194. Functional Fixedness: When All You Have Is A Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

Welcome to episode 194 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's Behavioral Economics Foundation's episode is about functional fixedness. Ready? Let's get started.

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, Malik Melina Palmer hello.

Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's episode, we're digging in on the concept of functional fixedness or the when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail problem. I am going to mention several other concepts during the show today, those that have their own episodes, like those on biases toward ourselves and others, fundamental attribution error, the focusing, illusion, priming, framing, and more. Within the show notes for the episode, you will find links to also get your freebie worksheet so you can take notes all about functional fixedness and begin applying your learning from today's episode right away. Those show notes can be found within the app you're listening to or@the brainybusiness.com 194 all right, so let's jump right in on functional fixedness again. Our when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail problem. I'm going to start by taking this analogy a bit to the extreme as I talk about how it works. Sound good? All right, so I want you to imagine you show up to tackle a new skill or concept. You're really excited about this new opportunity, maybe first day on the job, and you likely bring every mental tool you might need to help you learn. You are a sponge, ready for whatever life throws at you. It may seem naive to someone with more experience who looks at your enthusiasm with a shake of the head, thinking, I remember when I was a newbie like that, I didn't know anything. I'm so much better off now. You know what I'm talking about. And while experience is important, expertise is also kind of overrated, in my opinion. There are a lot of times where we get so narrowed in on what we think the problem is when we're experts. That curse of knowledge, something I talked about with Adam Hansen when he was on the show, that we don't look at what else could be going on. As you develop expertise, you start to declutter that mental toolbox. Instead of having everything available to look at and use over time, you throw away the drills, wrenches and duct tape while you perfect your hammer. Focused on your hammer, you might enhance its materials, make it stronger and more ergonomic. Everything you do is about creating that ideal hammer. The problem of course comes when you are asked to work with someone who only uses screws or who has a firm rule about not creating any holes. A hammer is totally useless in both of those scenarios, and if all you can do is argue about the value of your hammer while the other department members are trying to talk over you to convince you to use drills or non permanent glue, this very quickly becomes a standoff where no one is willing to budge. Everyone believes their way is best, and the others are illogical jerks who are unwilling to listen to reason. Your own actions are of course justified due to your fundamental attribution error. There is a link to that episode in the show notes, but this is the phenomenon where we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, both with an internal justification for why we're good people and this was a one off circumstance, while also blaming external influences for our deficiencies in a way that we don't always afford to others, especially those who are in another department. Someone we would say are a them versus an us. The primary example that's used to explain this is when someone cuts you off on the freeway and you automatically label them as a jerk, a bad person to the core. However, when you cut someone off, you're a good driver but you couldn't afford to be late and this was just a one time thing or you were distracted because your mom's in the hospital or because that other driver wouldn't let you in. In a work scenario for the fundamental attribution error, I like to talk about being late to meetings when someone else, say from the team that works with drills is running late. And your hammer team might start complaining about how complicated they try to make everything and make jokes about how they got hung up in another meeting. It's so typical for a drill person to be late. They're so inconsiderate. If you or someone else from the hammer team is running late, well there were extenuating circumstances. Everyone will understand because you had back to backs and you needed to get a snack at some point, right? Episode 92 is all about fundamental attribution error, so I'm not going to talk about it more now, but it is important to know that you see others as different from you and will tend to judge them and their ideas more harshly, not giving them the benefit of the doubt that you might give yourself and members of your team when this combines with functional fixedness and where everyone has their own way, they believe is right, so everyone else must be wrong and you need to prove to them that you are correct and they're trying desperately to do the same thing. It's a recipe for distrust and a lack of productivity. When you look at your own business interactions, how often are you arguing a point you know to be true while others are fighting just as passionately for something they believe in? Or how often have you proposed a great idea only to be told, we tried that once 10 years ago and it didn't work? Those are hammer drill problems and examples of functional fixedness in the workplace. In the episodes on Confirmation Bias and the Focusing Illusion, I talk about how the subconscious will filter through information to determine what is important and let everything else sort of fall by the wayside. You've potentially heard me talk before about how your subconscious can process approximately 11 million bits of information per second compared to the 40 bits of information for your conscious brain. If we put that another way, it means that for every one piece of information your brain decided was relevant or important enough to focus on, there were 275,000 other things it filtered out. Isn't it possible that the one thing someone else is arguing is one of those 275,000 things that your brain filtered out and didn't focus on? Or that you are looking at just one of the many possible correct alternatives that could work? As Rory Sutherland says in his book Alchemy, the opposite of a good idea can still be a good idea. Functional fixedness or being set in your ways is very similar to confirmation bias and the Focusing Illusion. If you go in looking for examples for why hammers are the best, or were to search for articles about how drills have ruined walls. Again, taking this analogy way too far. But we're in this together now. You'll find information to support that. Similarly, the drill people that want to look up how hammers are more likely to cause big holes or how nails don't secure things as well as screws will be able to find that as well. This shift in perspective to allow for the 275,000 other things that could also be true shows how even when you disagree or are saying completely different things, you can both be right. To put it another way, everyone else doesn't have to be wrong in order for you to be right. That picture could be hung with a nail, a screw, command strips, or something else you haven't thought of yet. Each has its pros and cons and are worth evaluating. Even if you only have a hammer, you can still add in a perspective of the other tools that are available, maybe those that used to be in your toolbox but you've done away with as you've gained expertise. Sometimes you have the benefit of knowing someone with a drill and someone else with adhesive strips to have a conversation with. Other times you need to try and emulate their perspectives without them being there. Regardless of the situation, whether you have people to connect with or not, this is all about getting out of your own functionally fixed way. And one of my favorite stories that I think is such a great example of overcoming functionality fixedness comes from Apollo 13. In case you aren't familiar with the story, there's a movie about it that came out in 1995 featuring Tom Hanks as one of the astronauts on the Apollo 13 mission, and I've linked to a little clip in the show notes here that showcases some of what I'm going to talk about here right now. But I do recommend the movie. It's Great so Apollo 13 is one of the NASA missions that was intended to land on the moon. But very early into the journey they had an unexpected emergency that very easily could have ended in disaster, but the team was able to work together and bring all three members of the crew home safely. Shortly after an oxygen tank exploded, they realized they would have to abandon the main spacecraft and move to the lunar module, or LEM, and turn it into a makeshift lifeboat. One big problem was that it was designed to sustain two men for 45 hours, and they needed it to sustain three men for 90. No small task. To make matters worse, they realized mid emergency that there had been a clear lack of communication between the teams who had been on the projects designing the LEM and the main spacecraft. They were siloed teams, much like our hammer and drill people from before, and they never imagined anything from one area would need to work on another. Something that's very obvious in hindsight, but there had been no need to touch base as they were working on their own parts. Each worked happily on their own projects, which didn't matter until it mattered. In this case, the CM lithium hydroxide canisters, which are used to scrub carbon dioxide out of the air so humans can breathe in space, were square on one system and round on the other. Sadly, this type of problem isn't limited to Apollo 13. In 1999, NASA lost a 125 million dollar Mars orbiter because one team was using English units of measurement while the others were using the metric system, something that wasn't discovered until the thing was in space and unable to function properly. And I promise NASA isn't the only organization to do this. I'm not picking on them intentionally. They just have really public failures when things go wrong. And even when the stakes are high, little things like this can be missed when you're too focused on your little area that you're working on, and it can cause a big problem. So back to Apollo 13 and its canister issue. They didn't fit together naturally, and the team needed to figure out how to get a literal square peg to fit in a round hole under limited time with only the items available in the spacecraft. And they had to be able to explain how to make it work to a team without experience with this specific sort of work, who were about 200,000 miles away with communication systems that were a lot like a walkie talkie. And you thought trying to communicate with your team over zoom was hard. When presented with the problem, the engineers and other team members on the ground all explained why it couldn't be done, what might go wrong, how they'd never simulated that, and that they didn't want their departments to be responsible for making a guess that the pieces weren't designed to do what needed to be done. To this flight, director Gene Kranz, played by Ed Harris in the movie, replied, I don't care what anything was designed to do. I want to know what it can do. A remarkable reframing that may just have saved three lives. This simple statement can essentially give the brain permission to look at the problem in a different way, to free itself from the mental constraints that it's putting on the situation by focusing too narrowly on one particular aspect. When things were going right, what something was designed to do mattered. In a crisis, who cares? We need to make something now that can achieve this one goal. How do we do it? I talk often about how easy it is to find the right answer to the wrong question. This Apollo 13 example is a perfect showcasing of that. All the responses from the engineers and others on the team may have been technically accurate, but they didn't help solve the problem at hand. They didn't give the astronauts enough clean air to breathe so they could get home safely. While you might not be dealing with life and death stuff like they were, in this case, you still would benefit from having someone be your gene crayons on projects, someone who can help you see what you might be missing, something amazing or useful that's right in front of you. But because you have blinders on that are keeping you focused on the wrong stuff. You just can't quite see even a shift from something simple like what is 5? 5 will not get you to the same place as how many ways can we make 10? Reframing the conversation so the team can look at things from different angles is so important and one of my favorite things to do as a consultant. If you're interested in learning more about that, please send me an email melinathebrainybusiness.com as another example of functional fixedness, I want you to imagine you're presented with a candle, some thumbtacks and a box of matches. Your task is to affix the candle to the wall and light it. When presented with this problem in the original 1945 study, and when replicated multiple times over the years, people try to use the thumbtacks to stick the candle to the wall, which doesn't work and often get stuck and just give up. They see the box that the matches or tacks came in as just a container and sort of dismiss it. So they don't even see the very obvious solution to of emptying the box, lighting the candle and melting a bit of wax to then stick it to the box and then use the thumbtacks to affix the box to the wall. Easy Functional fixedness puts the box into a box, so to speak, and it's hard to see it as anything different than how it was presented. Interestingly, a subsequent study found that five year old children didn't have the same barriers. They solved the problem much faster than the adults, and even six and seven year olds. Five year olds didn't yet have that container association in their brain, so it wasn't a hindrance. When you're too deep into a problem or when you've become an expert, as I talked about at the beginning of the episode, you have this curse of knowledge that can keep you from seeing all the opportunities that are just outside the norm. This highlights an important balancing act for you and your teams between expertise and the unknown depth and breadth, focus and looking out into the abyss for opportunities. You can't be looking for all the possible ways to use something or how things can be different all the time. You'd never get anything done. Having a background knowledge of associations and how things work is important, but it's also important to understand that functional fixedness is a problem and it can keep you stuck sometimes in a way that will keep you from innovations or from solving the right problems. One of my favorite examples of this, which is very related to functional fixedness comes from a great article in the Harvard Business Review called Marketing Myopia. The original article was by Professor Theodore Levitt back in 1960, and it's still really relevant for businesses today. One of the very brief examples that just had a little note in it was talking about the buggy whip business. And that could have been a great industry to be in until the turn of the century when automobiles started being much more popular thanks to Henry Ford. If the makers of buggy whips had their mission statement as something like we make the best buggy whips in the world, which is very narrowly focused, when cars come around, they can't compete. Nobody wants buggy whips or to use buggies when you can have a car. The business though, is stuck by being too myopic. If instead they had realized they were in the business of making things go or in the transportation industry, they would have been in a much different place and might still be around today because they could have pivoted to making engines or something. I remember when I was first introduced to this article while doing my undergrad. I can still see my professor writing on the board and I remember the room that I was in for this class and he was talking about people who make make drills. Very fitting for our conversation today and saying that they need to understand that they aren't in the business of selling people drills, they are selling holes. The customer doesn't necessarily want a drill, that's just the best way they know to make the right size hole. But if someone can eventually make a better hole, no one will need drills anymore. Just like buggy whips. When you're fixated on the myopic perspective of what you do or how you do things, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is that hammer, you can be missing the bigger picture, which isn't necessarily a problem until sometimes it's too late. As you think about starting to apply all this into your work, I don't recommend starting with something big like your company's mission. Have some warm ups on less consequential projects first. Maybe something that's interesting and where there's some potential. Try something new. But it isn't going to make or break the company like a new process for the department, or reevaluating your budget, or maybe redoing some email templates your department uses, or the way you structure your meetings. Let's use that last one as an example instead of just saying we've always had a weekly one hour meeting and sticking with that approach. Maybe ask what's the benefit of having meetings instead of focusing on the agenda you've always had, which may have gotten a little stale, and you more have people running through the motions than really preparing and getting good value. Say what's the most important thing we could accomplish with a meeting? Or what do we want our meetings to do? Or what would we gain from a different format of communication? Or what does our team need from each other? Or what's the best way to support each other? I'm going to stop with my long list of questions that I could inevitably get into here because I'm guessing you get the point and that you can see the difference that comes from a slightly different question. Properly wording the question is so critical for where you end up. Again, understanding the problem you're trying to solve. Each of those questions gets you somewhere different and you need to know what you want to accomplish before you start diving in on solving the problem. In overcoming functional fixedness and loss aversion, it's important to not look at what you've always done and then think. Think about tweaking it. That's going to end up with a weird, ineffective Frankenstein's monster of meetings and communications, one where you likely just add extra stuff on top of your already ineffective meetings, which no one wants. I recently had a follow up conversation with Matthew Confer who was on the show in episode 158, talking about three steps to better decision making, which he also has a TEDx talk about and that is of course linked for you in the show notes. Along with that episode. I reached out to him as I was working on the content for my second book, what your employees need and can't tell you, which is being finished up right now. I'm so excited, but more on that to come soon. Anyway, I asked him about managing change in organizations and he shared some insights about how they're making meetings more effective internally at ability. One simple thing they did was changing up the questions they ask and how they set up the meeting, including having everyone answer a fun rotating question like who would play you in the movie of your life? And also having each person share the most important thing they thought about that week. Now just think about that for a minute, how differently that frames the meetings and what it says about your entire organization or department. If one of the three things you share in your weekly meeting is the most important thing you thought about that week, how does that prime the experience people have during the week they might be thinking about? If this thing they're thinking about is worthy of sharing in the weekly meeting or if maybe they should spend their time on something else. It also helps showcase the importance of thoughtfulness, which you know, I love, which can have an overall benefit that that ripples throughout the business. Getting out of your own functionally fixed way about Even something as simple as legacy meetings can have such a huge impact on your company overall. And that impact is just starting with something small like meetings. One last little tidbit before we close out the show. In general, when there's an issue with functional fixedness, both sides are holding on so tightly to their own respective hammers. Like all the biases, heuristics and concepts I share here on the Brainy Business, it's easier to see these things in others than in ourselves. But I challenge you to look for your own hammer in each encounter. What are you fixated on that's keeping you closed off to the other person's perspective? How might things be different if you asked a different question or look for a new opportunity? As a reminder, there is a worksheet waiting for you in the show notes atthebrainybusiness.com 194 to help you work through functional fixedness in your life and business. I want to leave you with a paraphrased reminder of that statement from Gene Kranz during the Apollo 13 mission because it's such an important reframe and something you can use in other situations as well. It doesn't matter what something was designed to do, you need to know what it can do. And just like that, episode 194 on functional fixedness is done. Next week I'll be joined by our first guests on the podcast from South America. Karina Montez and Mario Drago from Biawa in Peru are here to talk about their amazing work. Work with nudges, its impact and tips that anyone in a country that doesn't yet have a behavioral economics presence can use to follow in their footsteps. Leading the way. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don'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 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.