Ep 307 | Dislike of the Unknown Leads Us to Act Before We Should

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. I love talking about decision-making. I love sharing, uh, whatever I've learned, whatever I've read, what I've experienced with our No Days Off Nation, because I think we all can, can develop, can get better at our decision-making. And in doing so, I don't want to ever say guarantee our success, but certainly improve the likelihood of us succeeding, not just in business, but in relationships, in life, and in health, all the things that we'd love to talk about. And speaking about decision-making, I recently was learning about what's called doubt avoidance tendency. Doubt avoidance tendency. And doubt avoidance tendency is a psychological bias where we prefer certainty over uncertainty. We're, we're human. We like to know certainty or have certainty over uncertainty. And this desire to have a degree of certainty over uncertainty sometimes leads to quick decision-making without thorough analysis. This tendency that I'm describing is driven by the discomfort, it's driven by the anxiety that's associated with doubt, that's associated with uncertainty. Here's a couple key aspects of this tendency that I want you to understand, that I want you to think through. First, Quick decisions. Quick decisions. People with strong doubt avoidance tendency oftentimes make some very quick, impulsive decisions to, to escape the discomfort of uncertainty. This can lead to rather poor judgment. It can lead to mistakes. In addition to quick decisions, doubt avoidance tendency might lead us to simplify. It leads to simplification. In order to avoid doubt, sometimes will oversimplify complex issues and ignore details, ignore, you know, important nuance that could affect the outcome. Doubt avoidance tendency creates a degree of resistance to change. It could lead to us avoiding, or I should say resisting, new ideas, resisting changes, as these things will always introduce, or almost always introduce, some degree of uncertainty. So we'll stick with the familiar, you know, the familiar routines, the familiar beliefs, even if those routines and beliefs are suboptimal because they provide a degree of comfort. Confirmation bias shows up. Doubt avoidance tendency can contribute to this confirmation bias. Confirmation bias— what am I talking about? It's when we seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs and we ignore the information that contradicts those beliefs. Again, we're seeking certainty versus uncertainty. Lastly, doubt avoidance tendency impacts our ability to learn. It hinders our learning, it hinders our personal growth. Because there's fear of doubt, there's fear of the unknown, there's, there's even fear of failure, and it prevents us from exploring new perspectives or developing new skills. So understanding doubt avoidance tendency is really important for us if we want to improve our decision-making processes, if we want to be more open-minded, if we want to foster environments where uncertainty is actually seen as an opportunity for growth rather than a threat. Now, this doubt avoidance tendency, it doesn't just show up at the individual human level. There's many a company, real-life business scenarios where doubt avoidance tendency showed up. One big one that comes to mind for me, it's been a case study I've been referencing for a couple years now around Kodak. Kodak, the picture company, you may remember Kodak had resistance to digital photography. In the late 2000s, Kodak dominated the film photography market. Kodak invented the first digital camera, but Kodak executives were very hesitant to fully embrace digital technology due, due really to the uncertainty about its impact on their existing film business. See, the existing film business was certain, at least they perceived it to be certain. But doubt avoidance tendency led them to downplay the potential of digital photography. Ultimately, this led to Kodak again focusing on its print business. And I think we kind of know what happened with Kodak. Its existing film business eventually floundered. It was way late in trying to get after digital photography. Other companies grabbed market share, and as a result, Kodak ultimately failed. How about Blockbuster? We know that Blockbuster was disrupted ultimately by Netflix. There was some other companies like Redbox that, that prompted some disruption, but usually we look at Netflix as the disruptor. Well, most may not realize that Blockbuster actually had this game won— online streaming. Blockbuster was not just the leading video rental company, but Netflix had proposed a partnership in the early 2000s. Blockbuster just dismissed the idea. Blockbuster had also created Blockbuster On Demand at one time, but they were uncertain. They had doubt avoidance tendency. They were uncertain as to where online streaming was going to go, and so they stuck to their traditional rental model. Their reluctance to embrace this uncertainty and, and test this new business model more thoroughly allowed Netflix an opening. And Netflix grew and became dominant. And as we know, Blockbuster more or less disappeared. There's other, other examples. Nokia, who was in the smartphone game for a second, but they were hesitant. They got passed up. We know where smartphones landed. IBM, IBM, still a great company, but had a very late entry in the cloud computing. They were a major player in enterprise technology. They probably could have not just maintained their market share, but even grew, 'cause they were so much ahead of everybody else. But they were slow to enter cloud computing because of the uncertainties about its potential, about the impact on their traditional hardware and their software business. And this doubt avoidance allowed companies like Amazon with AWS and Microsoft and Google with Google Cloud to establish rather dominant positions in the cloud market way before IBM could effectively compete. Last one that, that I've been thinking around, around doubt avoidance, Yahoo rejected Google. If you remember the late '90s, Yahoo had an opportunity to purchase Google for literally like next to nothing. I mean, it You know, it was still costly, but not anywhere close to what it would look like today if they tried to buy that same amount and acquire Google. It would never happen. But Yahoo had the opportunity to acquire Google and chose not to because Yahoo's management was uncertain about the future potential of Google's search technology. And instead, they focused on their existing, you know, directory-based model that Yahoo, you know, really put Yahoo on the map and made it dominant. Until of course Google passed them up. GM rejected electronic vehicle— electric vehicles. I mean, there's, there's lots of different things to point to, but doubt avoidance, it shows up. I want you to think about maybe where it's showing up for you right now, or where it's shown up in the past. As humans evolved over time, fast decision-making was a survival advantage. Right, so there was reason for fast decision-making. But what I'm trying to say to you now is as the world has evolved and we're not being chased by saber-toothed tigers— is it saber-toothed tiger or saber-toothed lion? No, it's saber-toothed tiger, right? Shoot, I better look that one up. A little too late now, but we're gonna keep rolling with it. We don't have to get chased by these prehistoric animals anymore. Quick decision-making while important in some scenarios, is not always advantageous. But examining these uncertainties more thoroughly, processing whether or not there's opportunity here— doubt avoidance tendency has got to be overcome because it tricks us into acting earlier than we should. So where has this showed up for you? Where is it showing up for you right now? And what are you gonna do about it? My recommendation, before making important decisions, schedule yourself some time to delay. I think that time is the answer for doubt avoidance. Create more space. Give yourself more time by sleeping on a judgment call. Sure, you might be a little late or you might upset a few people, But taking that time to more thoroughly vet the direction you're going to go and really challenge your thinking is imperative if you want to succeed at a really high level. That's all I have for you today. The No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.