More Choice is Not as Desirable as we Hoped w/ Sheena Iyengar

The too much choice effect. People want more choice, but it's not always a good experience for them. It actually can paralyze them.

Hi, my name's Adam Durrell and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. And this is your weekly dose of the peanut butter of enterprise account sales combined with the jelly of customer experience. Together, you know, it makes a delicious snack. It's the PB&J sandwich that we call Account Experience. By the way, from where I'm from, we call jelly J, but you get the idea. And in every episode, I like to catch up with inspiring industry leaders or thinkers to help you develop your Account Experience program. I'm also a father of four, a founder, and I'm fanatically interested in human relationships and I love anything that furthers the quality of business relationships. Today I'm talking with a truly fascinating person I originally saw in a TED talk talking about the paradox of choice, which is how my guest today first discovered the famous jelly experiment. And we'll get to that later. More recently forming part of the central thesis of one of my books of the year, which is the Jolt Effect, I'd like to welcome Sheena Iyengal, the St Lee professor of Business in the Management department at Columbia Business School and the best selling author of the Art of choosing from about 2010, I think. And that's where the paradox of choice comes from. She's a leading expert on the study of innovation, choice, leadership and creativity and regularly consults with a range of organizations on really interesting methods for innovation. And her new book, Think Bigger, subtitled How to Innovate, really goes into the idea behind the problem solving method. Amazingly, it's released today as we record this April 11th. I'd love to welcome Sheena Iyengar. Hello, welcome to the podcast. How you doing, Sheena?

Hi. Thanks for having me here today.

Congratulations on your book launch officially today.

Yes, it's happened.

So before we get to think bigger, I'm going to get you to come back a little bit and tell us how you got here. You, you know, you're well known thought leader on Paradox of Choice. How did you get into this whole world and tell us a little about how your journey began.

Wow. So how far back do you want me to go?

Hey, start from where you need to. Where did you start?

I mean, if you want, I can start from when I was a kid.

I've got a bit of color.

Well, I started to, I guess I officially started to study choice in 1992 when I started my PhD at Stanford. University, I think that dates me. You might ask why I was interested in choice. I am somebody who grew up going blind and I'm also Indian American. And so because I had to navigate two contrasting cultures that were very different from each other in terms of their ways of thinking about choice. Also as a blind person, I was constantly wondering, what choices do I have? What choices can I create? What choices do I have but people don't realize that I have. I suppose I was always fascinated and in one way or another, always thinking about choice. So when I was in undergrad at the Wharton School of Business, I studied marketing and statistics and then I also got into psychology and I inadvertently or subconsciously began to look at choices people make in terms of ads and what draws people in and what doesn't draw them in. And then when I got to my PhD program, as I went a very deliberative search and asked myself, what are you really interested in studying? And I was really interested in studying what motivates people. And then I discovered that there were four main motivations. And as I studied those four, I thought to myself, you know what? The one I am most interested in making a mark in is the study of choice and self determination. And that was the choice I made when I was 22 years old. And I would say the best choice I ever made was the choice to study choice.

Adam, everything you could have chosen looking at choice was the one subject.

And I have never regretted it. It was, it's the perfect choice.

So after you went down that road thinking about choice, how did you frame your research?

Well, in the west we've been thinking about choice for centuries, right? You've had all these revolutions that were about the fight for freedom, the fight for democr life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And so there's a lot of literature, whether it was in political science, philosophy, economics, the rational chooser, the invisible hand, everything pointed to the power of choice. And I, being somebody who came from the two contrasting cultures of the sort of Asian versus or Eastern versus Western narrative, began to ask the question, does everybody think of choice in the same way? And I also started to ask the question, you know, we pay a lot of lip service to choice, but what are, what choices do we really have and what are the limitations of choice? And so as part of my PhD thesis, I would say my first work was really showcasing the idea that it's not that we're all born knowing how to choose, we're not. It's actually something we're taught and it's a social construct. And you know what? This notion that we have in the west, that everybody is going to understand and interpret choice in the same way is not true. We're taught, what's a choice, what's not a choice, what's a good choice, what's a bad choice, how many choices do you need, who should make the choice? All of these things are things that are taught to us, starting from when we're babies and we're start learning them subconsciously and then consciously. So that was really the first set of work I did. And then from there I moved on to more broadly trying to understand. So there's the thing called choice that's very powerful. You know, clearly it's something that drives people, that can be motivating, but at the same time, what are its limits? And that got me to the cognitive limitations of choice, which led me to the study you were referring to earlier, which was, it's known as the jam study. I actually at the time stumbled upon it. It wasn't like I had this clairvoyance about it. I just used to go to a grocery store, an upscale grocery store that at that time was really special. And it offered people lots and lots of choices, you know, like 250 different types of mustards and vinegars and mayonnaises and over 100 different types of extra virgin olive oil. And I would go there and I would. I loved looking around and learning about stuff and even tasting some things, but I rarely bought stuff. I would go to the next door, more mainstream grocery store to do my shopping. And so one day I started to ask the question of, well, what happens when we're given all this choice? And I set up that tasting booth where we either put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam. And it was actually a very simple study. I didn't know what I was going to find. And what we found was that more people stopped when there were 24 on display, about 60%, than when there were six on display, about 40%. But when it came down to buying behavior, we now saw the opposite effect. Of the people who stopped when they were 24 on display, only 3% of them bought a jar of jam. Whereas of the people who stopped when there were six on display, 30% of them bought a jar of jam. And that was really the first documentation of the idea that while people are more attracted to a larger number of options, they're more able to make a choice when they have less to choose from than when they have more.

Yeah, I think that's fascinating. I've always been caught out with the concept of going, I think it's the Cheesecake Factory where you've got pages and pages of choice of all of the great dishes you can have. But in the end I almost always go for the dish of the day. You know what?

Well that's the easiest and you're actually a statistic. Most people, as the number of options go up, they go for the default or they just get a recommendation or what they're just used to.

But it so and, and it's also not new. I remember reading my father's marketing books from the 60s which are all about how to do pricing where you know, you need to have a, an upper price and a lower price and the one you want to go for is get people in the middle. And that's. We also see that on wine menus for example where people go for the second least expensive option on the menu.

Right.

That was quite a breakthrough study that you did. And it was, you know, I think it's, it's really well known and I've come across it many times which is, you know, why I'm a total fanboy and wanted to get the opportunity to speak to you. So what led your thinking after this? Armed with this knowledge, Sheena, what did you do?

So I would say that my first book, the Art of Choosing really describes to people the modern day dilemmas confronting everyday choosers no matter where they are in the world today. And so it talks a lot about how choice is a social construct. It talks about how every choice you make today is no longer about what you need, it's actually an identity. Whatever choice you make is an expression of who you are, which puts a lot of burden on choice. It talks about the idea of illusionary choice and how we don't even know what's fake or what's real. And this is long before fake news and alternative facts and all that. It talked about the too much choice problem and then it also talked about the fact that in modern day society we have choices that we don't really know how to make. So like life and death choices. And so really that was a book that articulated the challenges we have. I would say my new book Think Bigger takes it to the next level and says, well, we know that choice is a really powerful tool and we know that choice is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to whom we want to be tomorrow. But how do we get the most from this tool and to think bigger is designed. It's a prescriptive book. It's not a descriptive book. It's a toolkit that and a sort of a six step method that essentially walks you through how to do two things. How to become a better picker and finder. Right? Because in the world today, we have so many choices and half the time you can't tell them apart. You can't even figure out if what you're looking for is present or not. And second, how do you create a meaningful choice? Because despite the overwhelming number of choices for most complex problems, there are no known solutions.

So let me get this straight. In your first book, you really talked about all of the dilemmas that face us and about people's choices today, which I also believe doesn't make us any happier. You know, having so much choice. It was not happier human beings because we have so much choice.

And what you said, it makes our cognitive and emotional lives much more complex. We're overwhelmed.

And so now you're moving forward in the new book, Think Bigger to talk about ways that we can find better ways of making those choices if I'm right and then living with those choices. Did I get that right?

Well, if you think about choice, right, it functions in two important ways. The purpose of choice is, first, it's a picking and finding exercise, right? I want a really good ice cream to eat right now, and I'm gonna do a search of all the different flavors and find the perfect taste for my taste buds, right? That's picking and finding. And then the second function that choice plays is it's the tool we use as human beings to create new stuff. I mean, you know, admittedly we are. What really sets us apart from any other species is our ability to create. And so we're constantly creating new choices. And so those are the two functions that choice plays. Now, in the old days, it wasn't as hard to make a choice, right? The mere addition of any choice, the presence of a choice, was a big deal. But now that's not the big deal. Now the big deal is, oh my goodness, okay, should I even bother to make a choice in this scenario? How do I choose if I need to choose? And oh my goodness, I have a problem and there's nothing here that can help me. What do I do? So that's really what Think Bigger is trying to do.

This podcast is sponsored by Customer Gauge and they're the experienced leader in the the CPG market. Let me tell you why they're contacting more people in the independent trade and modern trade than any other customer experience company out there. And you'll know the brands that they work with. We're talking Coca Cola, AB, InBev, Heineken. Just E takeaway. They're literally pulsing millions of contacts around the world and more than 60 countries multiple times a year, delivering those insights to thousands and thousands of frontline employees in those companies. But you know, it's not just the CPG business CustomerGage is famous for. They're ranked number one for B2B customer experience by Gartner. However, if you're in the CPG business and you have not contacted Customer Gage to understand what is going on in your business, you're seriously missing out. Because we know there are other people out there just doing it once a year.

Year.

Well, Customer Gauge gives you customer insights 52 weeks a year right to the front line in real time. It's going to absolutely transform your business like nothing else. But don't take our word for it. Listen to the podcast and they'll tell you exactly why.

I'd like to come on to the to the second part, which is about the creativity aspect at the moment. But so can you give us a few ideas about how to get better at being a picker and a finder from some of the items in the book?

Well, first, I would say the biggest, most important thing that you can do, whether you're talking about your business or you're talking about your personal life, is it's really, really, really important in today's world to be choosy about choosing.

Choosy about choosing.

Yeah. Not every choice is worth making.

Okay.

Just because it exists doesn't mean I need to make a choice.

Can you give me an example of that?

Well, your Cheesecake Factory was a great example. I don't need to work through this whole menu. I'll just go with the special. Not worth it. I just came here to have a pleasant enough meal. I'll choose the default and I'll have a good time. It's a great example of being choosy. Presumably, if it's something much more important to you, you would want to really think through what you're looking for and how to find that set of characteristics of what you're looking for and then choose. But you don't want to do that for every single decision that you have to make in life.

Yeah. So being good enough, having a good enough choice is probably where we need.

To be for the things that don't matter to me. Yes. And I would say per day, I would limit Myself to three really important choices per day.

Interesting.

Let everything else go. Go on autopilot. Doesn't matter enough.

They don't teach that in schools, do they? It could be a good social skill to have to figure out ways of getting just good enough, because that would certainly help us when we have things to choose on Netflix or even that.

Would help on Netflix. It would solve a lot of social problems. If you think about it, a lot of our fights are because we want to optimize on stupid stuff.

Yeah, that's true. Maybe even on our choice of partners that having somebody who's just good enough might be the way to go. Right?

Well, I think on that one, each person has to ask themselves, how important is it for you to optimize? And if so, on what? Right. And for some people, they just want to have a companion. And good enough is actually better than all the anxiety associated with the potentially endless search to find the optimal. Yeah, for others, it may be that the only conditions under which you want to be with somebody is if you have the perfect person and both choices are legit. It's just that you have to know which bucket you're in and whether you're willing to make that sacrifice.

Brilliant. In the jolt effect that I referenced before, they also talk about that as a sort of choosing for business. And too many buyers are confronted by having too much choice, and they that means they don't buy. And so as a seller, you have to encourage your buyer to settle for perhaps the best and easiest option rather than the perfect option. So it's a really interesting way of doing that, I can see.

Well, I think for businesses today, they have two kinds of too much choice problems. Right. One is what I call they add to the additivity buckets. They add way too many bells and whistles because they're trying to oppress everybody. And so one of my go to examples of how this can really come to shoot you in the foot is, for example, what happened to Skype when the world shut down. That should have been the obvious go to platform, but it wasn't. And it wasn't because they stopped investing in just making the basics work. Well, they got distracted by trying to do specialty things, whereas Zoom, you didn't try to get into specialty stuff. They just took all the best practices of the basics and put that together and so became the go to easy to use for the world because you needed something that wasn't fancy, just something basic because you needed to make the world function. And so I think one thing that people One thing that businesses make the mistake of is that they add too many bells and whistles because they are worried that they'll be left behind.

Yeah.

And I think the second thing that happens is they forget who they are. So, for example, every time there's a new technology, whether it's crypto or NFT or blockchain or now is it ChatGPT or don't forget Meta, Twitter, et cetera, every time there's a new technology out there and everybody's talking about it, if you're not doing something with it, you're a loser. But we forget that technologies are great if it's solving a problem for you. If it's just there to look cool, well, why would anybody use it? And don't forget, there's a lot of new ideas that entered the marketplace that never go anywhere. Because while it's cool to talk about, cool to share with somebody at the cocktail party, hey, did you know? Blah, blah, blah, blah is happening, but if you don't have a need for it, it's not solving a problem for you, well, then we're not going to use it.

Well, I think that's a great way into the other aspect that you write about, which is about using what you've learned about choices to get into creativity. And this is really about, I think, where the title of Think Bigger comes from. So can you tell us a little bit about how you see using the tools that you've got to enable better creativity?

So I think it's, you know, in some sense people would say, what I'm about to tell you sounds complicated. And in some ways, what I'm about to say is actually very straightforward and simple. So what Think Bigger makes you do is first define for yourself what's that problem you're trying to solve. How do I get into X space? How do I grow my market share with this population in the next year or two? What's the problem I'm trying to solve? Normally, what we do is we state a problem and we just start generating as many ideas as we can think of. We might even ask our friends, what I make you do is a much more systematic approach. I say, look, this is the problem I have to solve. I need to grab what's the barriers, what's been the challenges? So now I prioritize the three to five things that have made it challenging for me to grow. Now, for each of those things, or each of those sub, I call them the sub problems, or you could call them the sub challenges. For each of those challenges I say, okay, so let's take for example, one sub challenge is how do I get access to markets that go beyond my immediate geographic location? Could be one challenge. And so now first I look at who did that. Well, in my own industry, that's usually knowledge that most people have. Then I go and I ask myself, well, when other industries, when companies in other industries had this problem, they had to go into a different geography, what did they do? How did they solve that problem? So you notice how I'm not asking how did they solve the big problem of how do I grow my particular company? How did companies in other industries in the past and in the present solve the problem of going into other geographic locations? And once you frame the question that way, you start to collect different strategies from all kinds of industries. And in fact, I make people really search widely. So I think the key to innovation is your ability to search.

Yeah.

And I think when people say think out of the box, sometimes people think that what that means is you go on a retreat, you climb a mountain. For me, when I tell you to think out of the box, I mean literally go and search in other boxes. That's where you're going to find your best strategies. You edit those and you import those in. That's how you think bigger.

So if I've got this right, you need to find other lands to go and search in, or other things, not just Googling on a narrow, narrow point. And it's the juxtaposition of the ideas from these other areas that really gives that capability for innovative thinking. Did I get that right?

Yeah. Although Google in today's world is actually really helpful. I mean you can get a lot of information through Googling. Yeah, you can learn a lot. Like the kinds of problem I just mentioned, like what is a company? So for example, let's say how do you go beyond your very specific geographic location? You would find, say the most successful company in Israel or small country. In order to be for them to make it big, they've got to be able to sell widely.

I live in the Netherlands and they've already cracked that code because they sell over the world. But I think it's really true. And in the same way, I think that YouTube is also really allowing people to do amazing things. Well, certainly like changing a tap around the house or figuring out how to make a small repair. I mean it's a wonderful examples you can find those things. I've heard you talk about something you call heroic stories, which I love because it blends this, like this concept of the hero's journey about a start place in a finished place. Can you talk a little bit about how that comes into play?

So normally when I tell you the story of a great innovator, you know, whether it's, you know, Henry Ford or Steve Jobs and Bill Gates or Picasso.

Yeah.

Or Einstein, you'll tell that story like a hero's journey. Brilliant person. No one believed them. Here are the mountains. They had the climb. They were steadfast, persistent. Despite all the things thrown their way. They climbed the mountain and voila, they made it. He loved those stories. It's what made Disney a lot of money, great for the box office. And I love those stories too. And we should consume those stories. But understand that the story of how we innovate is never that linear.

Right.

It's the way they actually created. Their idea in almost every case was just a creative combination and it was cobbling together a bunch of pieces that they got both from their experience as well as from searching outside that they combined together to create something that turned out to be big. And that's true. No matter. You can take any innovation and you discover that whether you're looking at art, whether you're looking at sort of political movements, whether you're looking at a product.

Yeah. Success is built on many failures, isn't it? Really getting and iterating to that one thing? But I love the concept that it's.

So I would slightly revise that. I would say successful is not built on failures. Exactly. Success is actually built on successes. It's just that in many times, in order to discover a success, you might have to have learned or experienced the number of failures. You know, like Aristotle said that, you know, there are many ways to fail, but only one way to succeed. So what you're doing as an innovator is searching for those few and far between examples of success, and you're using those to combine and create your solution.

I think that's a brilliant place to kind of stick the ending of our podcast today, Sheena. So really on the story arc between how we get from too much choice to really getting to success by working through all of the successes and the failures he had before. So, Sheena, your book Think Bigger is out today. It is, and for one, can't wait to get hold of my copy and to read more about it. I'm a huge fan of your work and I'm.

Thank you.

Really, I can't wait to get inspired by this. And if people need to find out more about your work, where should they go?

Oh, I am a regular poster on LinkedIn. So feel free to follow me on LinkedIn. I also have a webpage so you can learn all about me.

I'll put all the links in the show notes on this and also link to your book.

Sheena, thank you so much.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It's really. I'm so proud to share the launch day of your book and thanks for sharing all of your great ideas with us today. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Ra.