Avoid thinking in a narrow frame.

From Chip Heath’s “Decisive”

What is Narrow Framing, and Why is is Bad?

• “narrow framing, which is the tendency to define our choices too narrowly, to see them in binary terms.” People think, “should I do this? or not?”
  
  
• “Nutt found that “whether or not” decisions failed 52% of the time over the long term, versus only 32% of the decisions with two or more alternatives.”
  
  
• “When the executive board considered more than one alternative, they made six times as many “very good” decisions. (Specifically, 40% of the multi-option decisions were rated “very good,” compared with only 6% of the “whether or not” decisions.) That is not a small effect.”
  
  
• “The first step toward that goal is to learn to distrust “whether or not” decisions. In fact, we hope when you see or hear that phrase, a little alarm bell will go off in your head, reminding you to consider whether you’re stuck in a narrow frame. If you’re willing to invest some effort in a broader search, you’ll usually find that your options are more plentiful than you initially think.”
  
  
• “the simple act of surfacing another option—even if we ultimately decide against it—helps us to make better choices.”
  
  
  
  
  
  

Examples of Bad Decisions Because of Narrow Framing.

• “Teenagers are blind to their choices. They get stuck thinking about questions like “Should I go to the party or not?” The party is in their mental spotlight, assessed in isolation, while other options go unexplored.”
  
  “A more enlightened teen might let the spotlight roam: “Should I go to the party all night, or go to the movies with a few friends, or attend the basketball game and then drop by the party for a few minutes?”
  
  
  
• The CEO of Quaker Oats acquired Snapple for $1.8 Billion. It was considered one of the worst business decisions in history. When looking back at the decision, he realized no one made an argument against the acquisition.
  
  “There was so much excitement about bringing in a new brand, a brand with legs. We should have had a couple of people arguing the ‘no’ side of the evaluation.”
  
  “That’s a pretty staggering confession. Under Smithburg’s leadership, Quaker was contemplating the largest acquisition in its history, with deal terms that had been mocked widely by industry analysts, and yet, unbelievably, there was no one within Quaker arguing against the acquisition! Quaker wasn’t even making a “whether or not” choice; it was making a “yes or yes” choice.”
  
  
• “Most companies don’t consider other alternatives when making decisions. Nutt analyzed 168 decisions made by businesses. Only 29% of the businesses considered more than one alternative.”
  
  
  
  
  
  

Here are techniques to push for more options.

“When you hear the telltale signs of a narrow frame—people wondering “whether or not” they should make a certain decision or rehashing arguments endlessly about the same limited set of choices—push them to Widen Their Options. Prod them for their opportunity cost; what else could they do with the same time and money? Or try the Vanishing Options Test: Ask them what they’d do if their current alternatives disappeared.” (. 724)

Think About Opportunity Costs.

“Opportunity cost” is a term from economics that refers to what we give up when we make a decision.”

• “What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?”
  
  
• Would you choose a $700 stereo or a $1000 stereo? Don’t simply compare the two stereos. Compare the $1000 stereo with a $700 stereo AND $300 worth of albums. This gives you another option.
  
  
• “if you and your spouse spend $40 on a Mexican dinner one Friday night and then go to the movies ($20), your opportunity cost might be a $60 sushi dinner plus some television at home. The sushi-and-TV combo is the next-best thing you could have done with the same amount of time and money.”
  
  
• “You will never encounter a car salesman who says, “Hey, why not buy the entry-level model and use the savings to take your family on vacation?”
  
  
• “Decision makers confronted with a showcase of beluga caviar consider how much hamburger they could buy with the same money.… People intuitively take opportunity cost into account.”
  
  
• “If we’re thinking about installing wood floors in our house, for example, it will be natural to consider different types of wood flooring. If we’re really thinking out of the box, we might consider doing another home-improvement project instead. But truly distinct options—Use more rugs? Stain the existing floor and go to Hawaii on the savings? Forget the floors and buy a car?—are less likely to emerge, because they require greater swings of the spotlight.”

Use the Vanishing Options Test.

• Another technique you can use to break out of a narrow frame is to run the Vanishing Options Test. The conceit here is that Aladdin’s genie has an eccentric older brother who, instead of granting three wishes to a person, arbitrarily takes options away. Below, we give you a generic form of the Vanishing Options Test, which you can adapt to your situation:
  
  
• “You cannot choose any of the current options you’re considering. What else could you do?”
  
  
• Margaret was trying to decide wether to fire Anna or not. She used the Vanishing Option Test. What if firing Anna was not an option? What other options could Margaret think about?
  
  Anna was good at admin tasks, but was bad at the “front door” social tasks. Margaret came with an idea that Anna could to do the admin tasks, and Margaret could hire work-study students to take care of the “front door” tasks. This would help Anna focus full time on admin work and work-study students are cheap to hire.
  
  
• “The old saying “Necessity is the mother of invention” seems to apply here. Until we are forced to dig up a new option, we’re likely to stay fixated on the ones we already have. So our eccentric genie, who seems at first glance to be cruel—he’s taking away our options!—may actually be kindhearted. Removing options can in fact do people a favor, because it makes them notice that they’re stuck on one small patch of a wide landscape.”

Multitrack Your Decisions.

Have many people create many options, even if it’s not “perfect”

• That early lock-in is something that the Lexicon team has learned to fight. Clients will often come to them with a narrow conception of what a good name is. Some at Intel, for instance, had wanted to call the Pentium “ProChip.” Some at P&G had wanted to call the Swiffer “EZMop. Lexicon has learned that the best names emerge from what we’ll call “multitracking”—considering several options simultaneously.Lexicon hired many independent teams to come up with names for their products.”
  
  
• “He asked his network of linguists—70 of them in 50 countries—to brainstorm about metaphors, sounds, and word parts that connoted lightness. By working independently, they vastly increased the pool of considered names.”
  
  
• “Notice what’s missing from the Lexicon process: the part when everyone sits around a conference table, staring at the toothbrush and brainstorming names together. (“Hey, how about ToofBrutch—the URL is available!”)
  
  
• “Ad designers that were asked to make multiple ads at the same time, performed better than Ad designers that focused on one ad at a time. “Each designer started with a single ad and revised it five times based on rounds of feedback, yielding a total of six ads. The other half of the designers were instructed to use a “simultaneous” process, so that each one started with three ads and received feedback on all three. Then, in successive rounds, the set was whittled down with further feedback to two ads and then one final ad.”
  
  
• “In a study of top leadership teams in Silicon Valley, an environment that tends to place a premium on speed, she found that executives who weigh more options actually make faster decisions.”
  
  
• “This is a critical point: Multitracking keeps egos in check. If your boss has three pet projects in play, chances are she’ll be open to unvarnished feedback about them, but if there’s only one pet project, it will be harder for her to hear the truth. Her ego will be perfectly conflated with the project.”

Find Someone Else Who Has Solved Your Problem.

“TO BREAK OUT OF a narrow frame, we need options, and one of the most basic ways to generate new options is to find someone else who’s solved your problem. “

• “Again and again in his career, Walton found clever solutions by asking himself, “Who else is struggling with a similar problem, and what can I learn from them?”
  
  
• “If you’re not sure how to cope with a relative who has an alcohol problem, talk to someone else who has endured a similar situation (that’s why groups like Al-Anon exist).”
  
  
• “If you’re unfamiliar with the grant-application process for a particular foundation, talk to someone who has previously navigated the process.”
  
  
• If you’re not sure how to deal with an employee who wants to take more responsibility, ask other managers how they dealt with it successfully.
  
  
  
  

Create a “Playlist”

A Playlist is list of ideas and options to spark an organization.

• “Playlists should be as useful as checklists, yet your organization has many checklists and probably zero playlists. A checklist is useful for situations where you need to replicate the same behaviors every time. It’s prescriptive; it stops people from making an error. On the other hand, a playlist is useful for situations where you need a stimulus, a way of producing new ideas. It’s generative; it stops people from overlooking an option. (Don’t forget to shine your spotlight over here …)”
  
  
  
  

Get an “Analogy”

Look for inspiration from other fields or other similar situations to come up with solutions.

• “What Dunbar discovered, after countless hours of eavesdropping and interviewing and synthesizing, was that one of the reliable but unrecognized pillars of scientific thinking is the analogy.”
  
  
• “When the scientists ran into problems with their experiments, a common day-to-day experience, they would often benefit from a “local analogy”: a comparison to a very similar experiment with a similar organism.”
  
  
• “A scientist trying to understand how a new virus replicates, for instance, might work through an analogy from a better-known virus such as smallpox.”
  
  
• “When you use analogies—when you find someone who has solved your problem—you can take your pick from the world’s buffet of solutions. But when you don’t bother to look, you’ve got to cook up the answer yourself. Every time. That may be possible, but it’s not wise, and it certainly ain’t speedy.”
  
  
• A designer of Speedo wanted to make swimmers swim faster. She looked at fast moving objects like a shark and torpedo. She made a swimsuit from sharkskin and it covered the whole body to make the swimmer have a torpedo shape. The swimsuit was banned because it was too successful!
  
  
  
  
  

Example of Someone Avoiding the Narrow Frame:

Doreen was constantly stressed from work and it was affecting her family relationships. She became highly irritable at home and would yell at her kids for something minor they did. She wanted to change. Instead of thinking with narrow options, she came up with many options.

1. Quit my job.
2. Go to half-time.
3. Get my kids to be less irritating.
4. Ask Frank to control the kids more.
5. Find a less stressful job.
6. Find some way to release the stress before I go home.
   

She talked to her husband and he suggested option 6. She should try to leave work early and work out at the YMCA so her state of mind would be more calm when she’s home.

Other Good Quotes on How to Avoid the Narrow Frame.

“It’s easier to spot a narrow frame from the outside—watch for it as a decision adviser. “Whether or not” decisions should set off warning bells.”

“Managers need to push for legitimate alternatives, not sham options. To diagnose whether your colleagues have created real or sham options, poll them for their preferences. If there’s disagreement, that’s a great sign that you have real options. An easy consensus may be a red flag.”

“WITH SOME DECISIONS, FINDING more options is easy—you can just expand your search. You can interview three job candidates rather than one, or if you’re shopping for a house, you can visit ten rather than five. After all, you can’t move into the dream home you never saw.”

“There’s no “right number” of houses to see or job candidates to interview. One rule of thumb is to keep searching for options until you fall in love at least twice. If you’ve only identified one good candidate for a job, for instance, you’ll have the strong urge to talk yourself into hiring her, which is a recipe for the confirmation bias. You’ll start to make excuses for the flaws you see: She asked us not to call her old boss for a reference, but that’s probably okay, because the boss sounded like a real jerk … The same search-expanding logic also applies to choosing a car or a college or a job, though there are certainly commonsense limits—”

“Why do “whether or not” decisions fail more often? Nutt argues that when a manager pursues a single option, she spends most of her time asking: “How can I make this work? How can I get my colleagues behind me?” Meanwhile, other vital questions get neglected: “Is there a better way? What else could we do?”

Extreme multitracking is bad. For example if there are 26 good jams, you may have analysis paralysis. Stick to picking between 6 jams.

“WHEN LIFE OFFERS US a “this or that” choice, we should have the gall to ask whether the right answer might be “both.”

“In contrast, consider an aspiring screenwriter who has just moved to LA, imagining infinite opportunity—exciting new stories, fascinating new friends, lucrative new deals, and great industry parties. A compassionate friend might invoke the prevention mindset: What can you do to make sure you don’t get pinched economically while you’re waiting for some of these wonderful opportunities to pan out?”