412. Mastering Decision Making: Three Essential Steps with Matthew Confer (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 412 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is all about three steps to Better Decision making with Matthew Confer. 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, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is all about your three steps to making better decisions with Matthew Confer. I am so excited to be refreshing this episode today. It was such an awesome conversation with Matthew Confer and I know you are going to get so, so much out of it. The reason that I chose to refresh this one today is because of this upcoming Friday's episode with Melena Vinsky, lead behavioral scientist at IBM. In that conversation, she talks a little bit about the importance of doing a pre mortem and the value that it brings to projects to help them be more successful. One of the three steps to better decisions is, you guessed it, a pre mortem. So I knew instantly it was the perfect time to revisit this gem of an episode. Get your notebook ready. You're gonna love this one. Don't forget there are links for everything, including my top related past episodes and books waiting for you in the show. Notes for this episode which are found within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 41 2. All right, let's talk about making better decisions. Matthew Confer, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

I am very excited to be here.

I am so, so excited to have you. And we had met via LinkedIn and this is our first time actually meeting, which is always fun. I really like to learn along with the audience as we go. Even though we've connected, I've seen your TEDx, which is phenomenal, which is why I asked you to come join me on the show. But tell the audience a little bit about you, who you are, where you come from.

Yeah. So I'm based in Austin, Texas and I work for a company called Ability and we do leadership development simulation training. So the best way to describe it is when you think about a pilot getting in a simulator before they get behind the wheel of the jumbo jet. You potentially want corporate leaders to train via simulation before they lead an organization, manage a team, run a P and L. And so we have actually created immersive team Based simulations to test them on some of the skills that leaders face in an ever complex global world.

I love that. And as the daughter of a pilot slash captain fan of the simulator reference for that and he flew for American, so very close as far as all his simulator training was very close to you there in Dallas. So, so let's give an example when we talk about pilots getting into a simulator, okay, cool, fly the plane. You know, I know what I'm doing, I'm trying not to crash that sort of stuff. When we look at this from a business perspective, like what sorts of scenarios do you test for? What does that look like?

Yeah, so we try to focus on three core competencies of effective leaders. So the first one would be people management skills, the second would be financial acumen, and the third is strategic thinking, decision making, cross functional collaboration, all that kind of other stuff that you really need to be successful in a large, somewhat matrix organization. So to give you the more tangible examples, the people manager simulation, you're actually managing six character archetypes and these characters are sending you emails. When you make a decision in the simulator, you're role playing with the characters, you're deciding what tasks you want to put these characters on and you're learning about the characters as the game goes on. And hopefully your decisions as a manager are being influenced by what is motivating your character. So a lot of the game is focused on as an effective people manager. How do you really understand what motivates us all to come to work knowing full well that for many of us it's very different than our colleagues and trying to pull that out is a key people manager skill. The second example would be in our financial acumen simulation. You're making decisions that affect the growth and profitability of a fictitious company and you're seeing those impacts on the balance sheet, on the income statement, and you're trying to make decisions as basically a fictitious cfo. So rather than sitting in a room and learning what it means to be a people manager or learning what a balance sheet is, you're actually in the experience making those decisions in a competitive team based event.

Hmm, interesting. I, when I was in college for my undergrad, we did a simulator, I think that's potentially similar on the financial one where you do, you know, a certain number of quarters and you're selling widgets or cameras or whatever it is and you decide, you know, we want to be the, we're gonna invest all our money in R D and marketing and we're gonna be the expensive one. Or, you know, somebody else says they want to be the like, least expensive version. And then you put in your quarterly data and sort of see what everyone else did along the way. And, you know, one of the things I found so interesting in that process is that it would show, like you said, when you're competing against other teams. And I also used to volunteer for an organization called Washington Business Week, where high school students would go live on a college campus for a week. We used to jokingly, lovingly call it nerd camp. And so, you know, I had, I was an advisor to a company of 10 or 8 high school kids that I was in charge of for the whole week. And then they would, you know, elect a CEO and CFO and do all this process. And they had to submit the bizsim numbers every couple days or whatever, a couple times a day. But, you know, there's always somebody who had been there the year before or had done this in an in school program and would say, like, oh, no, like you guys, we did this last time I was on a team. That's why I should be cfo. I know how to do everything. And we made all these decisions and we won. And so we'll just follow exactly the same thing that my team did last time and we're going to win again. And I would always warn them and say, doesn't usually work that way. Like something that worked before isn't necessarily going to work today because all the teams you're competing against have changed. Like those outside variables are now very different. And they would often learn that the hard way. Do you have that sort of experience as you go through this as well?

We do. And I think one of the reasons that our clients come to us and thankfully come back to us in the future is adaptability. Is one of the things that they say that they want their rising leaders, their new manager managers, their executives at their organizations to have as a key tenant as they ascend at the organization. So just because you think XYZ is the right way to manage somebody, if you're not conscientious of what else is going on in the game. And just as you described, each of our games has defined quarters and then debrief sessions at the end of every quarter, if you're not conscientious about what else is going on in the game and deviating, pivoting, doing all those wonderful buzzwords to address your lack of success or push for continued success, you're going to be unsuccessful in the game. You have to be aware of what else is going on, not just in your silo as a participant.

Yeah. And that, like, you know, you go in, you know, do you hold the strategy? And when you're reactive, that doesn't usually work out very well either. So, yeah, watching that learning, I think, is so valuable. And for anyone who's listening and thinking, cool. And what does this have to do with behavioral economics? If we think about how the brain actually works, which is all of what we talk about here on the podcast, there's a very big difference between doing and thinking about doing what we think we will do in the moment and what we actually do when push comes to shove. And that's why, you know, for anyone who's done the. I remember having many experiences where you bring the entire executive and management team into the room and these key players and you have the scenario of, like, there was an earthquake and none of your phones work. How are you going to get in contact with each other if there's no Internet? And where are you going to meet and who goes where? And you have to physically, like, you now are over in this room because you got stuck at your house and whatever, and you have to deal with that. But it's because of that experience to where you can remember that you've done it once before. You know what happens, and you can rely on that instead of just what you think you would do and what I think that you would do, because it's what I would do. And my brain thinks I'm always the smartest and the best, you know, and. But your brain thinks the same thing. You just end up with so many problems and clashes along the way, whereas turning that into something your subconscious can remember and say, wait, I've done this before. I know what to do here, versus just hypothetically reading about something. I think that gets into some time discounting, too, where when we think about ourselves in the future, really, our brains look at us like we're a completely different person. And so when, you know, Sunday night, you know, you pledge and say, I'm going to start my running routine and great exercise tomorrow. You know, Monday morning, and you set that alarm and you feel amazing, and then it goes off and you feel like a totally different person the next day because your brain was committing, you know, future Molina to do those things. And that's really easy to do. And then I actually wake up and go, ugh, I have to do that. Yikes. I obviously didn't sleep well enough. Tomorrow is the right day. And so being able to make that more tangible Makes it so that we are able to then draw upon that experience when it actually happens. So I really love the idea on that people management piece. So out of curiosity, do you program it to where like I come, I'm in and I'm me. Right. So it's my personality and what I would do. And then I always have this array of six different, or I think you said six different archetype personalities. And I have all six and I just have to see how they all respond every single time and like learn upon it or is there any version of, you know, you evaluate who's already on my team and if I'm having a problem with someone specifically or you know, that you can program to where I can see how one specific person might react and learn from that.

Yeah, you're kind of right down the right path there. So the biggest part of the game is each of the participants. So you would be a participant in the simulation. During each simulated month or quarter, you have three time tokens that you need to make a decision on where you're going to invest your time. And you can invest your time in the game. Coaching a resource. You can invest your time actually recognizing a resource for job well done, or you can actually roll up your sleeves and use one of your time tokens contributing to a task. So you have these tasks that you need to make the decision on what to do. You have these resources at your disposal and then you have your limited time as a manager. And so during the interaction of the game, you're getting basically slack messages and emails and little pop ups from all of the characters giving you snippets of information. Additionally, we have video recordings of these fictitious characters having interactions themselves. So you start to piece together who these people are, what is potentially bringing them to the office and making them excited about their job. And then you have to handle some external events. So you actually role play with some of the characters. Maybe there's a character in the game who you want to promote to a higher level and she or he is not interested in taking on managerial responsibilities. So how do you handle that as a people manager in charge of getting a list of tasks done? How do you invest your time in coaching and leveling up your resources and who on your team might be more receptive to coaching given the information that they've given you along the way? So how do you piece together all of the things that we struggle with as leaders and make the best decision of how to use your limited time?

Such a valuable piece to be bringing for people A skill that should be better taught before we get into business land. But I appreciate that there's a company at least that does that if it's not something that's really heavily enforced in schools and things like that. So I really want to talk about. Of course there will be a link for your TED Talk in the show notes and so people can go watch the TED Talk. However, I want to talk about it now and in a way that it's three steps to better decision making. It feels like we can still touch on each one, but maybe expand if you have some client projects or things that you've done since then or that you didn't get to. You know, TEDx type presentations are so specific. Can you share a little bit about what your TEDx was about and the inspiration for it and how it ties in with the work you do?

Yeah, the inspiration was that I looked back and we had had over 20,000 people go through one of our simulations in about a two year time frame. And I've had the pleasure of facilitating some of the experiences and I get to hear from our global facilitator base of what happened in these experiences. And what I found was that there are specific traits that top teams do. And specifically one of our simulations is focused all about how you handle dealing with Ambigu. So there's a lot of ambiguity in the business world. There isn't a prescribed perfect way to go about it. And if you're on a team, how do you cross functionally collaborate and how do you effectively make decisions under time pressure? So that's a huge component of our game is there's a ticking clock in all of the quarters and during all of the simulated months. So what we tried to do is distill what have we seen effective teams and individuals do when it comes to making decisions. And the thing that stuck out more than anything else is that, that there's a concept of what do you do before you make the decision? So what is the lead up to the decision? And when there's time pressure and when there's stress, sometimes that's the part that gets thrown out. And you have business leaders constantly say, you know, I just went with my gut, I just did what I thought was right. And there was no thought process behind it. And so our perspective was, and our organization thought we should put in place a decision making framework that has steps that people can follow. And so the first step in that framework was what I called on the stage challenge. The constraints. And the reason that that was the first step Is what surprises me the most when I facilitate is when you throw a challenge at somebody, all they want to do is solve it. We are just so conditioned to see a problem and want to solve. And the successful people in the simulation and the successful people that I've experienced in my career to date, normally when they get a problem before they just jump into solving, they take a huge step back and they try to figure out what constraints are holding them back. What is stopping you from making a real breakthrough. And that was something that I noticed that most teams and most individuals didn't do, especially when a time pressure was thrown into the mix. So that's why we called the first step challenge the constraints.

Yes, yes, for everybody. Like I'm reminded of all the things so this, I talk about this all the time. I have chapter in my book dedicated to this. I have episodes dedicated to this that when you're looking to apply behavioral science or do anything in business, really the biggest problem, the spot where most people go wrong time and again is understanding the problem that you are trying to solve and not just jumping right into solving mode, but then using. I have a process I use called question storming, which is helping to identify the right question instead of brainstorming, which is just not an effective tactic. It doesn't work well with our brains at all. And being able to know that you're finding the right answer to the right question instead of wasting a bunch of time on the wrong thing. And I am going to be linking in the show notes. So there's an episode about time pressure. And also on scarcity, there's part of my book is dedicated to that as well. We're going to be linking to the episode on what problem you're solving. Also the episode on questions and answers. There's lots of stuff here, which is why I think I was distracting you while you were talking. I was like doing jazz hands because I was so excited on the talk. But you know, there is research where we go from this transition of being risk averse to loss averse when time pressure is applied. And so where you see that little ticking clock that is counting down how much time you have, say I like to give the example of many of us haven't necessarily done this in a while perhaps, but you know, Ticketmaster I think was one of the first places that really had that, you know, you have to buy your concert tickets and you have 15 minutes before they're going to be going away. And you can see it counting down. You're like hand shaking, trying to Type in your credit card number. Ah, like I'm going to miss it. And it's. If the clock wasn't there, even if it said you have 15 minutes to buy, it just wouldn't feel as just stress inducing, nightmarish. And where you're just, oh my gosh, I have to do this right now. I have to do this. I can't lose out. The FOMO happens, we just go crazy over it. And time pressure is a form of stress and it changes the way that we make a decision. And so this practicing you said that you have allowed within the simulation makes it to where I know I can do this in a certain period of time. This is actually way more time than I had available when I did this in a simulation. So I can kind of calm my brain and not get totally weighed down by, you know, we have five minutes sort of a thing. And knowing that your choices are going to just go haywire. So please continue. But I had to, had to talk about those pieces because it got me all excited.

Yeah. And one of the things that I've, I've found and I've observed and I appreciate about really intensely good decision makers is just because you challenge the constraints and doesn't mean that you have to go and make a crazy decision. It's just helpful to start the process to see what is holding you back from this huge breakthrough. So instead of just jumping in and solving and going with your gut, for lack of a better way to describe it, if you take the moment to take a step back, no matter what you end up deciding, you become more effective because you've at least considered what constraints are holding you back from potentially going in a somewhat crazy or really intense direction that leads into the second step of the framework. And it's called embrace a pre mortem. And I think many individuals are more familiar with the concept of a postmortem. It happens frequently in business and I think we do it a lot in life. We complete a task, we make a decision, and then we do this postmortem where at the end of it we look back at the decision and what happened and we evaluate it. A lot of the times we do it when things go wrong. Specifically in business, a project will go wrong, a key performance indicator won't be hit and somebody will say, like, let's do a postmortem. Why did this happen? The reason I think a pre mortem is so powerful is because you are conditioned to not think that you are going to fail. I talk to teams and individuals in the simulation. And I ask them why they're doing something and they inevitably will be able to come up with 76 reasons why they are going to be successful. And you have to really press them to figure out if they think they will fail, why they will fail. And I think it is one of the most powerful things that you can institute at your organization or in your life. Before you make a decision, especially a critically important one, you should take the time to embrace a pre mortem and brainstorm that you will be an epic failure if you do this and figure out why you will fail. It is such a powerful reframing and such a powerful way to start the decision making process.

If you can give an example for business. So perhaps you are getting to the, you know, we've got the three steps and then you'll give an example that walks us all the way through, then that's fine, you can just say, hold on, Melina, I'm going to jump through here. But if you have, you know, an example for maybe each one that really emulates it versus walking through, just want to have an opportunity for that before we get too deep into that. So definitely the pre mortem is so important. And really the other piece being planning fallacy, which is very closely tied with optimism bias to where we think we're going to be faster, quicker, better. Like, yes, it usually takes me five hours to do this type of project, but this time, because I've done it a few times, I bet it'll only take me four hours this time around. And you don't plan for the phone calls and all these other things to happen. So I really like to like you're talking about you're getting slack messages and emails and things that are happening around you versus being in this simulated environment where you're in a vacuum silo. And it's very easy. Like so many trainings or going through business school, whatever is an employee comes to you and says that they are very concerned about xyz, what would you do? And then you go, hmm, what would I do? And then you answer the question from your conscious perspective versus emails flying around and things happening in the moment. You can see, yikes, that's clearly not. I know what I should have done, but I didn't. So getting really at that subconscious rule, whatever it is that's going to be taking the reins. So I think a pre mortem is so important. Plus it helps you to look at both, you know, earlier on to say, well, what if, what if something doesn't work? So you have to ask that question. But also, like you said, typically people don't really invest the time in a post mortem. They think they're going to. They say we should do this after every single project. But if it goes well, you basically just say like, well, it went well because we're awesome and we knew that it was going to be good. Yay.

Yes.

And then you move on to the next thing and don't really take the time to dig in and see, you know, where did we make a bad decision that could have really blown up or, you know, what did we do that we didn't even realize we were doing that made this go well. You just don't ask enough good questions toward the end. So, you know, having that pre mortem and then, you know, still a postmortem at the end, but it makes you do that. I think on every project that's important. You obviously can't do it for every email you send or something. But really, when it counts, taking that time is so valuable.

Yeah. One of the things that a lot of people have shared with me, and it's one of kind of my favorite stats that gets thrown around a lot, is that 80% of us think that we're above average drivers. And I kind of noticed that in the simulation, probably close to 90% of the people that we work with think they are incredible managers, really great professionals. And I think it's the ones that take a step back and assume that they have things to learn, assume that where they're going might be the wrong way. Really, they end up making better decisions because they have first assumed that things are going to go against them and tried to then mitigate for those outcomes. And I think it's hard to mitigate for adverse outcomes when you just assume that what you're going to do is going to be successful. And I think it's our innate decision making in our head to just assume that what we're deciding is the right path forward. So making that mental leap and taking that mental exercise is really powerful. And that's why it was the second step that I talked about from the stage.

Yeah, absolutely. So we've got our first two and I will let you decide if it's the right time for examples or if we go to part three and then do an example.

Yeah, let's do part three and then I'll do examples.

Sounds good.

Part three is check the basics and why it's the third and last step is when decisions get more complex. What I've observed time and Time again is that it is small details rather than big details that tend to get missed. So we have a lot of executives and rising leaders and new managers in our programs who are really get into the game. Like unsurprisingly, people are very competitive. They want to stretch their comfortable limits, they want to compete with their coworkers. They potentially are devising pretty intense strategies to try to win in one of our simulations. What I find though is the more advanced, intense, complex the strategy becomes, the more likely it becomes that it's a small detail that trips them up. So as things become more complex, it's small details that tend to go through the cracks. The example that I always use here and I used from the TED stage was a NASA mission to study the climate of Mars. And so you've got legitimate rocket scientists working on this incredible project that has huge dollars behind it. And the mission ends up failing because one of the teams uses the metric system and the other team working on the same project does their measurements in inches, feet and in pounds. And you have legitimate rocket scientists with hundreds of million of dollars on the line and behind their project and they forget to check that they're both using the same unit of measurement. So it's this small detail that trips them up. And that's something that, not on that grandiose of a scale, but that I noticed time and time again in the simulation. And why it is the critical third and final step.

I remember that example and it's one of those things where also it's the like I've seen different ones too. It's like, oh well, we were using these square plug things and you guys are using the round ones and oops. I like from somewhere in the tech kind of space where it's saying that from, you know, at the very beginning, if you're able to identify that something needs to be changed or added into your software, whatever it is, you know, it's like a $10 problem, you know, and then when you get to this step, it becomes a $10,000 problem. And then it's a hundred thousand dollar problem. It's a million dollar problem as you go down the path to change. And I think that taking that time to make sure that you identify that you've really covered your bases and those little basics is super important. So thank you for sharing that piece for sure. So let's do an example, something that people can really tangibly grab onto as we go through this decision making process.

Yeah. So from a challenge, the constraints perspective, I'll think a lot About COVID actually in this example. So a lot of our clients are global organizations that previously to Covid, tended to bring people together in person for our simulations. We were a company that was about 70% in person, 30% fully virtual. Obviously, March of 2020, February of 2020 comes around and getting together in person was no longer possible. And so a lot of our clients had to challenge the constraints. They had been planning for months or sometimes even years for these very intense corporate training programs that were a week of everybody coming together from six different regions to get together for brainstorming and strategy. And. And so the clients that were the most successful are ones that almost threw the rulebook out the window and said, now that everything has to be different, let's take any constraint off the table. So if we're going to do everything virtual, that means that the three things that we had planned for in the classroom, it doesn't mean we're just going to take what was in the classroom and just move it virtually. That might not be the right approach. We literally have to challenge the constraints and say what would be an ideal situation in a virtual environment. So just because things had been planned and just because time and money and energy had been spent, a new curveball got thrown at you and you had to throw the rule book out. And so I was very impressed with some of our clients that said this was going to be a five day in person event with guest speakers and simulations and all of this stuff. We're changing it and it's going to be two parts and in virtual for a third of the amount of time. And we're going to do that because it's the right thing to do, not because it's what was planned before.

Yeah, that is, I have. I made a note while you're talking about, it's just really this reframing a problem when it comes to your status quo has been shifted and not feeling like you have to do exactly what you were going to do before, because we said we were going to. But to then reframe that as this opportunity of, of saying we have, of course nobody wanted this to happen, wish it hadn't. And in a world where we were going to be training ourselves on our responsiveness and our ability to adapt to change and dealing with things in the moment in a better way, what a unique opportunity that we have to allow this to be a really robust learning experience that we wouldn't have had any other way. And then you can just move forward in that silver lining world and just go on with it. So love that. Love that example for sure.

Yeah. And I'll keep with the same theme for an example for step number two. So we're now, we're talking in May of 2021, and clients are really starting to think about what a return to the office is going to look like. And so under the embrace of a pre mortem step, what I've been really impressed with is we have clients that are saying, we're now planning for a training in the fall. Let's say that we decide to continue to embrace the success we've had with fully virtual training. But what happens if in the fall, all of our employee surveys are saying that we're so excited to be back in the office, the collaboration is great, this has been an amazing thing. And then we've got to train planned that's fully virtual. Conversely, what happens if we say we want to lean into in person collaboration, get back to how exciting in person training was, and come the fall, everybody is saying, I'm loving remote work, I'm loving this hybrid approach. I don't want to be in a conference room for two days with my colleagues. Virtual training was great. So if you're not for our clients thinking strategically about what could go wrong if we start to plan for a world we intend to be in place a month from now, two months from now, three months from now, if you're not having the conversations about what could go wrong, you're really missing an opportunity to plan effectively. You need to be putting in place plan B, maybe even plan C to get in front of some of the challenges. And if you're not embracing a pre mortem, you might not even be aware of what some of those challenges are.

Yeah, absolutely. And so as we move on then, so we've addressed, you know, we took our step back, we started looking forward a little bit, and then we're going to check our basics. So what, what's the lesson for, for this as we go into part three?

Yeah, I mean, I'll keep with the same theme. So let's say now you're planning your event that's going to be in person. Well, for the past 12 months, potentially every piece of material that you've sent out in preparation has been geared for a virtual audience. Teaching them how to log into Zoom, giving them specific, maybe virtual meeting, best practices. You don't want to hit send on those messages if the training is going to be in person. And potentially you're going to spend weeks and months preparing for this elaborate in person event as we all potentially return to offices in the fall and you might miss. The basics of all of your materials are now geared towards virtual training. And so you need to be assured that when you're making a drastic change or you're making a big decision, make sure that those small details aren't missed along the way.

Yeah, I would think too, you know, some of what might be overlooked, as you just say, like, oh, yeah, in person, events were great. We did them all the time. We'll just rely on how we did them before. But then do we need to be accounting for social distancing? Do we need to be doing anything with masks? Are people going to be comfortable being close to each other? Where we used to have everybody taking notes and working in this close proximity, but maybe they're uncomfortable. Are there travel restrictions that we need to be thinking of for people coming in? And there's going to be an issue of what if people get stuck because of, you know, test when they landed and it didn't go right and they got sent home or, you know, all these other things that were just a given in the previous world that, you know, we expect people are going to make it. They're fine being close to each other and eating at a buffet or whatever and sharing, you know, the water or whatever it is. And we can't just accept that now. So it's a thing that is a little bit of the pre mortem. But also those are some basic things that it's easy to just say we've done a million of these and it'll be so great to be back to normal. And you don't think about even that mindset that people are going to be in being uncomfortable. This might be the first time people are going to be together. If you do still have a virtual working environment for a large number of your employees, say, and we decide we're still going to do our collaboration in person because there's so much value for it and we want to get the team together and get to see each other again. And you have so many different personality types and backgrounds and even just people from around the US the perspective from I'm in Washington state is a very different approach than what's happening in Texas or New York or anywhere else. And so bringing all those people into one room doesn't mean that everyone's going to feel just like you do where you happen to be planning the event.

100%, I would say our organization last year was blown away in the most impressive way possible about how clients pivoted extremely Fast put employee safety first. But also said, we can do this, we can change what was in planning for a long time. I'm just as impressed now of clients coming to us and basically saying we need to think critically about kind of the future being some flexible uncertainty, like we're not exactly sure what it's going to be. And I think it's really powerful. It's also inspiring and it's also kind of an interesting decision making challenge of its own regard. How do you plan for a future that you don't really know what it's going to look like?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, do you have another, just as we're wrapping up, if there's another example, maybe one that you don't get to talk about very much or a learning or something that, that you all have done. This is like one of your favorites. That's a really key learning for people. I'd love to hear it.

One of my favorite decision making techniques is called the press release method. And it's kind of pulled from what Amazon does. And so when Amazon is considering a new product to launch or a new feature to add to their website, they necessitate that people create the press release for the finished product. And so in order to start your decision making journey, you have to envision what the customer would say or what the press release would look like announcing it, assuming you completed it to your plan. And I think it's a really nice way to start a decision making process. We kind of innately start to think about the end state that we're going after, but actually having to tangibly write it down and in the case of Amazon, design it as a press release, I think is a really powerful decision making framework.

So here's the question that I have with that. Do you have people write both the press release of if it went well and if it totally bombed?

So that would be my iteration. But I am by no means sitting in this chair thinking that I should do anything to adjust what has made Amazon the powerful behemoth that it is. But that would probably be my iteration to it because press releases sometimes are potentially not of the glowing variety if things don't go as planned. So that would be my addition. I definitely would concur with that.

Yeah, I love it. That's so where I was talking about the examples of. I've done a lot of PR training. I was the person at the financial institution that I worked at where, you know, if something goes wrong and the press shows up with the big camera and they like shove the microphone in your face and all the lights and everything. So I went through multiple trainings where there's someone actually shoving a microphone in your face and the big lights and asking you these attacking questions so you can practice in the moment that you don't say something stupid. And so the. But you have to practice for this terrible thing that might have happened. So I think it's an interesting twist on that press release example to where it feels really awful of what. And I think writing what someone might say about you in the worst case scenario, if something totally goes all over the place, you know, is. Is an interesting practice to help also overcome some of that time. Discounting I was talking about at the beginning to keep you on track to make sure that you don't mess up because you know how bad it could be at the end if you end up on CNN with people just attacking you or all the press at your door or whatever. That is so awesome. Well, for everyone that I am sure is now beyond interest, interested and wanting to get into contact with you and with ability and sort of learn more, what's the best way for them to do that?

Well, I really appreciate the time. It's been a pleasure talking to you. I connected with you on LinkedIn. It is my favorite way to connect with people. It's led to jobs, it's led to connections. So it's Matthew Confer on LinkedIn. Also try to be pretty active on Twitter. It's Matthew Confer there as well. If you're interested in the TED Talk. I love hearing from people. I just got a note from somebody from the country of Colombia a couple of days ago. So I'm blown away sometimes by people who find me via the TED Talk. The TED Talk is called before you three Steps to Better Decision Making. And you can find that just by searching my name. And the last way to connect with me is during the pandemic. We actually launched a podcast about leadership and I have the pleasure of hosting it and it's called the Learn to Lead podcast. And it's been one of the more, more enjoyable pursuits of my professional career to date. So you can find me there as well. And thanks again for the opportunity.

Yeah, absolutely. And we will of course have links to all of that in the show notes. And for everyone who is maybe just taking a handwritten note and thinking, I'm going to go look up ability, it is not spelled the way that you think it would be. It is a B I L I T I E. So it ends with an ie instead of a Y. As we go to put that in there. So mental note when you go to type that in and you go to search for that. But again we'll have the links in the show notes. So easy peasy for everyone. Thank you so much again Matthew for joining me on the show. It has been delightful and I've been loving, really talking about decision making with you.

Thank you very much.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about Matthew Confer's three Steps to Better Decisions today? For me, I always find it inspiring when someone has taken the time to create and evaluate tons of research and data and break it down into something like three steps. Especially when we're talking about something as key as making decisions. We all make so many of them and being able to know how we can do this better on our own and as part of a group in an organization is fantastic. And if you were inspired on the idea of pre mortems, don't forget this upcoming Friday's conversation with Dr. Melena Vinsky, lead behavioral scientist at IBM. She's going to dig in on this and so much more. It's such a fantastic conversation. I can't wait for you to hear it. Speaking of which, if you aren't already subscribed to the Brainy Business podcast, now is a great time to do so as we close out the show. Don't forget about those show notes with links to my top related past episodes and books, a timestamp summary of the episode, ways to connect with Matthew and myself, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 412 and just like that, episode 412 on better decision Making is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Dr. Melena Vinsky, lead behavioral scientist at IBM. 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.