111: Avoiding Everyday Work Disasters, an Interview with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

Welcome to episode 111 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode features a discussion with Dr. Gleb Sipursky, author of Never Go with youh Gut. Ready?

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You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello everyone, my name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Gleb Sipursky, a disaster avoidance expert and author of multiple books including Don't Go with your Gut, which we'll be digging into today, as well as the Truth Seekers Handbook and a brand new book called Resilience, Adapt and Plan for the New abnormal of the COVID 19 coronavirus pandemic. Gleb has been consulting, coaching and speaking for over 20 years and has done work for clients like Aflac, Honda, IBM, the World Wildlife Fund and over a hundred others. He taught at the Ohio State University and is a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist studying the psychology of decision making in business. His research has appeared in Behavior and Social Issues, the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, and more. Like Kwame Christian, Gleb was also a recommendation from previous guest Brian Ahern. Thank you for all these great recommendations, Brian. We all appreciate you and I'm very much appreciating how many fabulously wonderful and amazing people there are in Columbus, Ohio. So thank you again for that. There are links to Gleb's website, books and all the episodes and concepts we discuss throughout the show, including links to both Brian and and Kwame's episodes which can be found within the app you're listening to or atthe brainy business.com 111 in our conversation today, Gleb will tell you about why you should never go with your gut. Ways to think about avoiding disasters, what a disaster really is. It's much more than pandemics and fires, as well as five important questions you should be asking in your business. But instead of me telling you about all that, now let me introduce him so he can share his wisdom. Dr. Gleb Zypersky, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

I really appreciate you inviting me to speak to your listeners. Melena, it's a pleasure.

Absolutely. And so we got introduced through Brian Ahern who I recently interviewed on the podcast and we'll of course link to that in the show notes. But you were someone he said, hey, Molina, you've got to talk to Gleb. So tell us a little bit about you and your work and your books and all that sort of stuff.

Happy to. I'm known as the disaster avoidance expert. So I help folks avoid disasters. Now, when you look at disasters, you'll see that disasters come from basically bad decisions. That's the cause of disasters. You make a bad decision or you don't make a decision that you need to make. Those are really the only two causes of disasters. Bad sorts of decisions. And again, you either omit making a good decision or to that would have addressed the disaster, or you make a decision that leads you to a disaster. So what I study is how do we make these bad decisions that lead to disasters? These patterns of mental failures, cognitive called cognitive biases. Some cognitive neuroscientists and behavioral economists have been in academia for about 15 years studying these topics, researching them, publishing on them, on cognitive biases, particularly how to defeat them. There was the first generation of scholars in cognitive biases. Daniel Kahneman Eamon first they looked at what are the biases themselves, how our brain is screwed up and all the points that matter. That's what they looked at. My generation of scholars, including myself, looked at how do you address these problems? How do you debias ourselves Specifically, I'm in the field of within cognitive neuroscience. I'm also working on behavioral economics. Two fields. Those are my two fields of work. And I look at how businesses, professionals, how do we deal with these bad decisions in our professional life, whether in our individual careers, all levels, or in our businesses, if we're business leaders or run a small business, whatever we do, how do we deal with these problems? How do we make the right decisions, manage risks, make effective strategic plans so that we avoid disasters and maximize success? And that's my fascination. That's what I've been doing. Now, I published a number of books on these topics. The one we're going to talk about is called Never Go with your How Pioneering Leaders make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. That is the book that I wrote that focuses specifically on decision making in business and professional settings. And as you mentioned, I wrote a number of books. So my most recent one is called Resilience, Adapt and Plan for the New abnormal of the COVID 19 coronavirus pandemic that I wrote very quickly, as you can imagine. My publisher approached me and said, hey, do you want to write a book on this? And I had a number of speeches canceled. So I had some time to write a book.

Yeah. Similar situation over here as I'm writing my own book as well.

Excellent.

Exciting first one for me. So congrats on the plethora of books that you have on your side.

Thank you.

When you talk about disasters, can you define some of what that means? Because I think when we hear that term and especially right now, maybe primed for it, but you hear disaster and you think of things like coronavirus where the entire business is shut down and that what do we do? And everything is this huge issue. But because you wrote this book previously, you know, prior to Covid, then I'm assuming that it's all level of disaster and that's sort of an overarching term that maybe even something that's revenue relatively small could still be considered a disaster. Can you define what that, what those mean for people?

Happy to. It basically means anything that makes a significant negative impact on your bottom line and that can be a one big time decision. So let's say in your career you choose to go to a new company and you didn't realize that you would that the atmosphere there is kind of toxic because nobody tells you that in the interview process and then you are kind of screwed when you're working there and it's a really bad environment. You can't wait to leave. But then you know, you know that they won't give you a good referral when you leave. And that's, that's just. I've. I do a lot of coaching so I've seen a number of business leaders be in that sort of situation. That's not a good situation to be in. That's a disaster situation. But you can also have a disaster in terms of a staying in a dead end job. And of course we can make individually bad decisions in our careers. We can write an email to our supervisor, you know, their boss and unintentionally offend this person and then that could roll downhill. So that's kind of careers for your just in. As a business leader or as a business professional, you can have a series of small conflicts with a team member person, your team that escalate over time to a situation where you hate each other's guts and that leads to of course a disastrous situation in your workplace. That's not good. You can make a bad hire for a key role. That's not good at all. You can change your, you can have a major project. So we'll talk about planning fallacy for example that are when you look at projects, major projects, you'll find that about over. There was a study that showed that over 86% of all large building projects went over time and over budget and over 84% of large computer projects. That means everything from database implementation to something like launching a new website. And when the computer projects go over budget, the average over budget was 159%, which is huge. So that is the disaster. There are all sorts of disasters that really have a significant impact on your bottom line and they can result from one big decision like going to the wrong place, or a series of small decisions like writing emails that unintentionally fund people and result in lots of conflicts.

Yeah, well, so I'm guessing people are thinking now and you don't realize, you know, how do I know if I'm in a dead end job and that the sort of the devil you know is better than the devil you don't sort of vibe, right where it feels like there's that fear or maybe it's a pre factual thinking or regret aversion or whatever that happens to be of not sure. How do I know that staying here is the disaster versus going there is the disaster? How can someone figure that out?

Well, what you'll want to do to figure that out, let's say if you're in dead end job or if you're suspecting you might be, think about what the situation will be five years from now if you don't change what you're doing, what you're currently doing. That's a really good tactic. It's called consider the alternative. So when you look at the when you consider the long term and consider the alternative, when you look at the debiasing strategies, how do you fight these cognitive biases? And we can talk about the kind of cognitive biases involved in blinding ourselves to the reality of the situation, but my expertise is in fighting them. So when you look at addressing these cognitive biases, you want to consider your alternatives. What are the alternatives to staying where you are and what is the long term situation? What is the long term consequence of each course of action? And you'll find that in many cases staying where you are in the long term, not really changing what you're doing would be a pretty bad consequence for you. And that's going to mostly be the case when I see these sorts of situations far from always, but mostly the case due to cognitive biases like status quo bias and loss aversion, which we can talk about. But these problems lead to us too much staying in the current situation where we are and not considering the negative long term consequences of doing so because we don't see them build up over time. We don't see the buildup of these negative consequences over time. Each individual moment, you know, tomorrow, it feels painful to let go and take a risk after tomorrow and a week from now, but we don't realize what the consequence of it. It's like sitting there with a tooth that's increasingly bothering us. Right. Going to the dentist would be painful and, you know, unpleasant, but it will get rid of the tooth and eventually it will heal. But many people don't apply that same sort of thinking to their career, whereas they really should make a change. They also don't apply that if they're a business owner and they see someone who is not a good fit in the company, who is hurting the company, creating a toxic culture that happens. And they don't realize that sometimes getting rid of people or closing down a project that they are really invested in is a good idea. Yeah.

So it's sort of the. Is it a sunk cost fallacy that's coming into play on some of those. Like with the. If you started a project that felt like it was a really good idea and you've already been working on it for a year and you've invested a million dollars and then you realize it's not a good fit but you want to keep throwing money at it.

That's exactly right. And that applies to projects and people. Doesn't apply so much to your career, individual place. But if you hired someone and you've been trying to mentor this person, get them along and they're kind of barely making it, or maybe not and not really performing very well, or a project, if you have a building project and it's not going well. There are so many examples. Let's say the Boston Dig. I actually lived in Boston when the Boston Dig was going on, which eventually was supposed to be started off around $3 billion, came in at around $20 billion way over time. So that's pretty terrible. And there are many other examples of these sorts of projects. Boston Dig, we just know about it because it's public and people. Whereas a lot of companies have equivalent version and it's private and they don't tell anyone because it's very embarrassing. Now why does that happen? You said something costs and that is the cognitive biase, that specific mental pattern that describes, that scholars used to describe. But let's go a little bit deeper. What is actually going on underneath? Now when you look at the cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics of research on this topic, you'll see that our emotions determine about 80 to 90% of our decision making. 80, 90% of our decision making. When we don't follow a structured decision making process, which we can talk about later in the interview, that's going to address a lot of these problems. We'll just go with our emotions, we'll just go with what we feel and think about the person who launched a project, whether it's a home construction project, because that refers to home construction project or business projects, or when you hire someone and so on. You are in a situation where, if where you're emotionally attached to this project, you throw a lot of resources at it. It's like when you buy stocks. There's a reason people buy, buy high and sell low. People feel attached to the stock they, they bought and when the time comes to sell it, they feel, oh no, I'm, you know, I can still make money. The investors talk about it, people getting too greedy, but that's not really it. There's an emotional attachment to things. People feel emotionally attached, emotionally invested, and they don't realize that it would be better for them in the long term to let it go. Just like it would be better to let go of a tooth that, that's been hurting of a long for a long time. This emotional attachment is incredibly important to understand because you have to acknowledge that you're wrong to address the situation. I'm going to repeat that again. You have to acknowledge that you're wrong to address the situation. And the reason I repeat it is because acknowledging that you're wrong is a very hard thing to do. We have in our modern environment, contemporary environment, so many bad examples of public figures at all levels, whether business, whether politics, whether civic levels, media, figures, whatever, failing to acknowledge it they're wrong, refusing to do so, doubling down on when somebody points out that hey, you're wrong and sticking to their original plans because they get rewarded for it. They get rewarded for being what people call consistent. They don't get rewarded for looking at the evidence, seeing that the evidence changed and changing their minds according to the evidence. Now that's the best way to be. Of course you want to look at reality accurately and make the best decisions based on evidence. But most leaders don't get rewarded for doing so because there's that primal urge in us to look for people who are confident, who appear confident even when they're wrong. And that is very bad that actually.

So I don't know if you've done any research on this specifically but it makes me think that in the world of the Internet, where it's anything you do or say or think or, you know, this picture that's from 30 years ago, and then something comes up, or somebody said something 25 years ago, and then people are able to pull that out of, you know, the depths and say, well, you didn't say that back then. You know, is any of that worse or, you know, harder for people where they feel like you're stuck to be that you have to be consistent over time. Maybe because the Internet is making that a more public. Like you said, you can't hide some of that in the same way. And again, if you don't have research on it, I totally get it, but it seems like it would be related to me.

I don't have research on that particularly. But what I do have research on and what there has been research shown is that the way that everyone can communicate with everyone does definitely contribute to it, the breakdown of the media ecosystem, essentially, because previously media filtered out some of the bs. So when somebody would double down on a lie, and again, a business leader, political leader, civic leader of any sort, the media would call out this person on it. So every time that the leader would double down, the media would say, okay, this is what actually happened. And that made it really hard for all sorts of public figures to get away with falsehoods. Now, when the media ecosystem right now is kind of broken and lots of public figures have direct communication with their audience, that way, filtering the media has a much lesser role, much weaker role in filtering communication and calling out the deceptions for what they are. And that results in much more leeway for public figures to deceive and to double down on false statements and false confidence. And like I said, people want someone who appears confident. And if there's no filter between their confidence and the media, where the media provides a filter saying, no, this person is just spreading, you know what, that. That is going to result in more leaders getting into various positions of power in business, economics, and so on that result in pretty bad outcomes. I mean, look at some of the things that Elon Musk gets away with tweeting and how much of a following and popularity he has. That's an example of a very prominent business leader who is in exactly this sort of situation.

Right?

Yeah.

And that because our brains, and this is maybe where the never go with your gut kind of comes in, but that we're really wired to believe that first thing that we hear, we believe it until it's been proven wrong. And if nobody's able to prove it wrong because there's so much content that's out there and you see something and think it's true and don't go verify before you share it on Facebook, you know, or you just. All compounds and things can go viral when they're not true at all very easily.

You're exactly right, Melina. And here we have a number of problems mixing together. First of all, we do believe the first thing that we hear, that is the intuitive position for us. Just when we get information, we accept that information. Now, if you want to understand where that comes from, look at our evolutionary background, our gut reactions, our intuitions. They're not wired for the modern world. They're wired for the savannah environment. When we lived in small tribes of 15 people to 150 people, and when we had the fight or flight reflex was incredibly important for us to survive. We can talk about that. But here, the key thing comes from our tribal background. When we lived in small tribes, it was very important for us to be oriented toward tribal members and trusting toward them, conforming to the tribe. So when a tribal member said something, most likely we should take it as accurately as true, because in the long term, we'd find out this person is a deceiver if they did so. So there were natural incentives for people to not lie and natural incentives for us to accept the first thing that people say. So we still have that accepting perspective with our gut reactions. When we go with our gut, which is overwhelmingly, unless we have that internal filter of being skeptical, that's the thing that we have to develop. That's not an easy thing. That's not an intuitive thing. That's one dynamic that goes on. Another dynamic that goes on is called the anchoring bias. Now, the anchoring bias has to do with when the first piece of information we find out about something, then we are very much anchored to that piece of information. It weighs on us much more heavily than other information we find out about it. So that has to do with whoever has the biggest megahorn, whoever has the biggest microphone. That is the kind of person. That's the kind of information that would reach us, and then that information would reinforce our perceptions. And of course, also in the modern environment, we're dealing with filter bubbles, where the kind of information we read is increasingly filtered by social media. To be oriented toward information that we like and liking, of course, has to do with emotions. So it conforms to what we already believe, what we're brought up to believe, predisposed to believe, and Then we will not be exposed to information that counters our beliefs because we don't like it.

Right.

And that is a part of a big problem because it's about emotions. So where do our emotions come from? They come from what we are already predisposed to believe. So we're not predisposed to challenge what we already believe.

Yeah, well. And so you mentioned a couple of concepts, some of them by name, some just in gist, I guess, that already have episodes of the podcast. So for those of you who picked up on them because you're avid listeners, we will have links to Anchoring and Adjustment, which has an episode, the Focusing Illusion Confirmation Bias. We've already talked about pre factual thinking and priming and loss aversion. All will have links for you in the show notes. So lots and lots of important episodes that we will link back to if you want to learn more about those concepts specifically. So when you were talking about if we want to get back to the not going with your gut and to learn all of what that means and everything that someone should get from that, of course they can buy the book. There will be a link for that in the show notes as well. But what's the main reason why you tell people to not go with their gut?

Well, because we don't live in the savannah environment anymore. So, for example, consider the very incredibly complex modern world. Now, we are very intuitively tribal, so we tend to look for people like us when we just go with our gut reactions. We look for people who look like us, who think like us, who have our values. Now imagine what would happen if the modern world was simply that if there was no barrier to our tribalism, to that gut reaction. We are living in a multipolar, multicultural, global society. We'd have so many conflicts. And of course, we have a lot of conflicts because of this tribalism, but we do some things to address it. But that is when we go with our. When we don't go with our gut, we have to train ourselves to not go with our gut and to address this tribalism. And we still have so many problems due to this tribalism and. And of course more problems recently due to the breakdown of the media ecosystem and how the Internet allows people who are more tribal to connect with people who are part of their tribe and go on tribal rampages together. Right, That's a big problem.

Yeah, definitely. So is this tribal tendency the same thing as herding or are there some nuances that are important in there?

Well, herding is a subcomponent of it. So herding is a way that we show our tribal tendency. That's one. That's only one way that we show our tribal tendencies. So in the workplace, of course, diversity, inclusion and equity efforts are meant to address inherent tribalism. That is a very fundamental aspect of what diversity, equity, and inclusion does. Addressing tribalism. I speak on this topic often. I'm unconscious bias. And we have a lot of protests going on because everyone is suffering from some level of tribalism, some level of unconscious bias. And that's not something bad, that's not something evil for someone to have some unconscious bias. Unconscious bias refers to just impulses, tribal impulses that we are not aware that we have. And it's a very powerful thing. And it doesn't only have to do with racism. It has to do with all sorts of things. So in 2018, I was giving a closing keynote to an HR conference on diversity Inclusion in Central Ohio in Columbus, Ohio. So that's where I'm based. It was the regional conference for the Central Ohio HR Diversity inclusion leaders. Now, the one thing that people might know about Columbus and Ohio is that our local football team, the Ohio State Buckeyes, is very popular. So it's incredibly popular. And our biggest opponent is the University of Michigan Wolverines. It's one of the biggest rivalries in college football. So there are over 100 diversity inclusion experts in the room, and I'm talking to them about unconscious bias. And I asked them, so how many of you here in the room would hire a University of Michigan fan? And of the over 100 people, only three of them indicated raised their hand that they would hire a University of Michigan fan. Only three of them. And this is something. I mean, the nice thing is it was videotaped, so I have it on video. This is a very primal example of tribalism. There's that passion around football. And of course, you know, though all those University of Michigan fans who make poor choices about which team to root for, that has nothing to do with their ability to perform well in the workplace. But there's still that tribal antipathy, that tribal discomfort with someone who is clearly from the opposite tribe. And so that causes people to discriminate very clearly against those who are University of Michigan fans. And you can obviously find that out if somebody went to the University of Michigan, not likely to be hired here in Columbus, Ohio. So that is an example on your resume. That is an example of something that, of course, applies much more deeply and broadly to issues like sexism, racism, gender identity, religion, political affiliation, all sorts of things that have to do with tribalism, geographic affiliation, I mean, and you probably hear my accent, right? Clearly, I'm not from the United States. I'm actually from a small country in Eastern Europe called Moldova, which was freed from Soviet domination in 1991. And that's when my parents came here to the United States, brought me here. So I was 10. So I was born in 81. So when I found out, I was looking at the research on tribalism, One of the things I found out was an aspect of tribalism is called accent discrimination. There's. When you look at accent discrimination, you'll see that Americans discriminate against people with foreign accents, trust them less than they should be. There's only one accent to which this doesn't apply, which. Which is the British accent. You know, they still have that cultural imperialism going for them. So that is something that takes place in the workplace. It still happens in the workplace where people aren't hired with foreign accents when they should be hired people. There's not. Applies to lots of other dynamics too, since diversity inclusion in the workplace is a frequent venue of tribalism also applies not simply to diverse inclusion to how we look, but tribalism between different departments. So let's say, you know, sales versus operations. You'll have people within the sales department having tribal feelings toward others in sales department and hostile feelings toward people in the operations department. Or you'll have something like legal department versus, well, everybody else.

Right.

That will be another common tribalism aspect or finance versus hr. So all of these sorts of things are definitely important dynamics. And people don't realize that they take place and they really hurt morale, engagement, and those are some of the causes of disaster retention.

Right. Well, and the point about them being these unconscious or subconscious biases is that we don't realize we're doing them. And our conscious brain will say, I don't do that like that. You know, I don't really think that way about a University of Michigan fan. I would just say that as a joke here in the room because it's Ohio people. And so, you know, they get it. But really that's not a problem for me, is what we want to tell ourselves, but we know that those. The subconscious is really running the show and fundamental attribution error is kind of running rampant. And so I talked about that very much like you were talking about those siloed departments within a business. I talked about that in the episode on fundamental attribution error. And if you're kind of programmed to dislike this person because they're in the marketing department, the finance department, the sales department, operations, whatever it is, because it's us versus them. This affiliation, you will always have that as long as you look at them that way. You're going to have this initial reaction that you might not even be noticing is a problem. And some of the advice that I gave in that episode was to change the way you look at your team. And so if you say we're at the team of XYZ Company and we're all in this together, that that can help you to see them as part of your in crowd instead of as somebody else. What other tips and advice do you give in that space to help avoid the potential disaster of pitting yourself against a different department in the same organization?

What you're talking about is very useful. It's broadening your circle essentially of empathy. And that's the strategy that you're talking about. So when you look at the strategic techniques to address this, you want to broaden your circle of empathy, who you consider to be part of your team, who you consider to be part of your group. Another very useful technique in this case is to take an outside perspective. So step outside of yourself, look at the situation from the outside view and what would happen from an outside view. How would an outsider view the situation? What are the incentives for them? What are the incentives for you? What do you get rewarded for? Why did. What do they get rewarded for? What are some of the natural conflicts that result from these incentives? And then how can you address these conflicts? You often want to address them by addressing the incentives. Because the incentives often are the things that bid people in finance versus HR and operations versus sales in a way that the company doesn't realize happens. For example, sales and customer service is a notorious problem where people in sales get rewarded for making the sale. Sometimes the sale is to the wrong company, to the company that you don't want to be your client. And sometimes the sale is poorly done so that the company has too high expectations for the customer service that they receive. And then customer service, of course, you know, fights with sales about the situation. Not great, but that's the result of bad incentives. You're giving sales bad incentives. What you need to do is change the sales compensation so it's not only for the sale, but for the continuity of the sale and the customer satisfaction. So that there's incentives for the salesperson to work closely with the customer service person to make sure that they're selling the product to the right client, the service product to the right client, and that their client is going to be well supported after the fact. So these are some of the techniques that you want to be thinking about. So this external perspective, this long term perspective, where the long term is often a technique you can use to solve a lot of these problems.

Yeah. So there is an episode on incentives and nudging and how to be using those and make sure they're in alignment. And I've seen it is not uncommon for businesses, especially as they get very large and you have, you know, someone that oversees the, like you said, sales department and this side is overseeing the technicians or the, the staff that is doing behind the scenes work. And where if one group is having their incentives to where they get their bonus and the only way that they can get it for them to succeed means that this other department has to essentially fail and that they can't both get their incentives at the same time. It happens so much more often than people would even realize or think is happening. If you don't have those globalized incentives of what, why, why you're putting those goals in place and how they help the company overall and say, you know, sales teams can still have benefits and get incentives based on doing the best possible work for the people. I remember I used to work at an airline and we would get calls so the flight attendants got incentivized based on how many people they got to sign up for the rewards credit card that was there. And it wasn't everybody, it wasn't all the time, but there were some who very notoriously would promise extravagant amounts of bonus miles and things that you get when you get when you sign up for the card because they're filling it out by hand on the plane. And then it gets run, they get approved for the card, the flight attendant gets their bonus and whether that person is actually excited about it or likes it after it's come into play doesn't matter. So they might say you get a.

Hundred thousand bonus miles and all these.

Other things and they only get 25. And then it's, you know, my problem to deal with the upset customer that because. And I'm incented on short call times, but now I have to have a long call time helping this person, you know, so it can cause this problem. And then you start to feel this irritation toward the entire band of flight attendants, even though it's maybe just a couple people that are making bad choices there. So that I think is what came to mind for me on some of that incentive misalignment and how that is really disastrous for the customer service Experience and overall reputation of the entire airline. If you have those things out of alignment, it really is.

And I think it's important that you brought that, that you. I'm glad that you shared a personal example and you talked about money and money is often an incentive, but it's actually very often not the most incentive by far. And folks think about money as though it's the only way to incentivize people. It's really not. And that's fascinating when you look at what people's incentives are for most professions. With some exceptions in sales, some exception to sales. Once you get to a middle level lifestyle, you know, 50,000, 60,000 maybe in San Francisco, 100,000 or more. Yes, exactly. So when you get to that sort of middle level lifestyle, depending on which region you're in, then it really doesn't matter if you have another 5,000 or 10,000, 20,000. It doesn't really matter. That's not what incentivizes people. I'll give you an example. So I was doing consulting projects and this client allowed me to name them and I talk about them in the book. So I'm fine naming them. It's called the Edison Welding Institute. So this is an institute of hard engineers who do welding projects, who basically they come into other companies, manufacturing, mining and solve complex technical projects for them. So it's hard engineering consulting work. And what the company wanted them to do was do more marketing, meaning marketing and sales. Marketing meaning sales, do more conferences, white papers, blogs, sales calls, meaning go with the team and do sales calls. But these engineers that weren't doing as much as the company wanted, the company tried to incentivize them financially to do it, to give them financial rewards. Wasn't happening, was giving them training, was telling them how important it was for the company to do this. And it really wasn't happening. And so they the Mark Matson who was the HR vp, he knew me, he knew my work. So he brought me in to try to examine the situation. And I examined, I explored the situation, did an analysis and what I found out was that the engineers, they really weren't motivated by the financial incentives. They weren't motivated by the company really needing this done. They were motivated by their complex technical challenges by solving these. That's what fascinated them. So they didn't want to take the time to do marketing and selling and this was not something they preferred to do. So I came back to Mark Mattson and I told Mark, look, Mark, these engineers, they're really not emotionally motivated to do selling. You need to emotionally motivate them to do marketing and selling if you want anything to happen. Mark looked at me and he said, engineers have emotions. That's literally what he said. He gave me a testimonial saying that because Mark is an HR person and HR people are very emotionally expressive and read emotions, try to read people's emotions. Engineers are not. They come off as cold, stoic, as, you know, the Mr. Spock of start track of somebody, you know, knows of Mr. Spock. So that is how engineers come up. But of course, they're driven by emotions, just like all of us. There's a common cognitive bias called the empathy gap. The empathy gap has to do with us underestimating other people's emotions, especially people who aren't part of our tribe. And of course, HR and VP HR and engineers have that conflict. Not part of my tribe. Right. HR tribe versus engineer tribe. So that was an issue that we really had to address. And we were looking at the incentives. Again, financial incentives weren't working. So we looked at what really motivates engineers. And one of the primal motivators for engineers was status, social status among fellow engineers. Of course, in the tribal environment, you can imagine that social status was incredibly important. That's what the more resources, the more social status here in the tribe, the more resources you acquired and the more likely you were to pass on your genes to survive, therefore, and thrive and reproduce. So we are all the descendants of those who had high social status and who were seeking social status. So we still have that as part of our instincts. And the engineers had that. So that's something we're able to influence. We were able to change who was awarded the employee of the month, for example, from someone who solved technical challenge to somebody who did more marketing and selling. We were able to change who was highlighted as profiles in the newsletter for the company. We eventually changed the promotion process to have more promotion for those people who did more marketing and selling. And eventually over time, it really increased the willingness of engineers. They just started doing much more marketing, much more selling as a result of these changes having to do with status and appealing for status. So you have to figure out what is actually going to be emotionally appealing to the people, not fall into that empathy gap, figure out what is the emotional motivator and address their emotional needs in such a way that it aligns with the right incentives for the company.

Right.

And that is, I think, really bringing it back kind of full circle to say that, you know, a disaster quote, unquote, doesn't have to Be that the building burnt down or something along those lines. In this case, a disaster of not having the engineers getting on board with the global goals of the organization to having more marketing and selling, to bringing in new clients and having more people that understand what they're doing. And them not being part of that team could be a disaster in the long run of what the company is trying to accomplish. Right?

You're absolutely right. And that's a common problem for change management where change management often results in a disaster because the focus is on thinking of people as logical and rational instead of understanding their emotions that inhibit change processes. Change management and addressing these emotions first before addressing logic and reason.

Right, Absolutely. And what we, what we think people should do is often not what they, they do. In, in the episode I did on, I use the example of Milton from Office Space and where the thing you think that he should care about, about getting his paychecks about where his desk is and all of that, none of that was what the problem was. He really just wanted his red stapler and somebody took the stapler. And that's when you know the building gets burnt down is because he's so overwhelmed. But everybody else would think that's ridiculous and shouldn't be, shouldn't be a problem but it's what matters to him and where his emotions were tied and the whole problem comes altogether and that became a real, real disaster sort of in that example. So if we want to be kind of putting a bow on some of this and knowing that the details of course come in the book. But what is it that you would advise to someone what's sort of the most important steps if we're going to identify for ourselves because that's where we started off the interview and discuss is if I'm needing to avert disaster in my own life and career, kind of what's the process? How do I go about that? What's the high level recommendation?

This applies also to business leaders and how you're doing in professional settings of any sorts as well as your own career. There's a five question process that I advise people to use for any decision that they don't want to screw up. So this is not, this is not a step that you don't will make the perfect decision. There's an eight step process that takes about an hour to go through which is in the book. But for any decision that you don't want to screw up, you want to avoid disasters, not get the perfect decision, but get a good enough decision just satisfies Ask these five questions. First question, what important information didn't I yet fully consider? So what evidence didn't I take into account due to the confirmation bias? A number of other cognitive biases that we talked about. Wishful thinking and so on. Belief bias. We tend to look for information that confirms our beliefs and ignore information that doesn't. So you want to look twice as hard and weigh twice as heavily. Information that goes against your preferred choice. Try to just confirm. Try to prove yourself wrong. If you're not able to do it, great. That means your choice is more likely to be better, not a disaster. But if you can do it, that's also great, because then you can avert a disaster. So that's one example. That's the first question. Let's say with an example, if you're trying to write an email to your client to persuade them to do something you know, you know that they should do, and they know that they should do, but it's going to be a hassle. Now, you can try to avoid including any information or ignore information about why they shouldn't do this thing, why it would be a hassle. But if you do look at that information and include it in the email and address the objections in advance, you'll be much more likely to see the client do what you want them to do. Second, what dangerous judgment errors didn't I yet fully consider? So what cognitive biases didn't you address when I talked about a number of them? Anchoring bias, for example, if your client is anchored to a certain piece of information, you have to know that you have to do a lot to de anchor them from that piece of information. So think about what they first heard about the issue and how you can de anchor them if that's not a good thing. Third, what would a trusted and objective advisor suggest I do? So think about this as taking that external perspective. So step outside of yourself. You get about 50% of the benefit by just asking yourself, what would you tell a trusted friend to do in this situation? And you get the other 50% of the benefit by calling your trusted and objective advisor, or if you're a millennial, texting this person. Fourth, how have I addressed all the ways this could fit? This is an incredibly important question. We don't think about failure. The planning fallacy. A lot of other cognitive biases cause us to think that our plans will go according to plan, but they're often not likely to go according to plan. So in this email, think about, well, what could go wrong in this situation? Let's say your client is in an area that's experiencing an outbreak of COVID 19 and there's shutdowns and they're restricted and their kids are home from school and they're sitting stuck at home. So how are they going to be feeling? They're probably in a bad mood and distracted. Read the email draft that you drafted but didn't send yet as though you're distracted and as though you're in a bad mood and address all the problems that can be interpreted in a negative way, like pressure y or guilt inducing or shame inducing and draw the client's attention to the most important parts of the email. And finally, what would cause me to change my mind? What would cause you to revisit your decision? We don't often think about this question, but it's often the most important question we should ask because we tend to get stuck with a decision after when we make a decision, it's very hard for us to change our minds. So it really helps if you decide in advance what would cause you to revisit your decision. For example, with the email to the client, you can say something like, hey, if my client does doesn't respond within a week, I will give my client a call that gives you a very clear revision point. And you know what you're going to do differently in a week. If you don't have that revision point, you'll be kind of wondering every day what's going on? Why is my client not replying? What they do wrong with the email? You'll be increasingly anxious and ruminating about this question and not letting it go. But if you have that revision point, anytime those thoughts come out, you can say, hey, I know what I'm going to be doing. I have a revision point. I will think about that later in a week when I give my client a call. So those are the five questions and there took me only two minutes to talk them through. They can save you many, many hours and many thousands of dollars if you avoid a bad decision.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's fantastic. And as we already said, there is a link for Never Go with youh Gut the book in our show notes for today and definitely Gleb, thank you so much for joining me. What's the best way for anyone who does want to find you and to connect and you learn more? Like you said, you do some consulting and coaching. Where should people find you?

My website is disasteravoidanceexperts.com again disasteravoidancexperts.com and there's consulting, coaching, training as well as blogs, videos, podcasts, decision aids, guides, manual online classes of various sorts. Especially check out disasteravoidanceexperts.com subscribe so there's going to be a free 8 video based module class on making the wisest decisions. Again, that free 8 video based module class on making the wisest decisions along with an assessment on the most dangerous judgment errors in the workplace. These cognitive biases@disasteravoidanceexperts.com subscribe Perfect.

And we'll definitely have a link for that in the Show Notes as well to make it super easy for everyone to go and find that and to find you and to get the book and all these wonderful things so we can be avoiding disasters in our lives and businesses and really anywhere Indeed. Thank you so much Melinda yeah, thanks for joining me.

Such important insights about applying behavioral economics and avoiding those disasters which as you now know aren't just just things like a pandemic, but include staying in a job too long or leaving before you should. As a reminder, Gleb's five questions to avoid decision disasters, which of course he goes into more detail in his book Never go with your gut are 1. What important information didn't I yet fully consider? 2. What relevant dangerous judgment errors didn't I yet address? 3. What would a trusted and objective advisor suggest I do?

4.

How have I addressed the ways it could fail? 5. What new information could cause me to revisit the decision? As a reminder, the show notes have links so you can connect with Gleb and check out his books and the work he does at Disaster Avoidance Experts. You'll also find links to episodes on all the concepts we touched on, not all of which were called out by name during our conversation, including those on priming, prefactual thinking, loss, aversion, focusing, illusion, confirmation bias, hurting, fundamental attribution, error, optimism bias, and more. The links for all that great content are waiting for you in the Show Notes within the app you're listening to and atthebrainybusiness.com 111 and do please connect with me, Melina Palmer on LinkedIn as.

Well as across the social media as.

The Brainy Biz B I Z so we can talk about this episode, what you loved about the conversation with Gleb, and you can connect with him as well. Would love to be able to talk and share with each of you. Thank you again to Dr. Gleb Zipursky for joining me today and discussing his tips for avoiding disasters and his book Never go with your gut. I hope you enjoyed the conversation and learned some some valuable tips to apply into your business and life. Next Week on episode 112, we're going to be digging into the Ikea effect. It's going to be a lot of fun. You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness. Com.