Greg Voisen
Welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen, the host of Inside Personal Growth. And joining us from Bend, Oregon are Helen Edwards, obviously on the left and on the right Dave Edwards, and they have a new book out that I'm gonna hold up, you guys called Make Better Decisions. Look, he's holding it up to How to Improve your Decision Making in the Digital Age. I think it's really how to improve our decision making and our critical thinking skills as well, because I'm not certain for many people if those haven't gone in the toilet, because they're using the digital age to help them make decisions. And I don't always think that's the best thing to do. So and you outline this in the book, not that you said, that's the worst thing to do. But the reality is, is that we're going to be speaking with them about that today. And I want to let our listeners know something about both of you, Helen and Dave, are serial entrepreneurs, they own Saunders studios company focused on helping humans succeed in the digital age and is their fifth company and in to some 1017 They sold their artificial intelligence market firm. And Kelly Janessa. Is that correct? intelligencia. Yes, and Atlantic media, and continued their work at Atlantic media subsidiary courts. As you can tell, they're a husband and wife team, they have the same last name. And they've worked together since 2009. Saying that they wouldn't have it any other way. Well, I'm glad as a couple you guys get along, and you can work together, my wife tried working with me, but that didn't work out. So Stenner, she's got her own thing. But again, we'll have a LinkedIn, Amazon to the book, we'll also have a link to their website, and it's getsonder, s-o-n-d-e-r, just get sauntered up calm. There, you can learn more about their training programs, you can learn more about them, you can learn more about this book, you can see what it is that they do. So with that being said, you know, you both speak about why you wrote the book. And that's always a great place to start. I always say, hey, why do people write books anyway? Right? Please tell our listeners about the aha moments you had when working with one of your clients, and how that guided you to kind of write and make the right this book and put it out?

Helen Edwards
Well, thanks. We'd love a hot moment, you know, that moment of where the non-obvious becomes obvious. And I think when it came to decision making, which we'd thought and talked about a lot, because, you know, I'm a fan of Danny Kahneman and all of his work on decision making. The one of the things I noticed in our clients is there were a few people that would do things like print off a list of cognitive biases and pop them on the wall next to their desk, as though knowledge of the fact that we have these biases in our thinking was enough to become the sort of perfect rational decision maker. And I became really intrigued about why people thought that they could just sort of print these things off and have them there, and then they make better decisions. And I started to think, well, maybe there's a better way of doing it. And I think the real aha moment, was combining that with the way that in the modern workplace, people use expected to sort of get insights from data without necessarily having to sit down and really think about it, that the data will just give them an answer. And their aha moment was like, well, none of that is going to work, you actually have to improve your own decision making, and that it's more like meditation. Practice is more like sport, you go out and you, you spend time actually practicing things. And then over time you get better. That's not something that you can go to a checklist for. And so that's why we wrote the book has to, because we started using the 50 nudges ourselves, and they actually work. So over the course of a year or so with our clients and with us, we saw that it worked. People were making better decisions as they got to practice certain techniques.

Greg Voisen
Well, you know, you talk about decision making, and I don't know if I said this to you before, but I interviewed a Harvard professor and she's blind. And she wrote a book and I can't remember the name of the book, you guys might. I needed to look back into the archives. And it was about you know, she studied in grocery store bars, you know, if there were six peanut butters, right? And a man or woman went down the aisle six was too many. Right? It was like, it stopped your ability to make a decision about the creamy peanut butter, this peanut butter that peanut butter, but they found the optimum number. After all of this research, obviously her being it, I think it was either Harvard or MIT. It was like, three. So the less the less options, the quicker we could make some decisions, right. And it's kind of the same in business, you guys have probably heard this, you run workshops. You know, I remember this from Larry Wilson, Wilson learning. And it was so imperative. You know, the little lights would go on, you play a game between two teams, and you try to get across and it was like Whack a Mole. The key was not to look at all the dots and say, oh, well, that's the one that went on. And we need to take this path to get the other side to turn the light off. So we when he was really to step on the landmines as quickly as possible, because that's how you found out what didn't work. Right? Those decision making processes, but many people were frozen, because they see the lights and they just didn't freeze. Right? So I think that's a that's a tough place to be in. Dave, can you speak with us about how big data and small data leads us to making decisions and how our intuitions are data driven, as well as the influence that this has both good, and not so good on making decisions, including the ever complex and changing world in which we're living? Because it's, you know, this is ever dynamic. It's always moving. Right? You go to make a decision, something changes, people today, certainly out there listening, this can get that, you know, it's like, look at our economy, they just raised the rates, point seven 5%, right, you're gonna make a decision? Are you going to sell a stock? Are you gonna buy a stock? What are you making it? What are you basing it on? And I think people are a bit frozen right now. They're like, deer in headlights, because there is so much going on externally. And uncertainty. So I want you to comment about the uncertainty too. Sure.

Dave Edwards
I think there's a lot of things that people get trapped, conflating, you know, we talk about things like the idea that you have to separate rational decisions from emotional decisions, or in the context of your question, you have to separate data from intuition. When actually everything is data, if you think about it, our intuitions are informed by all of our own into the individual experiences, which essentially, is the data that we have lived the data that exists in the world, whether it's small data about an individual transaction, through to big data about everything a company knows about all of their all of their employees and all of their customers. Those are the some of the individual experiences of humans. And it gets sort of you get sort of stuck in this idea that just be that data must have the answer, right? It there's so much of it. And we've invested so much money in creating these huge data platforms. So the data, the answer must just be there, right? But it actually isn't, because in the end data is just data. And we requires humans to make sense of that, to make humans to provide context to understand what that data actually means to us to an individual or in aggregate to a society, and then figure out how to tell a story with that data that motivates other people to act. And so you get lost in this idea that we just have to look at a chart or a graph, and therefore there's a decision and you get frozen when you look at it, and you're not sure what to do with it. Because you're not allowing for the fact that you actually have to be a human and actually look at it and interpret it and make some make some decisions out of it. So we include a bunch of nudges in the book about how to think about how to use data and how to, how to think about it how to do things like look at what the literal understanding of the humans are in the data. It's one of my favorites. It comes from our friend, Jevon West, who's a professor at University of Washington, and looking at data to understand that there are actually humans in that data. So who are they? Let's think about that. Because when you think about who those humans are, that'll probably help you understand what to do with it. Or looking at data and understanding with the finding the gaps in the data, who isn't in the data. What experiences are not in the data, when you were telling your story about the Harvard or MIT prof walking through the store and she was blind. That's a That's a classic example of the kind of people who can frequently be forgotten and left out of data. We think about the people who walk cited through a store and frequently that you know, you can you can easily have data that is not including those people who are not sighted who can't see the peanut butter, and so you're not sure what to do with those decisions. And so we what we try to do is actually resolve that sort of human question and that human paralysis by thinking that data is superior in some way. And that helps us bring some of that sort of that fear and the paralysis and that complexity back to something that we can actually get our hands around.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, so, so true. You know, I know, in your world, the digital world, you know, they say, radical curiosity is really important. You speak about curiosity in the book, obviously. And if you look at any, and I wrote a book on intuition, the reality is, is that, you know, you look at quotes on the internet from Steve Jobs. And he says one of the most important things he used was his intuition. Right? Trying, he was radically curious. But he also used his intuition Bill Gates, the same thing has plenty of quotes out on the internet on intuition. And I think that people have a tendency to not realize that all these data set points that we've gathered over our life, to put the dots together, as Rita McGrath would say, right, can you see around corners? Can you see what's coming? Is the train going to hit you head on right? To be able to make better decisions? And then at times as humans, many times, we can see irrational behaviors, lots of irrational behaviors. And then speaking about that, Helen, you're less 10 of the biggest decision making errors in data driven world? Could you share with the listeners, these 10 biggest decision making errors and what we can do to avoid them also address the fact that all decisions are emotional? As you guys say, you know, even if you think, Okay, I'm gonna let the AI do the work for me. Right. Okay. Yeah. And that's probably the best example of that is the stock market, you know, these traders have these machines that gather all this data, and then it triggers certain points, and they do that. But I would say much of what happens in the market is emotional driven by the data that's coming in on a daily basis. It's how somebody feels, right? That, that they're making the decision. So what are those 10?

Helen Edwards
Well, it was, I'll just go back before our answer the 10, I'm just gonna get back to the peanut butter example. And you said that, that this, you're given six or nine, or whatever the original study was quite a quite a few. And that three was this magic number. And there's no accident in that. And it's something that we talk about a lot in our workshops, as humans thinking 123 Lots and lots and lots, you know, we can hold 123. And now mind really easily those three dimensions. And then we get to lots and lots and lots. So we have 10 main reasons that we, you know, 10 biggest decision making errors. But if I say all 10, you probably only listened to the first three. So the things that were the ones that I think are the kind of the

Greg Voisen
most give you what the other seven, yeah.

Dave Edwards
For those of you who weren't distracted by the idea of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you're hungry. Yeah.

Helen Edwards
This, so the very first one is overusing intuition. Now, I'm going to declare my bias as I'm a I'm a big intuitive decision maker doesn't mean I can't use data doesn't mean I don't want to use data. But it means that I want my data to be intuitive to me. So it takes me time to really sit down and sort of understand what the data says. And that's and to me, I would never make a decision off the basis of quick look at the data, I think there's a terrible way to make a decision, I need to actually understand the meaning and the data. But overusing intuition is a very bad decision making error. And the reason we do it is because that's kind of how we evolved. It's very energy efficient, and humans in all of life evolves to be incredibly energy efficient, and humans are unbelievably energy efficient, you know, 20 Watts to run our brains, it's just sort of nothing. And so overusing intuition is kind of almost a natural way of making decisions. It's very fast. It's very efficient. And it's usually good enough as I think Danny Kahneman is quote. But it does depend on fast, accurate feedback and being in the right context, not getting out over your skis, you've got to be in an applicable environment. That's increasingly less possible and more dangerous in a data driven world. Because we don't have an intuition for what's in these fast data sets. It's especially when the data is collected beyond our, our, our conscious awareness, so eye tracking and mouse clicks and things like that there are proxies for behavior and proxies for emotion. So overusing intuition in the algorithmic ages is problematic, that overconfidence is an enormous problem. It's it has been called the mother of all biases, and persists specifically over precision, which is an excessive sense that we know the answer that we're right. And that we know the truth. And when we're over, when we're when we overuse intuition, we can overcome over precisions made even worse, because we get this fluency in our decision making, you know, that feeling of, of just having this fluency, and I'm right, I need to do this, you do that. And you get the sense of certainty. And the sense of just making good judgments. And that itself feels good. There's an emotional signal that is called judgment completion. And it makes us feel good, and which makes it feel right. But just because it feels good, doesn't mean it's right, that causes us to jump to conclusions. And we do that all the time. Kahneman says humans are machines for jumping to conclusions. And so we become very conscious of a better decision making can become just even in an awareness of when you're jumping to a conclusion. And I think that the other big sort of category is, is that we don't recognize inherent emotion, and we don't, and we try, and we try and either overrule our emotions and an unsatisfactory way that we pretend they're not there. Or we pretend that things are going to be different in the future. There's a lot of deep scholarship around how difficult it is to forecast our emotions into the future. But they do suffer from predictable biases. So we, we can know, we can anticipate things better if we have some, what we might call cognitive crashes from simulations about the future, and AI has got a lot to give us in that artificial intelligence can really help us do that. But this idea that decisions, ask that thinking is separate from feeling is something that the economists gave us, because they're shaped the baseline measure of human decision making. And that, that modern neuroscience is really calling that into question. And we see it all the time, we see that people make decisions emotionally, all the time. I think Antonio Damasio, has said many times, feelings come first. They that is that being able to understand and engage your emotions, and your intuition can guide you to the right place in the problem space, so that logical reasoning can then take over. So that's sort of how we think about that broad category of decision making, how do you become more aware of overusing your intuition? And your confidence? And how do you calibrate that correctly for the situation you're in? And how do you use your emotions in the in the right kind of way? How do you get to that sweet spot, and your emotional and how you actually feel? And how do you engage that slower, more logical reasoning when you need to, particularly when faced with ambiguous data, when people don't, when you don't know what the data says, you're going to revert to intuition straightaway. And we see that all the time, we give people problems that are designed to be ambiguous. And the very first thing they do is, say what they've got feelings every single time. And so the nudges are really designed to sort of have multiple ways to attack this problem of, of how do you kind of, I don't know, deal with the Rubik's Cube, if you like, of decision making?

Greg Voisen
Yeah, it's interesting how you put that in. And again, for my listeners, there's 10 of them. So get the book so that you can get the other seven. The other thing you know, there used to be this saying and business, I'm not going to say personal because look, when you're dating somebody, whether you're a man or a woman, and you're trying to make a decision, are you gonna marry that person? That's very emotional. Right? It's predicated on how you're feeling and how you're how you're acting. But there used to be a statement and I'm sure the two of you have heard this. The only raw decision is no decision. Right? And so in other words, if you just keep hanging out. I've questioned that myself as to whether or not that statement is even valid today. But you will still hear that in business. Because sometimes, that to me, it seems like no decision was what you chose to do. Right? It was whatever gut feeling you had. So you said, hey, I'm not going to make that decision right now, I'm not going down that path. And I think that's the part I talk about kind of with freezing. Because we're in a programming world. You know, you've guys have to like build software that says, if it does this, then this if it does this, then this this, because you're constantly having it make decisions until it finally, it finally gives you what you want. But Dave, in your chapter on make good decisions, you state that decision making takes practice. And that's what you guys just said earlier, because many of the techniques that work best, especially the data require overriding natural and often pleasurable cognitive processes. But Helen was speaking about, you have 50 decision nudges that you reference, what are some of them? And how will they help us in making better decisions? There's a lot. Yes,

Dave Edwards
there are, there are there are 50. So I clearly won't be able to list them all. And have you all remember that

Helen Edwards
they are organized into five categories

Dave Edwards
organized into five categories, where we talk about decision, creativity and flexibility, reasoning, decision tactics, and decision self-awareness. And there's 10 nudges and each of those, but I liked certainly your setup question around thinking about no decision. The only bad decision is no decision, right? That that sort of idea. And part of that's based on this concept that you feel better when you've made the decision. You feel better when you you're confident that you've done something, it feels good to use your intuition. Because you feel like you're right. And we have this hero worship in our society of the people who have succeeded are deciders and they make good decisions. And they're, you know, that sort of top down kind of thing. And, and especially in the world, which now is sort of dominated by this founder led tech companies, those people get lionized as the people who are constantly making decisions. And so we got to make a decision don't say Don't, don't not make a decision. Some of that is what we get out when your question around, how do we override those natural, you know, and often pleasurable cognitive processes, right? So we, one of the core nudges, I think would be to delay intuition. This is inspired by Danny Kahneman. Now just take a moment to say that all of our nudges are inspired by people who are great thinkers, we call them the great minds. And so each of these has a routing in an academic field or practitioner who were really inspired by. And so that when we refer reference those, that's where they come in. And when you read through each of the nudges at the bottom, it says who they're inspired by, and we have great references to go dig deeper into any of these topics. But Danny Kahneman talks about intuition and the power and how good it feels to form that intuition. And the most important thing, and in some ways, the most challenging thing is to delay your intuition. One of the techniques we talk about we use in our workshops is to work people through to understand what your intuition is, and then to research things that are the anti-intuition to work against your intuition, and then to research reasons that supports your intuition. And then then go back and real and think about what decision you want to make. So are you able to actually delay settling in and bonding with that intuitive response? To try and push against yourself a little bit, what it does is it helps you not jump to the conclusion, right? And have that pleasurable experience. But it also helps you inform your intuition. If you can actually practice updating your intuition. Another nudge we talked about as to using, we talked about updating your intuition and keeping an intuition journal where you're learning where your intuition is really strong and where you might want to improve. But delaying helps you work through that. Another key knowledge that I bring up is calibrating confidence. We talked about what

Greg Voisen
what would you say about, you know, when I did research for my book on intuition and talked to programmers all over and professors and people that taught programming, I found a lot of them denied the outside themselves, let's just say that the spiritual element of intuition is like, well, I've had all these experiences, and I took all these spirits and put the dots together. Well, there's always that final step where you didn't have all the dots. And an aha moment occurred just like we said earlier, for you to be able to kind of pull all those pieces together, right and I found it interesting. How many people would they didn't want to go down that path. They didn't want to talk about the fact that there might be something beyond them that sparked them. You know, I do a show and it includes spirituality. So signs and symbols is another one that we've talked to many people about, they get signs and symbols, and they act on it, right? They really do. They're like, hey, I got a, I saw a bird fly across. And that to me meant something and I was gonna go that that's it to me, I'm gonna go take this action, the sign or symbol? Where do you guys land in on that space? It sounds I know, a little weird. But it's really not. But I'd love to hear where you guys are on that. Oh, we talk about

Helen Edwards
lots of things that you'd think are really weird. It's just kind of weird, right? We talk about lots of stuff like that. Now, there's a couple of different ways to sort of approach the answering that question. First of all, I think the big overarching part of this is that understanding how our causal reasoning does defined the lot of the way that we process information from the world. And when we look for reasons, we are, we are causal reasons, which means that we tend to see causes for any effect, and we're motivated to see causes for any effect. So whether it's whether it's someone has a feeling about something, or has a mental model that's come from their spirituality, no matter what it is, or whether they're thinking in an a pattern recognition kind of way, one of the top nudges that we advocate is alternative causes. And whatever you're thinking about whatever you think the reason might be, because we, when we reason forward into the future, from causes to effects, we were prone to a particular error, which is to not see alternative causes. So we want to have, we want to sit at the effect, look back at the causes, and think about multiple alternative causes. And so I think that that's the a powerful tool that's very inclusive, because what it does is it we all have so many different associations in our brains, right? We're completely unique individuals. So whenever we if we can agree on an effect, and we can discuss what that effect is. And then we can, we can respect that all of us have different causal associations, and different patterns in our own minds, different life experiences, about what that possible, what those possible causes can be, we end up with a much richer, inclusive discussion. So I think that works across everything that works. That is the core of diversity, when we talk about diversity is having different life experiences, being able to have those causal discussions, whether it's because you, you, you grew up in a different country, you're you have a different spirituality than the person sitting next to you, whether you Whatever the reason, that is a very potent way of sort of having much more sort of deep respect for the associations that people bring. And an aha moment, that moment of creativity. That is, that is a neurologically distinct signal in our brains. And that's that, and we have that moment of the obvious, the non-obvious becomes obvious. And we need that diversity. And we need that variability in our own thinking and in the thinking of the team. So we work quite hard to bring inclusivity into decision making, based on, on how we think causally,

Dave Edwards
I think it's important. Remember, we have these big, beautiful, powerful brains, but one of the reasons that they're so powerful is we're able to collaborate with others. So we use the knowledge of others that are near us and that work with us. Plus, we also put our knowledge out in the world. And that's a sort of a can be a counterintuitive idea, you think would make a good decision to put myself in my office and sit in front of my desk and not have any distractions and everything else. So we actually go quite different think quite differently about that than then you might, you know, think from that concept. So we talk about being less brain bound. How do you think about getting out of your brain and tapping knowledge that's out in the world? How do you get outside how do you move, you know, tapping into work from Barbra Tversky and a Murphy Paul, about the fact that so much of our knowledge is out in the world. And that makes sense when you think about it, there's only so much knowledge we can have in our in our body in our brains. And so much of our knowledge comes through our body, we think metacognitively event, and we can think with interoception, that helps us understand, you know, the inside workings of our bodies actually tells us a lot about how we feel today, and how we might feel after a decision. And we can evaluate it that way. We don't know about some of your stuff. And we talk it's definitely a bit of a wacky. So we also talk a lot about flow is one of the notice, how do you get into that state of flow? And I think for some who is highly spiritual, allowing yourself to be in that state to actually have that flow state that comes through combat, being bonded with your spirituality will put you in a good space for making decisions? And that's an individual experience, how much does that matter to you or to you or to me, that's all our own individual spaces, and that's fine. But being in that good emotional spot, whatever that means to you, is going to improve your decision making

Helen Edwards
Well, that and that's the real, that's the how to get to an aha moment. Yeah. Being able to be in that that cognitive, emotional space, where it's essentially almost a deep relaxation. And that's where you can reconceptualize something that you might have been battling with for

Greg Voisen
almost certainly, if you, if you look at it, whether you meditate, or you do yoga, or you go for a walk in the woods, or whatever techniques you're using, to get yourself out, because you're trying to solve a problem. You know, that's the best space. I mean, I mean, Steven Kotler has been on here, he's been on here six times has been on our 10 times, and, you know, the flow genome project is about hacking flow. Now, I don't really get that we're all going to be able to hack flow, okay, it's like, okay, well, I'm going to be able to have flow, I'm going to be able to do these things, there are certain things are going to help you definitely and get in the right space. And, you know, when you when you look at extreme athletes and the things that they do, to get into that flow state to be able to sustain, whether it's riding a wave, Hamilton or somebody else, you know, who's doing something. It's interesting, when they study the mind, the chemicals that are being released the endorphins that are being released, the things that are happening, that's what we're trying to get to, and I think, whatever techniques we're using, yes, you can hack it a bit. But in the end, it's, it's still, I don't even know how to say this mean, it's got to come naturally. Okay. So, Helen, you mentioned that you have borrowed techniques from the design thinking, called Five why's, and I'm sure my listeners understand what why is ours? If we keep asking ourselves, why, why, why, why, why away, we're going to finally get down to it in this decision making process. Why is why so important?

Helen Edwards
Why is important, because the power of explanations, essentially. And so I think about it as an engineer, originally, so and this came out of, you know, the five why's originally had its heritage and root cause analysis. And it's very easy to like jumping to conclusions, it's very easy to take the first answer and not really press. But what happens with explanations, that explanations are generative. And you actually create something in your own mind when you when you offer an explanation. It's not we're not like machines, where we just go in and retrieve something from memory. We sample from this probability distribution, if you like, and our minds, and we don't really, I mean, I don't know where the mean, the five was sort of, I think people get tired after six to five, and probably unrecorded cause analysis, there's a law of diminishing returns. And that's sort of a nice place to stop. But we can't really get, we don't have access to every single intuitive layer of our explanations. It's just the beliefs are formed very deeply. But by asking why a number of times, what ends up happening is that you have to generate an explanation every time and when you generate an explanation. It changes the way that you process the information. And the real guru on this is a prop from Princeton named Tanya Lombroso. And she's a genius at understanding the way that that explanations cause us to do more than just reason they cause us to really have to construct something in our minds. So, and this was something that I really embraced deeply when I was doing the research for this book is truly understanding how powerful it is to have somebody else offer an explanation as well. And this is an absolute slam dunk for anyone raising teenage girls. It's just like the ultimate thing to do with teenage girls, is to gently coax explanations out of them, because they're the ultimate people who think they've got the world utterly dialed. And if you even just one layer of the explanation, and you see the complete realization in their own mind, that they've got no idea why they think what they think they've, that it's come to them from someone else who has come to them from social media or what have you. And when you press them for an explanation, it's the it's so revealing to just see them go. No. So as a mom of three teenage girls, it's an absolute slam dunk. But it works. It comes to we sort of come at this, also from Steve Sloman who wrote a book called The Knowledge illusion, which was really almost sort of where we started this journey as picking up his book, which is where we get our knowledge from our community. And there's a psychological effect called the illusion of explanatory depth. And we feel we know more than we do. Because we have access through friends, family, the internet, whatever it is, to information and knowledge. And when we're forced to explain something, we realize how we don't know as much as we thought, and it busts the solution. We use this all the time in our workshops, it's a very, very powerful way of, it's very humbling to realize that what you've, that you your sense of knowledge isn't actually backed up by knowledge. It's backed up by access to knowledge. Right, right. And, yeah, and it's, it's a very profound insight.

Greg Voisen
That's the reason for going out in the world. Because that's where you're going to obtain that. And I love what it said, I used to do a workshop with my son who's in the software industry business. I came up with the title, never mind, never mind the noise thriving in a world of ever increasing complexity. And I think that complexity is a key issue here. And the noise is a key issue. Because when you can find the Signal and the Noise, right? It's like the beacon that's coming through. That's where you're getting kind of your aha moments. And Dave, you mentioned that making creative decisions means understanding the problem applying patterns, and elsewhere in meaningful ways and allowing time and space for imagination. You just missed that. And somebody asked me the other day, I don't remember how it came up. But Imagineering and Disney, I actually met Walt Disney when I was six years old, I got to actually shake his hand and say hi to him. And the lady was so like, oh my god, you got to meet Well, Disney. Well, imagination is a key. What are the nudges that help us unleash the most creative decision making? Because there's so many people in this world that we've seen, are just hyper creative, right? And you always wonder why, what space are they in? That they have this magic gift to be so super creative, right? versus, you know, a lot of people where it doesn't come that easily. We love

Dave Edwards
the creative nudges. And there's, that's one of the core sections of the book is on decision creativity. There's a few that I'd highlight here. A lot of it has to do with being in the right, the right mental and emotional space. In order to allow the creativity to happen. We've talked a lot about aha moments, and being more curious, but I'd highlight a couple one is to wallow in the problem. And this comes from our good friend, Michael Bungay Stanier. And he brings a design mindset to the concept, which is to stay in the problem as long as possible. It feels so good to get to the solution, that and you feel like you're the hero in the room, and you're the one who comes up with the idea. But the problem with that is you're automatically cutting off any ability to be truly creative. Drew creatives stay in the problem as long as possible. So you spend 10 times as much time in the problem understanding it than you do and actually generating and creating the solution and In our world is human centered designers, which is another part portion of our business. We spend a lot of time understanding the problem, so much so that our clients go, wow, we're really spending a lot of time in this, aren't we, but that's where the creative ideas come from, is when you really sit there, another good natured highlight, one of my favorites is sketch. And this was inspired by Barbara Tversky. What a wonderful book called Mind in motion about how we, how we think through movement, and how spatial reasoning is the foundation of abstract thought, which kind of gets you to that sort of concept of creativity, right. And she did a lot of work in her career roundabout with designers and creativity and found that sketching was a really wonderful technique for advancing creativity. You don't have to be good with a pen, I'm actually a terrible sketcher. I mean, no one be able to understand really tell what I'm actually drawing, but sketching something out, sketching out what you think the problem is, sketching out what you think, someone's emotional state is think is sketching out who you think you're solving this for, whatever you're doing, you're generating something. And the action of actually using a pen on paper or pencil on something or marker on a whiteboard, gives you a new way of thinking and seeing what you're thinking. For me, that's quite powerful. I'm one of these sort of classic extroverts where I don't know what I'm thinking until I say it, which is a must be a real, wonderful, charming challenge for my wife and business partner. Because I'll sit there and yammer on that. I don't know, I'm not sure I really like how that sounds. Let me change that. I'm gonna change that idea. But sketching does the same thing. I can draw it out and go. I'm not sure I really like that. I'm gonna go back and think about that one. Again, if I really understood this problem to really come up with some sort of creative idea,

Greg Voisen
or you, Tori thinker.

Dave Edwards
I definitely think out loud, for sure. So you're an auditory thinker. Yep. Yeah, very much so very much. And, and I think, and I think quite generatively, and experimentally out loud. So understanding what that is, is important and allowing us to say that the time and space for imagination, right, not rushing it, I think it's also important to share uncertain ideas, and allowing them to be out in the world in a way that they they're not complete. You know, you mentioned Steve Jobs. And one of the, you know, one of the perhaps less famous parts of his creative process was one walking. So it's constantly out wandering around infinite loop campus back in the day. And also the way he introduced new ideas, he would walk in and say, this might be a dopey idea. But right and offering something up, that was not complete, that was still messy, there was still possibility that someone else could contribute ideas to it. And there's one of the great ways I think, Johnny, I’ve talks a lot about how that was the way they start their most creative, constant conversations is he opened up the idea to allow someone else to bring new ideas to it and contribute to it.

Greg Voisen
Well, I, like Michael said to wallow, you know, when he when you guys are talking about that, and I think that's a great nudge, probably one of the better ones, because, yes, it's not to the fastest that come to the solution. Because really haven't thought it out. And I actually looked for this quote, while we were talking about it online. And Einstein said, A man should look for what is not for what he thinks should be. Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. I believe in intuition and inspirations. I Sometimes feel that I am right. Sometimes, yes, right. That's right. Sometimes right. Now, and in your book, you mentioned that life throws us curveballs boy does it. But then we crave certainty. And we do, you know, we're in uncertain times people are looking for certainty. If there was like a big solution today, it would be how would you help provide the world with some certainty? And we try to create certainty in our decisions. We're talking about decision making, thinking, Okay, I'm making the right decision by doing this. How do I do that? What must our decision making? Why must the decision making be flexible? And what are some of the nudges that you'd recommend applying when uncertainty is present? Which right now seems like almost all the time?

Helen Edwards
Yeah, yeah, you're right. We don't, we do crave certainty. I mean, our brain interprets uncertainty as dangerous. So we, we tend to, we don't like uncertainty. And, but we have to, there's a couple of things we need to do. One is to actually somewhat reframe our relationship with uncertainty. It's, you think about what it's like to you know, watch a basketball game, and the sides are completely unequal and you know, who's going to win so It's not really interesting. I mean, the most exciting games are when it's back and forth. And it's really close. And that's uncertainty. As fun. It's an uncertainty as opportunity. And that's really what uncertainty represents. And I think that there's a little bit of an intersection going on here, culturally, with the analytics movement with the promise of the analytics movement, and the promise of the analytics movement and AI in general, is that there's the single optimizable answer, and that a human can't possibly find that we need a machine to find it. And I think that that's exacerbated this sort of focus on reducing uncertainty to zero, just the predictive world we live in, where we need predictions for everything, because we've got predictions for everything. And we need to actually really remember, especially leaders really need to remember that uncertainty is opportunity. And that the job of a leader is to actually help the people get better at managing uncertainty, because it is difficult, it's uncomfortable. And there's, you know, paradoxical decisions, there's dilemmas. That's just the way life is. And some of it is that we've got more of them present more of them presented to us every day. And a lot of the nudges that I like about flexible decisions. And the reason we need flexible decisions is because we can't quantify the uncertainty, there is no machine that can tell us the optimal answer the answers to life, the universe, and everything is 42. Well, it's not. We, we we've need to be flexible, because we could be wrong, you know, we were, we work a lot and complex problem solving and translating some of the new science of from, from complexity science across into business. And one of the great insights is, you've got to reframe how you deal with uncertainty. And one of the ways that I personally do it, that's been a really big help to me. when life throws curveballs as one that comes from Adam Grant, and the nudges, be less wrong. And instead of trying to like, get your things you know, to be just a little bit better, just a little bit better focus on the things you don't know. And you can get a greater lift on just a little bit more understanding of the things you don't know. And that's not an intuitive thing for people to do. Because guess what it's uncomfortable, doesn't feel good to go and wallow in the things you don't know you want to wallow in the things you do know, that's why we have this is where we all read exactly the same articles over and over and over again, you know, just different variations of our favorite subjects and go down the YouTube rabbit holes and what have you, is because we tend to like to read things that are familiar. But once we start to research things that are less familiar, that are less comfortable, and that we're able to handle the uncertainty around that we start to see more opportunity, we start to have that close baseball game basketball game. But that that's that well, it's so sort of it used to

Greg Voisen
it's so easy to fall into reading things Helen and Dave, that will, we're familiar with, or we'd like, I remember when I had Steven on the show not so long ago, I said, you know, look, if you're a programmer, you might want to read Architectural Digest, you might want to read all of these things that are so foreign to you in different spaces that you're not in, because that's actually going to stimulate your ability to come back with better decisions, better creative decisions, better ways to approach something. And he was telling me all the various publications he reads that are unrelated to anything that he's doing. Right. And I always remember that because I thought kind of odd, you know, the first thing we're going to default to is another book about something we know in a space that we know because we feel comfortable and familiar with it. And it's going to reaffirm what we already thought because somebody is going to say something that we'd already heard and we go great, okay, I can hang my hat on that one again. Because here's somebody else who wrote a book that said that that's good. So that's got to be right. And I find it fascinating that our default mechanism is, as you say, toward those biases, those are certainly huge biases, and that's where we're going to go. And as humans, you know, I'm not a social biologist, but we have a tendency as you said, to move towards the things you said we're only using 20 Watts to power this brain. So we're moving toward things that are comfortable and don't take a lot of stress. And we kind of go to homeostasis right. It's like okay, great. That's we can hang out here right. But that it's not how you're going to grow, you're certainly not going to grow by doing that. And you know, you guys in the book you give, it's a great guide for individuals and teams wanting to make better decisions, right? Let's face it, I'm going to tell my listeners, they didn't give you all the nudges. So go by the book, so you can get the nudges, because they are great. And they're citations from the people they came from. It's awesome that that is worth the book just in itself. Even if you only apply one of those nudges, what three pieces of advice would you like to leave our listeners with, associated with making better decisions if he took this whole book, and wrapped a ribbon around it and said, Okay, guys, you're gonna leave this podcast today. And here's three things just like I said before, not 10, not 23. And you guys can walk away with? It's like the peanut butter jars. Do we want creamy? Or Jeff? Or? Do we want to get almond butter? Okay, you get your choice.

Helen Edwards
For me, one of the top ones is decision self-awareness is to have this holistic sense in your own self about what decision making means to you, and how and why you want to get better and to embrace who you are personally, if you're an intuitive decision maker, and the world tells you that intuition is out of fashion, well, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to, to just sort of reject that? Or are you going to find ways to make data and analytics work for you. And I love this idea of I love the word metacognition, which means thinking about thinking, it's a human skill, deep human skill. And we have a whole section devoted to improving your metacognition around decision making. And in the last few years, I think that's the one thing that I've personally embraced the most is allowing myself to accept the kind of decision making a decision maker that I am, but to find ways to be a better decision maker on things that just don't come naturally to me. And so being more in the power of explanations, that that's the one that's really stuck with me, and getting, asking myself for an explanation, writing it down myself, and discovering that I have deeper reasons for things then than I thought at the outset, I just think it's really, and being it's so much better, so much better equipped to it's like, like what they say, on the airplane, you know, put on your own face might put on your own oxygen mask first. So you get better yourself, and then you can help other people make better decisions. Yeah,

Dave Edwards
I'm going to add one. Yeah. All right. So I've got one, which is to accept that decision making is a practice, it's not a process. So getting better at decision making is not frequently we'll have people come to our workshops and say, they want a three step process, four step process, they can't even be a nine step process, they just think it's a stepping process, if I just follow this process, I'll make a better decision. Decision making, it's way too much way too complex for that. So you have to allow for the fact that it's actually about practice. So embracing this, like you would meditation or be improving your ability to play the piano or being able to shoot a basketball better, it's not a step by step. It's actually practice and learning and thinking. And so once you take that, that's why we wrote a book that has 50 nudges, there may be one of them that matters you today, and we recommend that people just take one to focus on right now. Maybe pick one a week, you know, you've got one that'll go through an entire year. And after a year, you'll be you'll be much better at it. But once you brace that this is about repetition and practice, and you allow for that to happen that'll improve your decisions. And I'll give one I'll give the third is that right? And the third one, I think is to allow yourself to be vulnerable and ask for help from others. So much of one of the nudges we talk about is about having knowledge in the community, by getting the outside view about wallowing in the problem with others. There's a lot of things that it's actually not just about yourself. And we have evolved as a species, we've specialized and one of the things that allowed us to specialize and not have the same brain all the time, is that we work together as a community, we've developed rituals that allow us to come together, right we have stories that bond us together as people. And so allowing that to be part of your decision making process, right? You got wonderful people around you that have different perspectives that have diversity of decision making skills and abilities. And looking at that as a team and focusing on how we as a team do, help make better decisions as a group and also help each other make better decisions as individuals. I think it's quite powerful. And I say that because we Do this all the time, you know, we actually have done this, we've run this, we've worked together for more than a decade building businesses and writing a book together, which, as you said, at the beginning, many people will find to be an unusual circumstance. But one of the things that happens is that we actually embrace the fact that we think about things quite differently, or with very different kinds of decision makers. And we allow ourselves to be vulnerable to get help from each other about how to improve our own decision making. That's a very powerful combination, if you can make it work.

Greg Voisen
Well, I think you come from the perspectives, I'm gonna say perspectives, you know, obviously, there's sexual biases, there's the marriage kind of bias, there's the business biases, but you really have wrapped it up in an excellent book about people to make better decisions. They didn't say always the correct decision, they said better. And I think that's what's important is, you know, you said, you get these, I'm gonna say adrenaline kind of rushes or endorphin rushes, as a result of us finishing the loop about a decision. In other words, hey, I made a decision. And it turned out good. And that keeps me wanting to make more decisions. And I want them to emphasize that the wall will one that's Michael's is really important, because I think today in the Western world, we've been put into a position where it's like, how quickly can you make that decision? Now hurry up, make a decision, you know, your boss, or the CEO, or whatever is saying, I want a decision. I need it by tomorrow, right? And then if you go back to him, and you tell him, Well, I don't have all the data points, I don't have what I need. I don't feel really comfortable doing this. He says no, but I needed a decision. Right. So you know, sometimes people are forced to make a decision, against all odds against the things that they're doing. Right. And I think that's got to be one of the toughest ones, is that not having a control or feeling like you're out of control with relation to that, but I will tell everybody listening, in that position, give this book to the CEO, and tell him, Hey, I'm just really trying to help the company make better decisions. So I think

Helen Edwards
you speak a deep truth. Yeah. You know, we're, we're rewarded for having the solution, rather than the problem. And, Michael, I think we said in the book, Michael, had tapped into some research. So I think it's like 80% of the work in organizations is solving the wrong problem. So making the wrong decisions. Yeah. And I think a lot of efficiency can be gained by just slowing down and wallowing a bit longer.

Greg Voisen
And I think you, you hit it, it's really slowing down. And it's important, I think, I want to say this, because so much of this personal growth space is about letting go. You know, we get these thoughts. And you don't have to believe everything you think. Right? But because you think it, you're like you live in the world of MSU, making stuff up. So that that thought then becomes the AI then becomes the belief. And the belief becomes the knowing and it's your truth. And now you're headed down that path all of a sudden, without actually doing some critical thinking about what you just said, Hey, let's think about our thinking metacognition did, how did I really make that decision? And I don't think too many people, other than the two of you probably are doing that. Right. I really don't. I think that it's such a natural process that we fall into, that we really don't give ourselves time to critically stop. Take a look. And question how we've made the decision, you know, so I want to thank both of you for being on the show. I want to thank you for bringing to light, something that I think everybody needs to know more about, and that they should take time to do and I think it's a blessing. So thank you both for being on inside personal growth, spending some time with my listeners, talking about making better decisions. We'll certainly put a link for those of you are interested. Go to get sonder and.com. We'll put a link to that as well. Thank you both. Namaste.

Dave Edwards
Thank you very much.

Helen Edwards
Thank you.