Have you ever entered a Target store on a mission to buy one item, purchased a cart full of things you didn’t know you needed, and left feeling like you needed a giant latté and a nap?
You are not alone. Research shows again and again that large, department-style stores, with lots of options, are cognitively exhausting. But it’s not the bright lights, screaming children, or long lines that are tiresome. The exhaustion comes in the micro buying decisions that we are bombarded with having to make. Having to evaluate whether or not you need that new iron on the aisle end cap (you don’t) or whether you will go through two cases of La Croix (you can) may seem insignificant (it is), but these mentally taxing, low-level decisions are sapping the energy you need for higher-stakes decisions. This is called decision fatigue.
The work of sociologist Dr. Roy Baumeister is now being confirmed in neuroscience. Each of us has limited decision-making energy. The more decisions you have to make throughout your day (or in a store), the more likely you are to look for shortcuts. The most obvious shortcut? Not to make a decision at all. Passing on a decision may seem like an easy way to conserve mental energy, but the postponement in itself is a decision. Forgoing the iron has minimal consequences (unless you habitually show up to work in wrinkled clothes because your last iron broke years ago). But deferring some decisions may bring on significant consequences later. Even deciding if and when to decide can be depleting.
We often work with CEOs and GMs who are exhausted from the number of decisions that come their way – deals to be done, projects to approve or kill, customers to console, markets to enter. But even more consuming are the equally exhausting, but far less material decisions that sap mental energy – go to the employee luncheon or not, do the podcast interview with the local guru or delegate it, spend time reading those articles you filed, go to the gym, or just review the monthly financials. In their exhaustion, they often postpone their most strategic decisions in the face of the pressing, but less important choices. Through their postponing, they maintain the status quo or worse, fail to take advantage of an opportunity before a competitor. This is understandable given what we are learning about our brain’s ability to decide – mainly its limited capacity to process multiple choices simultaneously. However, it is no way for a leader to lead or an organization to thrive.
Our hope with the NQ16 is that we can be the double shot of espresso for your decision fatigue. We are focusing this entire issue on what it means to CHOOSE.
Choosing well begins with choosing how to choose. We need our own personal set of choice-making apparatus, lest we consign our most important choices to fate. What role will intuition and experience play? What role does information play, and what information do you trust or pursue? What role do others in your life play, and whom will you allow to help inform your choices? And beneath those apparatus, what is your orientation to risk? What makes choosing hard for you? Do you allow yourself to embrace desire? Are you driven by significant degrees of obligation and a need to please others? Are you counter-dependent, finding it difficult to compromise or accommodate? Your own story informs your choice-making apparatus more than you may realize. Choosing how to choose in the most important moments of life sets us up for greater success and satisfaction as professionals, family members, and citizens.
It should be noted that even with a choice-making methodology, choosing is hard. When we choose, each “yes” to one thing is an implied “no” to many others. Every choice has a list of painful trade-offs. Each time we choose to trust our gut, we bicker with our brain. Every time we seek more data to support our decision, we deny our intuition. And yet we must do the hard, painful work of choosing wisely because at the end of the day we all want to make more good decisions than bad ones.
Perhaps that is why Amazon’s (the virtual Target) leader, Jeff Bezos recently said “If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that’s enough. And they should be as high quality as I can make them.” For this quarter, let’s work together to make sure that our approaches to choosing are as high quality as they can be.