Susan Britton presents research by Ap Dijkstra showing that the best way to make complex decisions is to gather information, then distract yourself with something low-effort like easy music or word searches before deciding. Snap decisions and intense deliberation both perform worse.
If you've got a decision to make or you're coaching someone who has a decision to make, there's some interesting research that might be helpful in making that decision. So there's a Dutch social psychologist by the name of Ap Dijkstra who studied this extensively, and some of his research looked at, given a complex decision to make, whether or not 3 different variables was the, the most beneficial to use. So his 3 variables were: Number 1, he asked people to make a snap decision. So sort of like blink and have an intuitive hit and make the decision. Number 2, he asked people to deliberate on the information that they'd received. So really think hard about it and then immediately make a decision about it. And then his third group was somebody that took in the information and then he asked them to go and distract themselves. So they gave them very specific activities to distract themselves. Then come back and make the decision. And his research found that those who actually took in the information, distracted themselves, then came back to make the decision did a better job at making decisions. So how is it relevant? If you or you're working with someone like a career coaching client and they're trying to make a decision about this job or that job, or if you're working with a leader and they've got decisions to make about whether to launch a product in Q2 or Q3, something that's going to require more complex, holistic integral thinking, those kinds of decisions, it's going to be better to take some time and distract yourself. Now, the distraction also has to be specific too. It cannot be something that's going to require a really high cognitive load, so no mathematic quadratic differential equations or something that's going to require a lot of memory as well. So that would be too high a cognitive load while you're distracting yourself. So something simple and fun like easy music that you love listening to or a puzzle that's a word search, but no, no anagrams. That's going to be again too high cognitive load. Then come back after that lovely distraction and make the decision. Go encourage your brain!
Susan’s ICF Educator Award | The Heart Behind the Impact Katy Montgomery, PCC
