, we tell our tribe how we nudged everyone to the right conclusion. As you can see with groups, the stories we tell ourselves give us too much credit and not enough blame.
4th- Another common trap smart people fall into is feeling a sense of urgency.
Is it more important to do it right, or do it on a deadline?
Rushing happens to us all. The other day, I was late for a call at work, and ran out of my house and to the office. I skipped my coffee, made it just in the nick of time, or so I thought. Turns out I had left my phone, wallet, and keys at home. I’m sure this has happened to you too.
The Challenger mission was on a time crunch, trying to launch by the time President Regan delivered the state of the union address. Being rushed leads to bad outcomes. But deadlines are almost always negotiable, and less important than doing things right. If you notice your heart pounding, that you’re running “behind,” that you’re being forced to put a deadline over the quality of the decision — slow down and give yourself and the decision more time. So you’re less blind to the other things that are happening.
Being rushed leads to bad outcomes. But deadlines are almost always negotiable, and less important than doing things right.
5th- Are you operating outside of your normal environment?
A change in our normal operating environment or structure has a remarkable impact on how our brains operate.
Perhaps you’ve gotten a promotion and have a new office and team, or maybe you’re starting to work from home. The autopilot that you’ve developed that allowed you to handle volumes of information before is no longer automatically and subconsciously processing all of the information in your day. Now it seems like you’re paying attention to everything.
Think about when you first learned to drive. The first time behind the wheel, there was a flood of new information going through your mind. It took all of your energy to concentrate on what you were doing.
Changes to our routines or environment break the autopilot and awaken the mind, which can redirect our attention away from other, more important information. It takes more mental resources to operate outside of our normal environment and we increase the odds we overlook something important.
6th- Are you in the presence of an expert or authority figure?
As we mentioned before we are social animals. Not only do we defer to the wisdom of the group, but we also tend to defer to leaders, experts, and authority figures. Reality is they are just as subject to stupidity as we are.
Co-pilots in flight simulators, and unfortunately sometimes in real life, see the pilot making a mistake and don’t correct them. They defer to assumed expertise. This happens everyday in our workplace too.
I remember once at an executive meeting our CEO was trying to elicit information to help him decide on the strategy to take the next day in a critical meeting he was going to have with his boss. When he went around the room, everyone told him what he wanted to hear and not what they actually thought. I offered another perspective. One that he didn’t want to hear and one that he ultimately didn’t take. Two others who were in the meeting called me that night saying they were glad I voiced the other approach and they agreed with me that it was best.
7th- Are you dealing with too much information?
While most of us think that more information is better, our ability to usefully process information has limits.
Think about the modern environment we’re operating in. Information comes to us in a flood, facilitated by technology. We are overwhelmed and don’t know it. All of this information comes with a cost. We have less time and capacity to identify and pay attention to what really matters.
As the brilliant Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon said, “What information consumes, is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
Information overload overwhelms the other warning signs. It gives us unwarranted confidence in what we think we know, and distracts us from processing the most valuable information. One great thing you can do to become a better decision maker is stop consuming large amounts of useless information. Like we talked about in the skill Getting the Right Information, avoid other people’s abstractions and the junk of uninformed opinions. Processing a small amount of high quality information is far more valuable.
How can you apply this personally and professionally?
- Learn to recognize the signs in yourself and others.
- Organize your environment to promote thinking and processing (walks, quiet time) over gathering more information.
- To the extent possible don’t make irreversible decisions when several of these situations are combined.
- Have a strategy in place for the bad situations that occur frequently in your life.
- Set consistent bedtime routines and sleep to promote cognitive functioning and reduced stress.
- Slow things down when you see two or more of these things combining.
You’re Ready to Move on to the Next Module When the Following Are Complete:
- In order to not fall victim to bad decision-making in these scenarios, we suggest a two part plan.
- First, create a toolkit that you can pull out if one of these bad scenarios occurs. Maybe it has snacks, earplugs, music, or a meditation. Maybe it’s a room you can go to and close the door. Maybe it’s a place to have a short, distraction-free walk. Anything to give you the space to get out of the bad situation for a moment to gain clarity on the best next steps.
- Second, create a list of personal triggers. What are your common instances of acute mental stress? What are the group dynamics you usually in? How often are you outside your normal environment, and what usually happens there? What is your relationship with the expert or authority figure you most often have to deal with? Then, start planning in advance how you might navigate these traditional bad situations to allow for better outcomes.