A632.2.3RB_LeeDarrell - How to make choosing easier

I live in New York City which is a true melting pot of every culture. We have just about anything that you can imagine here, especially when it comes to food! If you can imagine it, it’s probably out there. Chinese dessert pizza? No problem.You can get that. One of the common “gee whiz” quips that the tourist brochures like to tout is that, assuming there was zero turnover in restaurants, if you were to eat three meals per day at a restaurant, it would take 23 years to get through all of them. So why do my associates and I find ourselves constantly trying to figure out what to eat? The answer is that we actually have a total choice overload.

Sheena Iyengar is a professor in the management department at Columbia University here in NYC. I have met Dr. Iyengar a few times through her husband, Dr. Garud Iyengar, who is a fellow member of a running group. They are both absolutely delightful and extremely brilliant people. I was therefore very excited when I saw that we were going to be using one of her videos for our blog this week! In her TED Talk, Dr. Iyengar (2011) discusses choice overload and how it can be overcome. Choice overload is where we are presented so many options that we become overwhelmed and, as she says, “we choose not to choose”. She outlines three main consequences of choice overload. They are:

1.      Engagement – the consumer/decision maker tends to procrastinate in making the choice.

2.      Decision quality – when we finally commit, we often make a choice that does not fit our actual need.

3.      Satisfaction – we are often displeased with the decision that we actually make.

Here’s a perfect example. Imagine it is a Saturday evening and you decide that you just want to watch a movie at home and relax. Maybe you have Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime. You open up the “browse” section and are faced with thousands of titles from which to choose. It feels like you spend more time clicking through the options looking for something that suits your fancy than you actually spend watching whatever you end up picking and once you do pick something, you get 20 minutes into it and realize that you are completely bored and you have to start the process all over! How frustrating is that? Obviously, deciding what to watch on a Saturday night won’t have lasting effects but imagine some other areas where we face choice overload.

Fortunately, Dr. Iyengar (2011) also outlines four methodologies for reducing the burden of choice overload. First, the supplier can cut choices down. I have a membership to Costco. Last year, I remember going there to get paper towels. I usually get one particular brand but I noticed that they only had two options – a different brand or their generic brand. The more I went there, the more I noticed this with other products as well. There usually are only two or three brand choices for any given product. Costco has actually made this their model – to offer a wide variety of products but limit the brands. This strategy streamlines logistics and reduces the amount of time that consumers spend searching for products thus moving them through the store more quickly and improving the overall experience (Hu and Chuang, 2009). “This practice enables Costco to produce high sales volumes and rapid inventory turnover” (p. 132). The second methodology to mitigate choice overload is concretization of the implications of the choice (Iyengar, 2011). When faced with overwhelming choices, the consequences of each choice must be vivid. I will speak just a little more on that in a moment. The third methodology is categorization. It is much easier to manage choice overload when the choices are broken down by category. Think back to that Saturday night movie selection of which I was previously speaking. Even though it can still be a daunting task to choose what to watch, the choice is much easier when you at least know a genre that you want. As I write this, we are approaching Halloween so I would imagine that a lot of people will gravitate toward the horror category this weekend. I, however, prefer comedies. Instead of being faced with thousands titles, we can select the genre and reduce our choices to just a few. The final methodology is to condition the chooser for complexity. What is meant by that is that we should start with small choices and work up to complex choices. In the example that Dr. Iyengar uses, customers are customizing vehicles. Instead of starting with the a complex choice (56 choices), they start with the easiest choice (4 choices) and then work their way up to the option that requires 56 choices. Though the choices remain the same, this somehow conditions the psyche to make the choices more easily.

As an Army recruiter, our applicants face choice overload. Honestly, this is not an aspect, though, that I really considered until now. Obviously a decision to enlist into the Army is slightly more life-altering than decided what brand of cereal to purchase so I have an obligation to ensure that my team does what we can to mitigate the overload that our applicants face. Our applicants must first choose between being a civilian or being in the military. If they pick military, they have four branches from which to choose. If they pick the Army, we have 150 different specialties. That is a lot to consider and can cause significant overload and shock. So how do we mitigate this using the methodologies that Dr. Iyengar suggests? There are two that I believe are the most applicable to us. First, though we cannot reduce the choices that our applicants must make, we can at least make it appear that we “cut” our choices. One way that we accomplish this is by initially eliminating the selection of specialties. Everything can be boiled down to one choice – does the applicant want to join the Army or not? Instead of worrying about in what capacity they will be a Soldier, for how long, or where, the decision is simplified to a simple yes or no. However, since those choices will eventually have to be made, what we are doing is actually conditioning our applicants for complexity. Once the decision has been made to enlist, they can choose whether they want to be Active Duty (full time) or Army Reserve (part time), the options that they may want (Airborne, Ranger), the job that they want, and, last, the length of the contract that they want. By at least feigning cutting of choices, the can go from easy to complex. The second method that we use is concretization of their choices. By conducting a solid interview, we artfully find what motivates them and we bring that to the forefront. For some, it is a solid career with a good paycheck. For others, it is money for college. The list of reasons to serve is as varied as there are Soldiers serving. Part of our job is to show them how the Army will fill that need in their lives. Just last week, we had an applicant that was about to back out of shipping to Basic Training. I remembered, though, that he told me that he was enlisting for the Post 9/11 GI Bill. I asked him what he was going to do if he didn’t go to training. He said he would just go ahead and go to college now but he didn’t know how he was going to pay for it. By painting a picture of his future both without and with the Post 9/11 GI Bill, that motivational piece again was shown to be an eventual reality in his future. The Post 9/11 GI Bill pays 100% of tuition and fees for any public university and provides a housing allowance, by the way. This young man is going to be a food services specialist (cook) for 36 months in the Army and then intends to attend a private university here in NYC that has additional veterans’ benefits so his 36 months will actually yield him nearly $330,000 in education benefits on top of everything that he earns while in the Army. When I showed him that again on paper, the picture was very vivid and concrete.

I understand that my current organization is very unique but the realities of choice overload are pretty universal. Regardless of where I find myself in the future, I think that these methods to reduce the burden of choice overload will be beneficial.

Hu, F., & Chuang, C. C. (2009). How can different brand strategies lead to retailers' success?       comparing manufacturers brand for coca-cola and private brand for costco. Journal of             Global Business Issues, 3(1), 129-135. Retrieved from             http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/docview/223740994?accountid= 27203

Iyengar, S. (2011, November). Sheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier [Video file].            Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose

MSLD632.1.4RB_LeeDarrell - Multistage Decision Making

I have just begun a new class – MSLD 632, Decision Making for Leaders. The first week of a course is usually very telling for me. The course titles can often be misleading. For example, my last course was titled Leadership Communication. Within the first week of that course, however, I was able to gather that the course centered around leaders’ use of storytelling to influence others. The content for the first week of this course has been equally as telling. This course will be about decision making for leaders! Go figure, right?

We are beginning the course with a reality that we must all face. We, as leaders (and managers), don’t just face simple problems with simple solutions. Most of the decisions that we make within our organizations are multistage decisions. They are dynamic and have multi-order effects. Often, we have to face the reality that there may not be just one right answer in our decision-making processes (Hoch, Kunreuther, & Gunther, 2001). If this is true, then we must also accept that there may be multiple wrong answers to the problems that we face. We use a combination of two things to make our decisions – knowledge and intuition. Sometimes we trust our gut feelings and we come out on top. However, there is a real danger with this. “As decision makers, we are prone to be overconfident in our occasional successes and overgeneralize the degree to which good intuitive solutions to some dynamic problems also offer good solutions to other problems” (p. 39). This reminds me of my past profession. I was an air traffic controller for over nine years. Air traffic controllers must be extremely familiar with airspace, weather patterns, aircraft characteristics, etc. and must always think five or six steps ahead. There were several times where I made decisions based on my gut instinct and usually it turned out to be the right call. However, there were also times that my intuition betrayed me and caused a few moments of absolute panic. It was like a giant game of chess where one action will affect what happens down the line but sometimes the plans that I made would fall apart and, with one transmission, instead of setting myself up to have a smooth flow of traffic, I would end up with an extra aircraft to fit into my pattern. Of course in the context of organizational leadership, the decision making process is typically more strategic and long-term but the idea still holds true – what works today on one problem can lead to a cockiness that may betray us in the decision-making process for future decisions.

Most of us in leadership and management positions deal with problems such as manpower, resource limitations, team assignments, personality conflicts, micromanagement, and so on and so forth. The decisions that we make are rarely straightforward. Since every decision that we make will have a ripple effect, it can often be very difficult to interpret how one decision may affect the overall process. However, there is a science to decision making. In theory, according to many brilliant mathematicians, it is actually possible to make the “right” decision through a process known as backward induction which the process of “solving it as if it were a series of independent two-stage problems, where the answer to each later stage dictates the solution to each successive earlier stage” (Hoch, Kunreuther, & Gunther, 2001, p. 42). This sounds a little like the backward planning that we do at work. As an Army recruiter center leader, there is a tool that I use called a MAP (Mission Accomplishment Plan). Based on historic conversion data – remember that knowledge piece that I previously mentioned? – we are able to backward plan our recruiting efforts. We take historic data over the past three months to determine exactly how many people need to go “to the floor” (to go to sign a contract) to result in that contract. I know that only 85% of the applicants on the floor will actually successfully sign a contract. We know how many people have to go to their physical to get that, how many people needs to pass a test to take a physical, how many people need to test to pass a test, how many appointments we need to conduct to have applicants test, and how many appointments we need to set to actually conduct the appointments. We are working backward with our MAP so we actually start at the end. My conversion data right now is about 38 appointments made to result in a contract. Based on my mission and manning, I am able to calculate how many appointments each recruiter needs to make for us to make our mission. Likewise, I am able to determine, based on averages, how much time prospecting everybody needs to contribute. That is the science piece to recruiting. My MAP is a perfect world blueprint that should tell me the exact decision that I need to make to complete my mission. But then, reality sets in. I struggle daily with how to appropriately manage my team. But my MAP is right there. I know what we should be doing! Enter the intertemporal choice. We know what we should do but maybe it isn’t what we want to do. I don’t just mean this in the whole angel vs. demon on the shoulder way but even in professional environments we are faced with what feels right vs. what we think is right. The problem is that “people are considerably more likely to favor should options over want options when making choices that will effect in the future than they are when making decisions that will take effect immediately” (Milkman, Rogers, & Bazerman, 2008, p. 326). In their collaborated journal entry, Milkman, Rogers, and Bazerman are essentially saying that it is often easier to focus on the wants and needs of the moment vs. the needs of the future. Think about it another way. It is so much easier to say on a Friday afternoon that you will come in early on Monday morning a little early and get a fresh start than it is to stay a little late after a long week to finish some reports. When it comes to leading our teams, the decisions that we make are often made in just the same way. It is easier for me to say, “We will make cold calls later but I really need Sergeant Such-and-such to send me that report right now so I can feel a sense of accomplishment.”

Bearing in mind what I have discussed already, consider with me one of the hardest dynamic multi-stage decisions that I have to make on a regular basis. My MAP is essentially an agreement between myself and my commander so I have to hold to the numbers that I provide to him. How I start Monday sets the tone for the remainder of the week. Let’s consider this week. I wanted to get my recruiters into a school event but it wasn’t pre-coordinated. Also, the weather was absolutely gorgeous so I knew that a lot of tourists would be out and about and we recruit heavily from those that make their living from the tourists (we try to recruit the street performers, vendors, hustlers, etc.). I knew that sending my team to the heavy transit centers would yield the appointments that we need. However, I also knew that if I could get into a school, I could get quality appointments. There was just no guarantee that I could get my team into a school that day. What I decided to do is irrelevant to this process but knowing that every decision has a ripple effect is relevant. I will tell you, though, that I did gamble against my better judgement but we were unable to get into a school and we began the week making only half of what we needed to make on Monday and it made for a hectic week of playing catch-up. But that same decision has paid off in the past and I knew that. But this is the reality of dynamic multi-stage decisions.

Hoch, S. J., Kunreuther, H., & Gunther, R. E. (2001). Wharton on making decisions. New York: Wiley.

Milkman, K. L., Rogers, T., & Bazerman, M. H. (2008). Harnessing our inner angels and   demons: What we have learned about Want/Should conflicts and how that knowledge can     help us reduce short-sighted decision making. Perspectives on Psychological Science,      3(4), 324-338. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00083.x

A521.9.4.RB_LeeDarrell - Reflections on Leadership

I remember once when I was younger – maybe 10 or 11 – sitting in my dad’s office looking at a computer software magazine. That was at least 25 years ago and computers were not the entertainment systems that they can be today. Most of the software was business based with some kind of a purpose. I didn’t really have an understanding of what software was at the time and I remember asking my dad how anybody could ever even hope to use all of the stuff that a computer can do. He explained to me that the software is not really the computer but just something that you can buy that tells the computer what to do. As we wrap up this particular course in leadership, I can see that all of the concepts that we have learned are kind of like the software for that old computer. We, as leaders, can never hope to be every type of possible leader all wrapped into one. Denning (2011) points out that true interactive leadership adds and subtracts elements of leadership to cater to the situations. Just as that computer is just a tool that has to have programs added and subtracted to make it function properly, we have to add and subtract leadership techniques to be the leaders that we want to be. But that begs one very important question – what kind of leader do I actually want to be? What dimensions do I want to have? Denning points out several different dimensions of leadership in the closing chapter of the book that we have been studying. The idea for this blog is not for me to just sit here and list those but rather for me to tell you the dimensions that I see myself as having in the future.

I inherited a very special trait from my mother. She and I are both very logical/analytical people. It is rare that we act on emotion without full evaluation of a situation. That is probably not going to change. In fact, I don’t want that to change. However, that sometimes leaves me sitting on the outside of situations looking in. Over the years, I have met many people that I view and effective leaders that have taken a very different approach. They have been much more “free-spirited”. They have this way of just jumping in with both feet and not just existing but they truly live life! We probably all know people like this. They are the people that travel to all of the cool exotic places and have the most wild adventures. I want to incorporate that into the way that I do leadership as well. There are three dimensions to leadership that I want to exhibit that will lead to that. First, I want to have leadership that participates. “Employing the interactive mode of leadership means engaging the world with a mind-set of active participation rather than detached observation” (Denning, 2011, p. 271). As I lead my teams in the future, I don’t want to look at our objectives so much as tasks to complete as I want to look at is as tasks that will change us all. I don’t want to be on the outside looking in. I want to actually be a part of what is happening and to be excited about it. This can be so hard to do as an Army recruiter sometimes because it is so hard to see the actual fruit of our labor. Once someone signs a contract, they ship to training and they fall off of our books. I want to really participate in the development of these new Soldiers! If this makes any sense, I want it to be who I am and not just what I do. The second dimension is one of connection. Have you ever been sitting in a meeting or a conference and someone of high importance comes in and they tell a terrible joke that isn’t even funny but the entire audience busts into fake laughter? Yeah, that’s not a connection. That’s the opposite of a leader connecting. But how about when we roll back into the FOB (Forward Operating Base) and our vehicles are smoking from the burning oil and being all shot up and there are ammo casings all over the ground and we are all covered with blood, sweat, and dirt and the Commander looks you right in the eye and says “You did well, son”? Now that’s a connection! As I prepare to transition out of the Army and into the civilian workforce, I would like to be able to have a connection like that with my team. Of course it won’t be a battle-hardened bond but, through participation, perhaps I can form some kind of a bond with my team. The final dimension falls right in line with the first two. I want to be a leader that has feeling. “Interactive leadership involves passion – another ingredient that is missing from the traditional mode of management” (p. 283). As I said, I am a very rational person. That doesn’t mean that I have to stop being rational and act on emotion but it does mean that I can listen to my emotions a little bit more. This is kind of like politics. The left is very emotion based. The right is very logic based. The best practices come, however, when they work together to compromise make bipartisan deals. I want my leadership to be bipartisan within myself – logical but with great passion.

I understand that I can never hope to be a perfect leader. I can’t incorporate every element of management and leadership all at once. In fact, that is why several organizations now use separate people to act as managers and leaders. However, I see myself as a “free-spirit leader” – one who participates, connects with his people, and acts with a passion for his purpose.

Denning, S. (2011). The leader’s guide to storytelling: Mastering the art and discipline of business narrative. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.