Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Thinking Tools

Why People are Afraid to Think

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Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. (Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight: A Method of Abolishing the International Duel (1916,) pp. 178–179)

Laziness and inability usually coerce people to reject thinking. But, as Russell contends, fear is a non-obvious inhibitor of thought. Not just because meticulous reasoning is demanding but because thinking may occasion an undermining—even revaluation—of our long-held convictions about all sorts of matters—notably religion and ethics.

People reject thinking because we fear it may challenge our equilibrium—how we make sense of the world. We’ll be coerced to see the world anew. As I’ve emphasized previously, once a belief is added to our corpus of viewpoints, we indulge in “intellectual censorship.” We cling to our ideas rather than objectively reassessing and questioning them.

Idea for Impact: Life should alter you. Through conscientious thinking, your worldview can—and should—reflect that growth.

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What if Something Can’t Be Measured

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During a September-2021 Airlines Confidential podcast (via Gary Leff’s View from the Wing,) former Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza told an exciting story about the airline industry’s systematic approach to reckon if potential new routes are economically feasible:

For the most part, airlines rely on data—required and reported by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics—on ticket purchases that show the number of people flying a given route and what price. For example, New Orleans, which is home to one of the largest Honduran populations in the U.S., has not had direct service to Honduras. Spirit Airlines will therefore analyze data from Sabre Market Intelligence for 2019 showing O&D (Origin and Destination) traffic between New Orleans and Honduras.

Sometimes, though, there’s no data on historical demand on a route, such as when Spirit Airlines was considering service to Armenia, Colombia. There hadn’t ever been a U.S. carrier flying into the airport, so there wasn’t available traffic data Spirit could access. Instead, Spirit looked at telephone data and migrant remittance statistics to get a sense of ties between the U.S. and the Latin American city. Spirit studied the frequency with which people were calling friends and relatives and how much money and how frequently money was being remitted as a reliable metric to determine if the new route was viable.

Spirit Airlines relies heavily on leisure bookings, especially visiting friends and relatives (VFR) traffic. In the absence of historical yield data for a route being considered, Spirit used fund transfers to Latin America as a stand-in variable.

A surrogate metric or proxy metric is exactly that—a substitute used in place of a variable of interest when that variable can’t be measured directly or is difficult to measure. For example, per-capita GDP is often a proxy for the standard of living, and the value of a house is a stand-in for the household’s wealth. Freight tonnage is often a proxy for economic activity.

Idea for Impact: Relying on intuition for sound decision-making isn’t sustainable, so folks need a systematic approach to making those decisions. Use meaningful proxy and surrogate metrics in your decisions to help overcome inherent biases with what can’t be measured.

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The Best Advice Tony Blair Ever Got: Finding the Time to Think Strategically

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Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair reminisced, at a 2012 event at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, how easy it is to get so absorbed by the pressures of doing that you rarely ever disentangle yourself from the chock-full of activities and the clutter that can choke strategic thinking.

As the leader of the Opposition, when I went to see him in 1996 at the White House, he explained that one of the hardest things when you get into the government is finding the time to think strategically. It’s being able to create the space so that you’re focused on what you really know counts because otherwise, he said, the system will take you over. You’ll be in meetings from 8:00 in the morning till 10:00 at night, and you think you’re immensely busy, but the tactics and the strategy have all got mixed.

What happens in leadership is that things come at you the whole time. If you’re not careful, you’ll spend your time dealing with one situation after another. You lose your strategic grip on what’ll determine if you’re a successful government. Many of these crises are real, and you must deal with them. But when you judge your government in history, no one will remember any of them. You’ve got to create the space to be thinking strategically all the time to change the world.

Idea for Impact: It’s your strategic thinking, more than any other single activity, that can influence what you’ll achieve as a leader. Find ways to create more “head time” amid the busyness.

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Beware of Too Much Information

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Nearly all decision-making models emphasize the need for much information about the situation and options before making a decision.

Information is worthwhile, no doubt, but information can sometimes be less factual or less precise than it may seem. Besides, too much information may distract you from important issues. Scouting for additional data may cloud the picture rather than arm you with crucial information.

Idea for Impact: Be wary of the usefulness and truth-value of the information you have amassed. The solution to being overwhelmed by too much irrelevant information is selecting relevant information—not merely less information.

Bear in mind that there’s always room for new ideas and new perspectives. Review and challenge your current comprehension of the problem you’re confronting. Don’t be afraid to refine your understanding and explore other possibilities.

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Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution

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Entrepreneurs, don’t get so excited talking about your solution that you forget to emphasize how it solves a problem at all.

Which problem are you solving for the user? What pain-point are you alleviating? Why is your solution relevant to your customers? How will it make their life easier, faster, and cheaper?

After all, every great company starts by solving a painful problem. Focus more on that problem when you’re selling. Not only will this persuade your investors and customers, but it also rallies your team around a shared understanding of the problem and prepares you to ask for the level of resources it should receive.

Idea for Impact: Sell the problem first, not your idea. Often, jumping too quickly to a solution makes you lose sight of the nuances of the problem.

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Ideas Evolve While Working on Something Unrelated

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In the ’90s, Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, through its subsidy Hitachi-Omron Terminal Solutions, introduced the Clean ATM, which cleaned the bank notes during transactions. The Baltimore Sun (11-Dec-1996) notes,

Hitachi has turned its talents to money-laundering of a literal kind, with an automated teller machine that sterilizes and irons yen notes before dispensing them.

Hitachi did not set out to sanitize the money; its engineers were trying to solve the problem of crumpled bills, which tended to jam machines, a company spokesman says. They solved the problem by running the bills through rollers heated to 392 degrees [Fahrenheit, 200 degrees Celsius]—any hotter would singe paper money—and discovered that the process also killed bacteria.

Idea for Impact: Serendipity is central to the creative process. Many ideas evolve when you’re working on something unrelated. Always be ready to discover what you’re not looking for.

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No, Reason Doesn’t Guide Your Politics

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“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” observes the American political scientist Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012,) a captivating voyage of discovery of the social psychology of politics and ethics. Haidt makes a compelling case for why reason and logic aren’t what people use to contend with problems and steer through to the right answers.

Most people’s politics tend to be ill-informed. People don’t engage in deep causal thinking about the consequences of their favored political positions. Information and analyses tend to provoke—not calm—their preconceived judgments.

Reason is Motivationally Inert

As the Scottish philosopher David Hume noted in his masterful Treatise on Human Nature (1739,) “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Reason becomes subordinate to the passions that have come to life in people’s tribal allegiances and their confirmation bias. People are prone to making decisions derived from instinctive, emotional, and fast thinking of psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s “System 1,” not the slow, logical deliberations of “System 2.”

Most people feel good about sticking to their guns, even if they are wrong. They tend to read newspapers, periodicals, blogs, and social media feeds to settle ever more comfortably into their preexisting beliefs. They use their tribes’ “notice boards” not to reassess their established opinions but to have them validated, comforted, legitimized, and intensified.

On the rare occasion that they do converse with someone or read something they may disagree with, they don’t revaluate their judgments, let alone change their minds. They merely use reason as a weapon to discredit contrasting evidence, spot others’ flaws, and convince them that they are wrong. Consequently, reason doesn’t bind but drives differing people apart.

Idea for Impact: The Opinions You are Blind to Could Be Your Own

Be conscious of the internal conflicts brought on by your passions. Seek and assess the counterevidence. Incorporate these counterarguments and strengthen your positions.

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Imagine a Better Response

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In the Discourses of Epictetus (c.108 CE,) Arrian reports, “I must die: must I, then die groaning too? I must be fettered: and wailing too. I must go into exile? Does anyone, then, keep me from going a smile and cheerful and serene?”

You may not choose the circumstance, but you can choose your response to it.

Choose your response, and you can rise above what holds you down.

But how?

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1959) proposes, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

When circumstances pull for some particular reaction, choose to respond instead.

Don’t react without thinking. Don’t accept reflexive reactions. Instead, learn to become aware that there is a “space” before responding. Learn to recognize, increase, and make use of this “space.”

That awareness ushers a release from the dictates of both external and internal pressures.

Choose a better response. With that, you can find inner happiness.

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Intellectual Inspiration Often Lies in the Overlap of Disparate Ideas

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From David Chapman’s instructive essay ‘How to Think Real Good,’

Learn from fields very different from your own. They each have ways of thinking that can be useful at surprising times. Just learning to think like an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a philosopher will beneficially stretch your mind.

I’ve always been an admirer of the “Renaissance Man”—the notion that one should try to embrace multiple streams of knowledge and develop one’s own faculties as broadly as possible. An archaeologist who studies only material culture will think similar thoughts to a second archaeologist who studies only material culture. However, an archaeologist whose studies include anthropology, biology, geology, and metallurgy has the wherewithal to pursue her curiosity down disparate channels and synthesize multiple perspectives.

Idea for Impact: Dabble in multiple disciplines from time to time and try to understand the basic thinking model of each discipline. You’ll think more broadly, redefine problems outside of normal boundaries, and reach solutions anchored in a unique understanding of complex situations.

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Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data

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Yesterday’s New York Times article highlights the complex tradeoff leaders must often make between indecision and acting on insufficient information:

The Omicron variant is pushing the CDC into issuing recommendations based on what once would have been considered insufficient evidence, amid growing public concern about how these guidelines affect the economy and education. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has been commended for short-circuiting a laborious process and taking a pragmatic approach to manage a national emergency, saying she was right to move ahead even when the data was unclear and agency researchers remained unsure. The challenge now for Dr. Walensky is figuring out how to convey this message to the public: “The science is incomplete, and this is our best advice for now.”

The smartest people I know are the ones who understand that they don’t know—can’t know—everything. Yet, they’re ready to act on imperfect information, especially when being slow will be costly.

Idea for Impact: Being able to analyze information is insufficient if you can’t reach decisions.

Knowing you’ll never know everything shouldn’t prevent you from acting. The ability to reason and reconsider your position on something is an integral part of rational thought.

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