From Chip Heath’s, “Decisive”
Set up a Tripwire to prevent yourself from going on Autopilot.
- “Chances are you know someone who has been stuck on autopilot too long. Sometimes autopilot causes people to neglect opportunities; maybe you have a friend who has talked about writing a novel for years but never seems to make any progress. Other times, autopilot leads people to persist at efforts that seem doomed, like a couple whose relationship makes them both miserable, or a relative with a naive dream of making a living as a landscape painter, or an executive who refuses to recognize that her pet project has failed. At some point, the virtue of being persistent turns into the vice of denying reality. When that transformation happens, how can you snap someone out of it?” (p. 191)
- “One solution to this is to bundle our decisions with “tripwires,” signals that would snap us awake at exactly the right moment, compelling us to reconsider a decision or to make a new one. Think of the way that the low-fuel warning in your car lights up, grabbing your attention. (If only the woman from Alabama had an Italy warning that lit up before she lost her health.) (p. 187)
- “The goal of a tripwire is to jolt us out of our unconscious routines and make us aware that we have a choice to make.”
- “It’s the same voice we’ve all encountered in different forms. My boyfriend still doesn’t treat me the way I want him to, but maybe he will change.… I’ll just wait and see what happens. Or, I know our sales aren’t going as well as we’d predicted, but before we reconsider our strategy … let’s just wait and see what happens. Kodak’s executives were trapped in autopilot; they were coasting with the momentum of past choices. They needed a tripwire to snap them to attention and force a choice.” (p. 189)
- “A tripwire specifies the circumstances when the team would reconsider a decision. So if you’re skeptical of a decision but lack the power to change it, encourage your colleagues to set a tripwire. (“If X happens, we’ll take another look at this.”) This will be easy for them to accept, since most people are overconfident and will underestimate the chances of hitting the tripwire. Meanwhile, you’ve made it possible to reconsider the decision at a later date without seeming like the person who said, “I told you so.” (p. 98)
Why it’s dangerous to go on auto pilot.
Examples:
- A women dreams of going to Italy. “One year she has the chance to go but postpones the trip because of responsibilities at work. Time slips by, and she thinks often of Italy, but years turn into decades, and eventually her health deteriorates to the point where she can’t make the trip.”
- Kodak was an incredibly successful company, but went bankrupt due to the digital film revolution. They underestimated how popular digital film would be because their thinking was on autopilot.
“Kodak’s executives were trapped in autopilot; they were coasting with the momentum of past choices. They needed a tripwire to snap them to attention and force a choice.”
Kodak could have set a tripwire that said, “We will act when more than 10% of the public express satisfaction with digital images.” - “My boyfriend still doesn’t treat me the way I want him to, but maybe he will change.… I’ll just wait and see what happens.”
- “I know our sales aren’t going as well as we’d predicted, but before we reconsider our strategy … let’s just wait and see what happens.”
- “Because day-to-day change is gradual, even imperceptible, it’s hard to know when to jump. Tripwires tell you when to jump. Setting tripwires would not have guaranteed that Kodak’s leaders made the right decisions. Sometimes even a clear alarm is willfully ignored. (We’ve probably all ignored a fire alarm, trusting that it is false.) But tripwires at least ensure that we are aware it’s time to make a decision, that we don’t miss our chance to choose because we’ve been lulled into autopilot.”
- “We’ve all seen people make a bad initial decision and then double down on their choice, throwing good money after bad. How do we know when it’s time to reassess a choice we’ve made? What could we learn that would make us retreat from a choice we’ve made? Conversely, what would make us redouble our efforts? What we need is a tool for snapping us awake at just the right moment, ensuring that we don’t miss a chance to cut our losses—or to maximize our opportunities. What we need, in short, is a tripwire.”
Examples of Tripwires:
- “One option is to set a deadline, the most familiar form of a tripwire. Some deadlines are natural, such as the deadline for filing stories at a daily newspaper—the printing press has to roll at a certain time, whether the story is ready or not. But it’s easy to forget that most of the deadlines we encounter in life are simply made up. They are artificially created tripwires to force an action or a decision.” (p. 191) Example- IRS has a deadline of March 15
- “When given a five-day deadline, 66% of the students completed the survey and claimed their rewards. When given no deadline, only 25% ever collected their money.”
- “While once-a-year feedback is inadequate, though, it’s superior to never-a-year feedback. Absent the deadline, that would probably be the norm.The annual review, then, is really a kind of desperate tripwire, ensuring that something critical happens at least once a year.” (p. 192)
- “Say your husband wants to start a business creating topiary sculptures for clients. You think the idea is bonkers, but you admire his passion, so it seems cruel to veto it. Instead, set a tripwire. Okay, dear, let’s give the topiary-sculpture business a shot, but can we agree that we won’t invest more than $10,000 of our savings in it? Alternatively, you might say: Go for it, but if you don’t have a paying customer within three months, let’s talk seriously about Plan B.”
- “Think of romantic relationships or business investments. (We’ve committed so much already; isn’t it worth just a little more?) If you’re dating someone who has commitment issues, could you set a three-month tripwire to see whether you’re making any progress? Or if a project at work has stalled out, could you set a $50,000 budget limit on the funds you’ll use to jump-start it? With the right tripwire, we can ensure that we don’t throw good money (or time) after bad.”
- “If you have a relative or colleague who is pursuing a bad path on autopilot, or if you think they’re being overconfident about their chances of success, work with them to set up tripwires—and hold them accountable to what they predicted. “Six months ago, you thought you’d have a recording contract by now.” These will not be easy conversations to have. No one likes to be reminded of failure. Nor is there any certainty that they will change course; overconfidence is a powerful force. The optimistic entrepreneur will always believe that sales will skyrocket next year, and the aspiring singer will feel that she could be “discovered” at any moment. But certainly you have a better chance of reining in foolish decisions when those decisions are considered than when they are left unexamined.”
- “Boundaries are necessary because of people’s tendency to escalate their commitment to their choices. For a simple example, think of a kid playing an arcade game. She’s been on a zombie-killing mission, but she made a mistake and her character died, and now she must burn a few more credits to keep playing. It feels so hard to walk away at that point. She might have invested several dollars and 20 minutes to get where she was. If she walks away, she “loses” everything. Isn’t it worth a few more credits to keep going?” (p. 193)
- “Other times, autopilot leads people to persist at efforts that seem doomed, like a couple whose relationship makes them both miserable, or a relative with a naive dream of making a living as a landscape painter, or an executive who refuses to recognize that her pet project has failed. At some point, the virtue of being persistent turns into the vice of denying reality. When that transformation happens, how can you snap someone out of it?”
- “If you’re dating someone who has commitment issues, could you set a three-month tripwire to see whether you’re making any progress?”
- “if a project at work has stalled out, could you set a $50,000 budget limit on the funds you’ll use to jump-start it? With the right tripwire, we can ensure that we don’t throw good money (or time) after bad.”
- “All this worrying about traps and contingencies may make tripwires sound overly cautious—the bicycle helmet of decision making. But actually we want to argue the opposite, that tripwires encourage risk taking by letting us carve out a “safe space” for experimentation.”
- “A hospital wanted to prevent children’s deaths due to medical error and ineffective practices. “In the training sessions, the instructor passed out cards listing six tripwires that warranted calling in the RRT. Five of the tripwires involved objective measures such as acute changes in heart rate, blood pressure, or oxygen saturation. The sixth tripwire, at the top of the card, was the most important: Call the rapid-response team if you are worried about a patient.”
- “The advantage of rapid-response teams, Leong knew, was that they encouraged action before it was too late, before it was necessary to call a code. She convinced her colleagues to give the idea a try.”
- “In short, tripwires allow us the certainty of committing to a course of action, even a risky one, while minimizing the costs of overconfidence.“