Rowan's Future of Choice

Customer's customer

I want to share a tip you may not have thought about recently.

If you have customers, or other people you are trying to satisfy or help, try thinking beyond them to your customers' customer.

If you are an employee trying to satisfy your boss, think about what he or she is trying to accomplish. If you are selling a product or service, think about the life of that product or service after your sale.

How is your customer using it? How are their customers using it? Beyond the transaction at hand, how can you help your customer succeed?

Using contextual insights within immediate relationships can actually simplify your choices. There is less guesswork and people will be impressed that you care.

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Gaining perspective

In "simpler" times, we had fewer choices, but did not know it. We had less to learn--and less time for learning--but again, we were naïve.

In simpler times, we tried to accept what we were given. We were taught to appreciate what we had, and to want less. (But less than what?)

In simpler times, the chance to break away was only given to the ambitious or lucky.

The simpler times are now.

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Golfer's Lent

Malcolm Gladwell has been corresponding by email with ESPN sportswriter, Bill Simmons, about a mixture of sports stuff (Malcolm is a huge fan) and the craft of writing. Malcolm observes this about star golfer, Phil Michelson:

"I'm happy writing anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I'm now to the point where I'm suspicious of people who don't love what they do in the same way. I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he'd picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that's true, isn't that profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks? Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer's version of Lent that I'm unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that something he loved so much had to come to end, and I've always thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was Gretzky. And surely it's the explanation as well for why Mickelson will never be Tiger Woods."

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Tipping into uncertainty

Because we can not control uncertainty and the variation it can bring, we try to take it out of our decisions. This is futile. Uncertainty is a part of reality.

The point at which we stop collecting information to make a decision is the point where we accept uncertainty.

"What interests me is the question of how humans learn to live with uncertainty. Before the scientific revolution determinism was a strong ideal. Religion brought about a denial of uncertainty, and many people knew that their kin or their race was exactly the one that God had favored. They also thought they were entitled to get rid of competing ideas and the people that propagated them. How does a society change from this condition into one in which we understand that there is this fundamental uncertainty? How do we avoid the illusion of certainty to produce the understanding that everything, whether it be a medical test or deciding on the best cure for a particular kind of cancer, has a fundamental element of uncertainty?"

--SMART HEURISTICS: GERD GIGERENZER Link
 

"I'll have my service call your service"

Has this ever happened to you? You are reading the first paragraph of a really interesting article on how to solve a big problem you are having. The phone rings, you look at the caller ID, and decide to let the voice mail pick up.  You get halfway through the second paragraph when your email service announces you have new mail. You try to ignore that, too, but by now that pesky gremlin in the back of your mind is fully awake. What do they want? Do they have critical information that will change my life? Is there some sort of emergency?

The gremlin will not rest until you get your messages. You do so, then return 20 minutes later to your reading. This repeats over and over. It is like being awoken every hour from a deep sleep and drifing off again. It is torture. We allow this to happen. The gadgets that are supposed to help us actually conspire against us. They seem smarter than we are.

Many of us are living in a continuous state of interruption. Even our interruptions get interrupted: think about Call Waiting.

Short of unplugging from our prescious connected networks, how can we ever thoughtfully make choices, do the right things, feel rewarded for making the right decisions?

Smart heuristics by Gerd Gigerenzer

The really interesting part of this professor's theory is that the way information is represented is key to our ability to understand it.

"...the study of smart heuristics shows that there are strategies people actually use to make good decisions that deal openly with uncertainties, rather than denying their existence."

Gerd Gigerenzer's article can be found here.

Beliefs muddy the waters

Someone named brain in a jar (I could not find his/her real name, which bugs me) over at Kuro5hin writes well on the roll of beliefs in helping us make decisions. Link.

"Beliefs are powerful, because they are not only the basis for our decisions, but also filters through which we view the world. We are constantly bombarded with huge volumes of information from our senses. Our eyes take in a full 120 degree sweep, much of this at a very high resolution, our ears are constantly responding to sounds, our sense of smell always probing the air around us for food or threats. The vast majority of this torrent of information is effectively ignored. Based on the information we get from the senses, we form a model of the world and it is this model, which forms the basis for our decisions. Absolute truth is out there, but in our heads everything is to a greater or lesser extent an interpretation. For any set of sensory data more than one interpretation is possible, and it is our beliefs, implicit and explicit, which we use to decide between the interpretations available. "

I hear you

Just listened to Doug Kaye talking with Dave Winer (link). Part of their conversation was about the importance of the human voice in podcasting.

Much decision-making is the result of personal conversations--with a spouse, friend or advisor. It is often face-to-face or on the phone. More and more of the information we have available for decisions is in written words or video. In both forms, the human voice is not at the forefront.

Over time, the intimacy afforded by a podcaster’s voice could lead to trust, which could help us decide what to do.