Thinking Tools

The Problem of Living Inside Echo Chambers

June 14, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Psychologists use the term realistic ignorance to explain the human tendency to believe that we’re normal—that the way we see and do things is entirely representative of everybody else.

Realistic ignorance is intensified by our natural desire to associate with people similar to ourselves.

Social media algorithms make this worse—they reinforce our attitudes but not change them. They steer us to the type of stuff we already know and like. They make it easy for us to form our own echo chambers, packed with people who share the same views. This causes confirmation bias. Tribal allegiances form flawed ideas and viewpoints about what is typical for organizations and communities.

Idea for Impact: Seek out and engage thoughtful folks who don’t think like you. Discuss, debate, and improve your reasoned understanding of one another and of the crucial issues. Your goal should be to enhance your own awareness of the counterarguments in contentious matters, not win over anyone.

Don’t Ruminate Endlessly

May 6, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Don't Ruminate Endlessly Say you’re in the market for a laptop but just can’t bring yourself to pick out the right model. You’ve spent countless hours comparing different models, visiting various websites, reading reviews, exploring stores, and researching all the available features, even though you’re unlikely to use most of them. Draining indeed!

Too Much Choice Can Stress You Out

Choice may be a great “problem” to have. Books such as Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice (2004) and Sheena Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing (2011) have exposed how increased choice may be bad for you.

Sometimes, the only thing worse than never having a choice is always having to choose.

Overthinking can trip you up. You can get confused when you have too much information or overthink about what you should be doing. Behavioral scientists such as Schwartz and Iyengar call this phenomenon “choice paralysis.”

Combat your indecisive nature by limiting your search, say, by establishing a cut-off time. Tell yourself that you’ll look around for two hours and then you’ll buy the best laptop you’ve come across in that time.

Use opportunity cost as a filter. Don’t poke around the internet for a better deal on an airfare or follow an eBay auction if you’re saving less than, say, $15 per hour spent deal-hunting.

Idea for Impact: Choose to Reduce Choice. Simplify and Prioritize.

Overthinking everything can make everyday life a challenge. Unnecessary analysis costs time and money and causes psychological wear.

The benefits of forgoing further rumination and acting on available information often offset the from needing to do everything perfectly.

Choosing when to choose is important. Rethink which choices in your life really matter and focus your time and effort there. Life is all about values and priorities.
In decision-making, simple beats complex. Reject complexity and accept that you’ll be sure that you’ve made the right choice. Make a decision, and then change course if it ends up being horribly wrong. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has written in his 2016 letter to shareholders, “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think.”

Creativity—It Takes a Village: A Case Study of the 3M Post-it Note

April 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Creativity isn’t always about sudden insights that work perfectly. No matter how good an idea is, it’ll probably need some work before it can mature into a helpful innovation.

The invention of 3M Post-it (or the sticky note) is a particularly illuminating case in point that innovation requires actionable and differentiated insight. Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure creative involvement throughout the development process.

A Glue That Doesn’t Stick: A Solution Without a Problem

Arthur Fry conceived the Post-It to bookmark the songs in hymnal In the winter of 1974, a 3M adhesives engineer named Spencer Silver gave an internal presentation about a pressure-sensitive adhesive compound he had invented in 1968. The glue was weak, and Silver and his colleagues could not imagine a good use for it. The glue could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Silver could stick the glue and reapply it to surfaces without leaving behind any residue.

In Silver’s audience was Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M’s paper products division. Months later, on a frigid Sunday morning, Fry called to mind Silver’s glue in an unlikely context.

Fry sang in his church’s choir and used to put little paper pieces in his hymnal to bookmark the songs he was supposed to sing. The little paper pieces of bookmark would often fall out, forcing Fry to thumb frantically through the book looking for the correct page. (This is one of those common hassles that we often assume we’re forced to live with.)

In a flash of lightning, Fry recalled the weak glue he’d heard at Silver’s presentation. Fry realized that the glue could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark. The adhesive bond was strong enough to stick to the page but weak enough to peel off without leaving a trace.

Arthur Fry and Spencer Silver: Inventors of the Post-it Note The sticky note was thus born as a bookmark called Press’n Peel. Initially, It was sold in stores in four cities in 1977 and did poorly. When 3M offered free samples to office workers in Boise, Idaho, some customers started using them as self-attaching notes. It was only then that Post-it notes started to become popular. They were first introduced across America in 1980 and Canada and Europe in 1981.

Ideas Intermingle and Evolve: Creativity Needs Collaboration

In all, it took twelve years after the initial discovery of the “glue that doesn’t stick” before 3M made Post-it available commercially. The Post-it continues to be one of the most widely used office products in the world.

This case study of the Post-it is a persuasive reminder that there’s a divergence between an idea and its tangible application that the creator cannot bridge by himself. The creator will have to expose the concept to diverse people who can evaluate, use, and trial the product.

In other words, the creative process does not end with an idea or a prototype. A happy accident often undergoes multiple iterations and reinterpretations that can throw light on the concept’s new applications. In the above example, Art Fry was able to see Spencer Silver’s invention from a different perspective and conceive of a novel use that its creator, Silver, could not. And all this happened in 3M’s fertile atmosphere that many companies aspire to create to help ideas intermingle and creativity flourish.

Creativity---It Takes a Village: A Case Study of the Post-it Note

Idea for Impact: Creativity Is About Generating New Possibilities

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas and concepts—and new associations that connect the ideas with existing problems.

Excellent new ideas don’t emerge from within a single person or function but at the intersection of processes or people that may have never met before.

Why Your Judgment Sucks // Summary of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

April 5, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) describes the finer points of decision-making. It’s an engaging showcase of the innate biases of the mind and unthinking approaches to decision-making.

Human Beings are Intuitive Thinkers

Kahneman is a behavioral economics pioneer and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His lifelong collaboration with Amos Tversky (1937–96) has molded humans’ thinking about human error, risk, judgment, decision-making, happiness, and more. Tversky died in 1996, so he did not share in the Nobel.

Thinking, Fast and Slow explores what Kahneman calls the “mind’s machinery” as two coexisting modes of thought (“fast and slow,” as the title says.) Kahneman splits the brain into two radically divergent ways, employing a two-tier model of cognition.

System One makes judgments instantly, intuitively, and automatically, as when a cricket batsman decides whether to cut or pull. A significant part of System One is “evolved heuristics” that lets us read a person’s expression in a microsecond from a block away, for example. And it can’t be switched off. System One’s thinking is fast and effortless. It often jumps to the wrong conclusions, relies on hunches and biases, and perhaps overconfident.
System Two is slower, conscious, calculated, and deliberate, like long division. Its operations require attention. System Two is what we think of as “thinking”—slow, tiring, and essential. It’s what makes us human. Even if System Two believes it is on top of things, System One makes many of our decisions.

System One Isn’t All Flawed

In a world that often necessitates swift judgment and rapid decision-making (e.g., fight or flight,) a person who solely relies on deliberative thinking (System Two) wouldn’t last long. Doctors and firefighters, for example, through training and repetition, develop what’s called “expert intuition” that helps them identify patterns and impulsively devise the right response to a complex emergency.

We as humans are not simple rational agents. Consequently, our thinking boils down to two “Systems” of thinking/processing. As we strive to make better decisions in our work and personal lives, it benefits us to slow down and use a more deliberate System 2 way of thinking. Learn to doubt your fast/quick way of thinking!

Human Intuition is Imperfect

Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Author of Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow is an eye-opener in various ways. It can be a frightening catalog of the biases, shortcuts, and cognitive illusions that come to err our judgment—the endowment effect, priming, halo effect, anchoring effect, conjugation fallacy, the narrative fallacy, and the rest. Such mental processes are not intrinsically flawed; they are heuristics—rules of thumb, stereotypes, shortcuts. They are strategies the mind embraces to find a path in a tsunami of data.

Kahneman teaches how to recognize situations that require slower, deliberative thinking. Kahneman asserts that the value of the book is to give people the vocabulary to spot biases and to criticize the decisions of others: “Ultimately, a richer language is essential to the skill of constructive criticism.”

Recommendation: Read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011.) As one of the most popular non-fiction books in the last decade, it’ll open your eyes to the quirky and error-prone ways in which you can be influenced in ways you don’t suspect.

The conceptions behind behavioral economics make Thinking, Fast and Slow a laborious read. Many chapters are bogged down by hair-splitting details of his rigorous scientific work and academic gobbledygook. It’s a commanding survey of this field, but it’s superbly written and intelligible to non-experts.

Complement with Rolf Dobelli’s accessible The Art of Thinking Clearly (2013.)

The Unthinking Habits of Your Mind // Book Summary of David McRaney’s ‘You Are Not So Smart’

April 1, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Psychologists have argued that many cognitive biases are rooted in mental shortcuts. They are heuristics—rules of thumb, stereotypes, instincts—that help you make sense of the world. They aren’t intrinsically flawed, but, they’re often quirky and error-prone. Your mental models can affect you in ways that you don’t suspect.

David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart (2011) suggests a brief—if hurried—tour of 48 cognitive biases that can deceive you. Based on the author’s popular blog, the book is a satisfying assessment of understanding people’s—and your own—behavior a little bit better.

There is a growing body of work coming out of psychology and cognitive science that says you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the thoughts you think. … From the greatest scientist to the most humble artisan, every brain within every body is infested with preconceived notions and patterns of thought that lead it astray without the brain knowing it. So you are in good company.

Each chapter starts with a brief statement of a misconception followed by the fact. Then a synopsis of a related behavioral study shows how our brains produce the counterpart deception and the truth. Some of the less-known preconceptions discussed are,

Confabulation. You tend to create unreliable narratives to explain away your choices post hoc. These reassuring perceptions can make you think you’re more rational than you actually are.
Groupthink. People tend to fall in with the rest of the group to minimize conflict and foster group cohesiveness and social acceptance. No one wants to be the one person with a dissenting opinion.
Social Loafing. That others in a team will pick up your slack may induce you to put in less effort if you think you’ll get away with it. This can curb your own performance, even if you’re a conscientious, hardworking type. If you don’t feel your participation will be noticed, why bother putting in the effort?
Availability Heuristic. You’re likely to estimate the likelihood of an event based on your ability to recall immediate and easily accessed examples.
Fundamental Attribution Error. You tend to assign external reasons for your own behavior but internal motives to other people. For instance, if you’re late for a meeting, you’ll blame it on public transport. If someone else is running late for a meeting with you, you’ll blame it on her poor time-keeping.

Recommendation: Read David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart. It’s an engaging, easy-to-read primer to how the mind works. Read it as a lead up to Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling dissertation Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011; my summary.)

Idea for Impact: Once you learn to spot the cognitive biases we all grapple with, they’re easier to overcome.

The Data Never “Says”

March 1, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Data Never

Data doesn’t say anything. Indeed, data can’t say anything for itself about an issue any more than a saw can form furniture, or a sauce can simmer a stew.

Data is inert and inanimate. Data doesn’t know why it was created. Data doesn’t have a mind of its own, and, therefore, it can’t infer anything.

Data is a necessary ingredient in judgment. It’s people who select and interpret data. People can turn it into insight or torture it to bring their agenda to bear. Data is therefore only as useful as its quality and the skills of the people wielding it.

Far more than we admit, subjectivity and intuition play a significant role in deciding how we collect, choose, process, explain, interpret, and apply the data. As entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan warns in Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril (2012,) “We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettles our fragile egos and most vital beliefs.”

In the hands of careless users, data can end up having the opposite effect its creators intended. All data is good or bad depending on how it’s employed in a compelling story and what end it’s serving—neither of which the data itself can control.

Don’t let data drive your conclusions. Let data inform your conclusions.
Don’t declare, “The data says,” (as in, “the stock market thinks.”) Data by itself cannot have a particular interpretation.
When you find data that seems to support the case you wish to make, don’t swoop on it without caution and suspicion. Data can be very deceptive when used carelessly.
Be familiar with the limitations of your data. Investigate if your data informs any other equally valid hypothesis that could propose an alternative conclusion.

Idea for Impact: Beware of the risk of invoking data in ways that end up undermining your message.

How to Avoid Magical Thinking

February 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Avoid Magical Thinking Magical thinking remains a subtle impediment to making sound decisions. The more you examine yourself, the more you can reduce your tendency to indulge in it.

Discover the truth for yourself. Beware of the tendency to let others think for you. Don’t believe what your parents, teachers, counselors, mentors, priests, and authorities of all inclinations have taught you from an early age. (The best predictor of people’s spiritual beliefs is the religiosity of their parents.) Question others’ underlying premises and discover for yourself what’s reasonable. Force yourself to test for alternatives.

Don’t believe what you want to believe is true. Many people believe in UFOs and ghosts, even when there’s no credible verification for any visitation from outer space or dead souls haunting abandoned buildings. Often, misinformation is cunningly designed to evade careful analytical reasoning—it can easily slip under the radar of even the most well-informed people. Shun blind optimism.

Consciously identify your biases and adverse instincts. Psychologists have identified more than 100 cognitive biases that can get in the way of clear and rational thinking. Explore how those biases could come into play in your thinking. Try to determine their motive. Work to extricate yourself from them to the best of your ability.

Demand proof when the facts seem demonstrable. Remain intellectually agnostic toward what hasn’t been established scientifically or isn’t provable. If you can’t determine if something is true or it isn’t, suspend judgment. Beware of anecdotes—emotionally swaying stories in particular—they are the weakest form of evidence.

Don’t believe in something that isn’t true just because there’s a practical reason to. If you feel emotionally inclined to believe in something because it gives you hope, comfort, and the illusion of control, identify your belief as just that. Faith is often no more than an inclination that’s not withstood the tests of reason. The process of faith is an absence of doubt. There’ll always be people who reject evolution for reasons that have little to do with evolution. Don’t act with more confidence in unproven theories than is justifiable.

Idea for Impact: Be wary of the influences that can put you at risk for magical thinking.

Give critical thinking and systematic evidence the central role in how you understand the world. Improving the criteria you use to judge the truth of things is difficult—but it’s of the essence. Have an unvarying, well-balanced degree of skepticism about everything, especially your own postulations.

The #1 Clue to Disruptive Business Opportunity

January 28, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When most folks encounter a problem, an inconvenience, or an unpleasant situation, they’ll assume these problems are “facts of life” and go on with their lives. At the most, they may even lament about it to others.

Not attentive entrepreneurs. They tend to identify problems and construe them as opportunities.

Miki Agrawal - Disruptive Entrepreneur

Serial entrepreneur Miki Agrawal tells the story of how she started WILD, New York City’s first gluten-free pizzeria, after becoming increasingly intolerant to processed foods:

It all started in 2005 when I started having recurring stomachaches. I realized I was intolerant to all of the additives, hormones, and pesticides that were being put in American mass-produced food. At the time, I had given up my favorite comfort food, pizza. In 2006, I opened WILD in New York City to offer people the best version of a pizza: made with organic, gluten-free flours & tomato sauces, and hormone-free cheeses & meats.

During that time, everyone thought “gluten-free,” “farm-to-table,” and “organic” meant “must taste like cardboard,” so it took a lot of education to get people to “get” it.

Embedded in Agrawal’s narrative is a great entrepreneurial thought lesson: You, too, can become better at recognizing unrevealed opportunities by learning to spot the subtle clues all around. The key question to ask is, “This product should already exist, why doesn’t it?”

Learn to Spot Hidden Business Opportunities

Besides WILD, Agrawal has applied the same ingenuity to found two other successsful businesses called THINX underwear and TUSHY bidet accessories.

Learn to spot hidden, disruptive business opportunities

Answer the following questions to check if some problem you’re aware of serves as a business idea worth exploring:

What’s appalling in your personal or professional world?
Is this thing so terrible that you want to do something about it?
Does this bother any person but you just as much?
Your proposed solution should already exist, but why doesn’t it?
Could this solution be worth something for others who are dealing with similar problems?

Idea for Impact: “Fix-What-Sucks” Business Opportunities are Everywhere

All you have to do is look around your own life and find something that has been broken, and then fix it. Extend and expand. The world is always seeking better, faster, cheaper, and smarter ways to solve its problems.

Our 10 Most Popular Articles of 2020

December 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Top Blog Articles of 2020 Here are our most popular exclusive features of 2020. Pass this on to your friends; if they like these, they can sign up to receive our RSS feeds or email updates.

A Quick Way to De-stress. Whenever you feel frenzied, meditation can help you focus inward, pull together your scattered energies, and allow your mind to become calm.
Don’t Beat Yourself Up Over Your Mistakes. Don’t agonize about what other people are thinking about you. They’re perhaps busy worrying over what you’re thinking about them.
Better than Brainstorming for Rapid Idea Generation. Studies have shown that people think of more new—and practical—ideas on their own than they do in a group.
Don’t Let Small Decisions Destroy Your Productivity. Good routines can protect you from your more effective negative impulses and bring order and predictability to your life.
Never Outsource a Key Capability. By owning the entire customer experience, Domino Pizza has provided a consistent experience for customers and iterate quickly.
When You Talk About Too Many Goals. When it comes to persuasion, clarity and conciseness are critical.
Best to Cut Your Losses Early. Best to cut your losses early—you’ll have the least sunk costs and the fewest emotional attachments.
What Went Wrong on the Boeing 737 MAX. When you devise a highly reliable system, identify all single points of failure, and investigate how risks and failure modes can be mitigated.
How Much Risk Can You Tolerate? Encourage careful experimentation and conscientious risk-taking by lowering the risk waterline.
The Power of Negative Thinking. The Stoic practice of premeditatio malorum helps intentionally visualize the worst-case scenario in your mind’s eye and tame your anxiety.

And here are some articles of yesteryear that continue to be popular:

We wish you all a healthy and prosperous 2021!

What the Duck!

December 28, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Rubber Duck Debugging - There’s a popular technique among programmers called “rubber duck debugging:” put a rubber duck (or a cardboard cutout of a dog) next to your computer, and whenever you get stuck, you talk to the duck.

Yes, you talk your problem and walk your code with that inanimate object. And you perpetuate the stereotype that we geeks are a socially awkward bunch.

“Showing It to Someone Else” isn’t just a way of telling the other what you think; it’s a way of telling yourself what you think. Just the act of slowing down and explaining your problem and its context can bring about a moment of illumination.

Rubber duck debugging is related to what psychologists call “incubation.” The best solutions can strike suddenly and unexpectedly when you aren’t actively working on your problem. Think of Archimedes and his Eureka moment.

Idea for Impact: Talking is often a part of thought. After many failed attempts, switching your brain from problem-solving to problem-explaining—even to a cat, parent, sympathetic coworker, or somebody who may not know much about whatever it is that’s bothering you—can break you free from fixation and trigger creative breakthroughs.

Hat tip to reader Nick Ashcroft.

Thinking Tools

Wondering what to read next?

Too Much Choice Can Stress You Out

Idea for Impact: Choose to Reduce Choice. Simplify and Prioritize.

Wondering what to read next?

A Glue That Doesn’t Stick: A Solution Without a Problem

Ideas Intermingle and Evolve: Creativity Needs Collaboration

Idea for Impact: Creativity Is About Generating New Possibilities

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Human Beings are Intuitive Thinkers

System One Isn’t All Flawed

Human Intuition is Imperfect

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Idea for Impact: Be wary of the influences that can put you at risk for magical thinking.

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Learn to Spot Hidden Business Opportunities

Idea for Impact: “Fix-What-Sucks” Business Opportunities are Everywhere

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