Author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
Psychologists call this ‘integrative thinking’.
Archives for July 2020
Accept Uncertainty
Author Steven Johnson recently discussed his book Farsighted: How We Make Decisions that Matter the Most in a podcast discussion with Malcolm Gladwell. In the interview, Gladwell asks Johnson if the decision-making strategies described in his book can apply to something like deciding what college you should go to.
Conduct a Risk Analysis
Whatever job offer you decide to accept, it’s likely that you’ll make a decision that involves an element of risk.
Risk is made up of two parts: the probability of something going wrong, and the negative consequences if it does. Risk Analysis is a process that helps you identify and manage potential problems. To carry out a Risk Analysis, follow these steps:
Attain Distance
Newton Baker was one of the most interesting men ever to serve as U.S. Secretary of War. He was an avowed pacifist when he took the post in 1916. Yet, after the United States entered World War I, Baker’s dedication, spirit and leadership won the respect of Democrats and Republications.
How could a man of such caliber conclude he’d be perfectly safe standing on the bridge of a battleship while the country’s best pilots attacked it with bombs?
Baker made an error in judgment that can happen to even the best decision-makers. Many educated people in the World War I era believed that no gnat of an airplane could sink a battleship. Worse than guessing wrong, Baker’s big mistake was holding his beliefs with utter conviction, without considering whether the available information justified the depth of that conviction. Baker knew with total – and totally unjustified – certainty that planes could not sink ships.
When Warren Harding succeeded Wilson, General Mitchell’s squadron of tiny planes demonstrated its power and promptly turned a supposedly unsinkable ship into a permanent part of the ocean floor (Don’t worry about Baker, he had returned to private citizens and a successful law practice).
Baker’s error illustrates the mistakes intelligent people can commit when they fail to evaluate carefully the information available to them. This illustrates two more decision traps:
Beware of The Giant Spreadsheet
In the previous module, I wrote a caution about relying on your intuition.
Today, I want to write a caution about relying on a spreadsheet calculation to make a critical decision.
Don’t Trust Your Gut (Without Testing It)
‘Listening to your gut’ is probably the most common approach to decision making. It’s the way many people make most decisions; if we used an exhaustive, complex decision-making process to decide what to eat for lunch, we’d never get anything else done.
Reducing Dimensionality
Cognitive research has found that human beings are wired to make less-than-wise decisions. Science has shown our brain uses a system to simplify decisions, but these mental shortcuts often are not in our best interests. The question then becomes: How do we overcome these innate predilections and decide better?
How to Choose the Right Job Offer
Our daily lives are the cumulative effect of hundreds of small decisions we make constantly. These decisions encompass everything from what you chose to wear today, what you’re eating for your next meal, and what you’ll watch on Netflix tonight. Generally speaking, decisions like this come fairly easily, and we rarely agonize over the small choices we constantly make throughout our daily lives.
Big and high-risk decisions, like choosing whether to accept a job offer, however, can sometimes be very difficult to make. That’s to be expected: making career decisions is an emotional process with potentially significant financial considerations to take into account, as well as your desire to do what is best for you personally and professionally.
Complex decisions, like deciding which job offer to accept, often have several shared traits: There may be many evaluation criteria (with some of them conflicting), the risks and outcomes are hard to predict, and data is unavailable or incomplete.
While there is no one “right” way to make a big decision, thankfully there are proven decision-making strategies and frameworks you can use, either individually or, more likely, in conjunction with each other.
In this training module, my goal is to give you additional knowledge, strategies and tools you can use to effectively evaluate job offers and help you choose the best one for you.
While there is no one “right” way to make a big decision, thankfully there are proven decision-making strategies and frameworks you can use, either individually or, more likely, in conjunction with each other.
Here are 10 strategies you can use to help you choose the best new job / career path for you:
Create a Career Vision Summary
Don’t Trust Your Gut (Without Testing It)
Create a Career Vision Summary
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying that you can only get where you want to be if you know where you’re going.
If you haven’t done so already, today I’d like you to list the ‘key ingredients’ (e.g. what’s most important to you / the ‘evaluation criteria) of the right work for you by completing this Career Vision Summary form.
By listing the ‘key ingredients’, you are ‘framing’ how you’ll evaluate job offers and choose the right one for you. Framing helps decision-makers think about the viewpoint from which they will look at the choice and decide which criteria they consider important and which they don’t.
With this insight, it will be much easier to get a clear sense of how a job offer stacks up to what you’re looking for in your work (e.g. where you want to be).