SnapDecisions

I'm watching CNN (the only TV I can understand in Israel) and they did a quick segment on Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." I have not read the book. The premise of the segment is that we, as people, are good at pattern matching without thinking too hard about the patterns.

I agree -- and I believe that people find patterns where the patterns don't exist, therefore applying a not-so-hot solution to the perceived problem. I see this all the time in project managers and managers. "Well, we're behind, so I'll ask everyone to work overtime until we make up the time." That's a snap decision that's just plain wrong.

What kinds of snap decisions do you see? What kinds of decisions work? -- JohannaRothman 2005.03.26

Well, sometimes I see snap decisions that work, but why in the world do we need snap decisions in projects? If you're working on a three-year project, I would think you could take 15 minutes - even an hour, to gather information and make a considered decision. If you can't, there's something seriously wrong with your project that no snap decision, no matter how right, is going to fix.

That said, there is a kind of snap decision that we make all the time without realizing we're even making a decision--and sometimes those are okay. But the more awareness we have of when we're making a decision that might be important to get right, the more chance there is that we'll take a bit of time to make it right. Certainly we can always take time to sit down for our decisions. Failure to do so is a sure sign of a project in trouble. - JerryWeinberg 2005.03.26

I make snap decisions when someone at work comes to me with a problem. I decide quickly when "I've heard it all before. I've seen this situation before. I know all there is to know about it. I'm busy. I don't want to hear the other person whine about their troubles any longer."

So I make a snap decision and dismiss the person and their situation.

Sometimes this actually works - at least it works for me in that the other person goes away.

I don't think it works for the other person, and it usually doesn't work for their situation either.

For me, snap decisions come from fatigue. When I am tired I just don't have the energy to listen to someone or think about something for more than a moment. I am becoming a little better at saying things like, "I am tired right now. This sounds like an important situation. I think we should talk about it in an hour or in a day or something."

Now that I think about it, delaying an important decision to a better time is a snap decision in itself.

DwaynePhillips 27 March 2005

I have read "Blink". Gladwell talks about both good and bad decisions made in the first few seconds, and about the necessity of surfacing them so we can direct them. The good decisions are those that come from training and expertise in a given subject, application of which becomes instinctual. One example is art experts' "instinctive" feeling that a supposedly ancient statue was a fake. But that would only be a taking-off point. They would then need to back that instinct with exploration and evidence.

The bad decisions he talks about are really scary: things like police shootings that should never have happened, and prejudiced decisions from people who are not consciously racist or sexist or whatever.

I came away with the conclusion that we�re going to make snap judgements anyway�that�s how the human mind works�so we need to create conditions where they don�t become unexamined decisions. For people who have to make quick life-or-death decisions under extreme stress that means both training and adopting practices that reduce the likelihood of making bad decisions, for example, banning car chases, because police are apparently far more likely to kill someone when they�re all pumped up after a chase.

We don�t have to move that quickly in our business, though we are sometimes surrounded by people who think we do. We can do what Jerry is saying: sit down and work through the decision process. In that model, the snap judgement becomes a hypothesis, probably one of several that we need to test. But then we have to eliminate the artificial stress and stop pretending that we�re in a life-or-death scenario. People running around shrieking (viz Jim Bullock in another forum) are awfully tedious, and they don�t tend to make good decisions.

FionaCharles 27-Mar-2005

On the first day of my project management workshop, one of the PMs asked how to take time to plan. I said, "Take 20 minutes and develop the project charter. Take another 20 minutes to develop the project plan. Another 20 minutes to block out the schedule. Now you have enough information to know the big black holes, and you'll know where to really plan." He was skeptical at the time. Today, I had the class perform the project that they had spent no more than an hour planning. They were amazed at how well they could adapt their plans.

Snap decisions have a place, especially when someone's safety is in jeopardy. But I don't think they have much of a place at work. I've been trying to think of a time when a snap decision was the right thing to do in a project, and so far, I'm stumped. -- JohannaRothman 2005.03.27

I can't think of a time when a snap decison was really needed on a project -- i.e., a time when we absolutely couldn't wait an hour.

I do make snap judgements all the time, usually on test strategies. That's exactly a process of pattern recognition. I learn as much as I can about the test problem in the first few days, and I whiteboard a model for the test. The danger of that sort of pattern recognition is that it becomes knee-jerk, because you fall in love with your own model (and/or your ability to craft a model)and force a problem into fitting the pattern. The necessary corrective is that the high-level sketch is analogous to Johanna's project planning example. It gets some boundaries tentatively established so I can do the real work of filling in the gaps.

Sometimes that takes a long time. I'm struggling with the detailed model on my current project. A critical part of the decision-making process for me is understanding how to represent the solution to a problem so other people can understand it. I haven't yet found the way to represent the model that's in my head, which makes me worried that it's badly flawed.

FionaCharles 27-Mar-2005

Fiona, you just jiggled me! I don't know if the RuleofThree is helpful to you with your detailed model, but I find it works well for project plans, project schedules, architecture designs.

The jiggle is this: Maybe a snap decision at work is okay if part of that decision is to consisder three things that will go wrong with the decision. If you can tolerate those three things, then you can live with the decision. Although, to be honest, I use this thinking anyway. Maybe the RuleofThree doesn't make it a snap decision anymore. -- JohannaRothman 2005.03.29

I think by the time you've applied the RuleofThree, you've gone past the snap decision point and tested your hypothesis.

Solved my problem. (Having escaped to my home office from the client's cacophonous project room for a couple of days.) But the RuleofThree is always a good test, and the reminder is helpful. Thanks! FionaCharles 29-Mar-2005

Updated: Tuesday, March 29, 2005