Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook. It’s about making certain decisions in certain ways. The way we choose to see our own lives; the stories we tell ourselves, and the goals we push ourselves to spell out in detail; the culture we establish among teammates; the ways we frame our choices and manage the information in our lives. Productive people and companies force themselves to make choices most other people are content to ignore. Productivity emerges when people push themselves to think differently.

 

But in the end, if you learn how to recognize certain choices that, to many, might not be obvious, then you can become smarter, faster, and better over time. Anyone can become more creative, more focused, better at framing their goals and making wise decisions.

 

1. Motivation: Reimagining Boot Camp, Nursing Home Rebellions, and the Locus of Control

• Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. 
• Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control.
• When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more.
• The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination.
• In experiments, people are more motivated to complete difficult tasks when those chores are presented as decisions rather than commands. This is a useful lesson for anyone hoping to motivate themselves or others, because it suggests an easy method for triggering the will to act: Find a choice, almost any choice, that allows you to exert control. Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control.
• Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence. A student with a strong internal locus of control, for instance, will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts. A salesman with an internal locus of control will blame a lost sale on his own lack of hustle, rather than bad fortune. 
  • “Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,” People with an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction. Having an external locus of control—believing that your life is primarily influenced by events outside your control—“ is correlated with higher levels of stress, [often] because an individual perceives the situation as beyond his or her coping abilities,”
  • Studies show that someone’s locus of control can be influenced through training and feedback. 
    • “That’s when training is helpful, because if you put people in situations where they can practice feeling in control, where that internal locus of control is reawakened, then people can start building habits that make them feel like they’re in charge of their own lives—and the more they feel that way, the more they really are in control of themselves.” “Today we call it teaching ‘a bias toward action,’ “The idea is that once recruits have taken control of a few situations, they start to learn how good it feels. “We never tell anyone they’re a natural-born leader. ‘Natural born’ means it’s outside your control,” “Instead, we teach them that leadership is learned, it’s the product of effort. We push recruits to experience that thrill of taking control, of feeling the rush of being in charge. Once we get them addicted to that, they’re hooked.” “You’ll never get rewarded for doing what’s easy for you. We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.”

 

Your WHY

• If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier, Quintanilla’s drill instructors had told him. That’s why they asked each other questions starting with “why.” Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.
• Self-determination: If you give people an opportunity to feel a sense of control and let them practice making choices, they can learn to exert willpower. Once people know how to make self-directed choices into a habit, motivation becomes more automatic.
• To teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values and goals. That’s the reason recruits ask each other “why”—because it shows them how to link small tasks to larger aspirations.
• An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.

• This theory suggests how we can help ourselves and others strengthen our internal locus of control. We should reward initiative, congratulate people for self-motivation, celebrate when an infant wants to feed herself. We should applaud a child who shows defiant, self-righteous stubbornness and reward a student who finds a way to get things done by working around the rules. We all applaud self-motivation until a toddler won’t put on his shoes, an aged parent is ripping a dresser out of the wall, or a teenager ignores the rules. But that’s how an internal locus of control becomes stronger. That’s how our mind learns and remembers how good it feels to be in control. And unless we practice self-determination and give ourselves emotional rewards for subversive assertiveness, our capacity for self-motivation can fade.
• What’s more, we need to prove to ourselves that our choices are meaningful. When we start a new task, or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves “why.” 

 

Self-motivation flourishes: when we realize that replying to an email or helping a coworker, on its own, might be relatively unimportant. But it is part of a bigger project that we believe in, that we want to achieve, that we have chosen to do.

• Self-motivation, in other words, is a choice we make because it is part of something bigger and more emotionally rewarding than the immediate task that needs doing.

 

2. Teams: Psychological Safety at Google and Saturday Night Live

• No matter how they arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns—or any evidence that a team’s composition was correlated with its success. “We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,” said Dubey. “We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.”
• Some productive Google teams, for instance, were composed of friends who played sports together outside of work. Others were made up of people who were basically strangers away from the conference room. Some groups preferred strong managers. Others wanted a flatter structure. Most confounding of all, sometimes two teams would have nearly identical compositions, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness. “At Google, we’re good at finding patterns,” said Dubey. “There weren’t strong patterns here.”
• There is strong evidence that group norms play a critical role in shaping the emotional experience of participating in a team. norms determine whether we feel safe or threatened, enervated or excited, and motivated or discouraged by our teammates.
• Group norms were the answer to improving Google’s teams. “The data finally started making sense,” said Dubey. “We had to manage the how of teams, not the who.”
• On the best teams, for instance, leaders encouraged people to speak up; teammates felt like they could expose their vulnerabilities to one another; people said they could suggest ideas without fear of retribution; the culture discouraged people from making harsh judgments. As Edmondson’s list of good norms grew, she began to notice that everything shared a common attribute: They were all behaviors that created a sense of togetherness while also encouraging people to take a chance.

“We call it ‘psychological safety,’ ” she said. Psychological safety is a “shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks.” It is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up,” “It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”

• The norms that Google’s surveys said were most effective—allowing others to fail without repercussions, respecting divergent opinions, feeling free to question others’ choices but also trusting that people aren’t trying to undermine you—were all aspects of feeling psychologically safe at work. “It was clear to us that this idea of psychological safety was pointing to which norms were most important,”
• Rather, the SNL team clicked because, surprisingly, they all felt safe enough around one another to keep pitching new jokes and ideas. The writers and actors worked amid norms that made everyone feel like they could take risks and be honest with one another, even as they were shooting down ideas, undermining one another, and competing for airtime.

“You know that saying, ‘There’s no I in TEAM’?” Michaels told me. “My goal was the opposite of that. All I wanted were a bunch of I’s. I wanted everyone to hear each other, but no one to disappear into the group.” That’s how psychological safety emerged.

• Putting ten smart people in a room didn’t mean they solved problems more intelligently—in fact, those smart people were often outperformed by groups consisting of people who had scored lower on intellect tests, but who still seemed smarter as a group.
• The researchers eventually concluded that the good teams had succeeded not because of innate qualities of team members, but because of how they treated one another. Put differently, the most successful teams had norms that caused everyone to mesh particularly well.

“This kind of collective intelligence is a property of the group itself, not just the individuals in it.” It was the norms, not the people, that made teams so smart. The right norms could raise the collective intelligence of mediocre thinkers. The wrong norms could hobble a group made up of people who, on their own, were all exceptionally bright.

• There were, however, two behaviors that all the good teams shared.

1. All the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” In some teams, for instance, everyone spoke during each task. In other groups, conversation ebbed from assignment to assignment—but by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount.
2. Second, the good teams tested as having “high average social sensitivity”—a fancy way of saying that the groups were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.
   1. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask them to describe what that person is thinking or feeling—the empathy test described previously. This is a “test of how well the participant can put themselves into the mind of the other person, and ‘tune in’ to their mental state,” wrote the creator of the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge. While men, on average, correctly guess the emotion of the person in the photo only 52 percent of the time, women typically guess right 61 percent. People on the good teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. They spent time asking one another what they were thinking about. The good teams also contained more women.

 

• The reason why Saturday Night Live has succeeded is because he works hard to force people to become a team. The secret to making that happen, he says, is giving everyone a voice and finding people willing to be sensitive enough to listen to one another.
• “Lorne was deliberate about making sure everyone got a chance to pitch their ideas,” “He has this kind of psychic ability to draw in everyone,”
• For psychological safety to emerge among a group, teammates don’t have to be friends. They do, however, need to be socially sensitive and ensure everyone feels heard. “The best tactic for establishing psychological safety is demonstration by a team leader,”

“It seems like fairly minor stuff, but when the leader goes out of their way to make someone feel listened to, or starts a meeting by saying ‘I might miss something, so I need all of you to watch for my mistakes,’ or says ‘Jim, you haven’t spoken in a while, what do you think?,’ that makes a huge difference.”

• In Edmondson’s hospital studies, the teams with the highest levels of psychological safety were also the ones with leaders most likely to model listening and social sensitivity. They invited people to speak up. They talked about their own emotions. They didn’t interrupt other people.
• This is how psychological safety emerges: by giving everyone an equal voice and encouraging social sensitivity among teammates.

“There’s a myth we all carry inside our head,” Bock said. “We think we need superstars. But that’s not what our research found. You can take a team of average performers, and if you teach them to interact the right way, they’ll do things no superstar could ever accomplish. And there’s other myths, like sales teams should be run differently than engineering teams, or the best teams need to achieve consensus around everything, or high-performing teams need a high volume of work to stay engaged, or teams need to be physically located together.“But now we can say those aren’t right. The data shows there’s a universality to how good teams succeed. It’s important that everyone on a team feels like they have a voice, but whether they actually get to vote on things or make decisions turns out not to matter much. Neither does the volume of work or physical co-location. What matters is having a voice and social sensitivity.”

 

“What matters are five key norms,” 

• Teams need to believe that their work is important. 

• Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful. 

• Teams need clear goals and defined roles. 

• Team members need to know they can depend on one another. 

• Most important, teams need psychological safety.

 

Checklist for leaders in Meetings 

• • Google-designed checklists they could use: 
    • Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. 

• They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it.

• • They should admit what they don’t know. 
  • They shouldn’t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once. 
  • They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways. 
  • They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.

 

Two general principles: Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.

 

The route to establishing psychological safety begins with the team’s leader. So if you are leading a team—think about what message your choices send. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you modeling listening? Are you demonstrating a sensitivity to what people think and feel, or are you letting decisive leadership be an excuse for not paying as close attention as you should?

• But a team will become an amplification of its internal culture, for better or worse. Study after study shows that while psychological safety might be less efficient in the short run, it’s more productive over time.

 

Project Oxygen found that a good manager 

(1) is a good coach; 

(2) empowers and does not micromanage; 

(3) expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ success and well-being; 

(4) is results oriented; 

(5) listens and shares information; 

(6) helps with career development; 

(7) has a clear vision and strategy; 

(8) has key technical skills.

 

3. Focus: Cognitive Tunneling, Air France Flight 447, and the Power of Mental Models

• “cognitive tunneling”—a mental glitch that sometimes occurs when our brains are forced to transition abruptly from relaxed automation to panicked attention.
• “You can think about your brain’s attention span like a spotlight that can go wide and diffused, or tight and focused,”
• Our attention span is guided by our intentions. We choose, in most situations, whether to focus the spotlight or let it be relaxed. But when we allow automated systems, such as computers or autopilots, to pay attention for us, our brains dim that spotlight and allow it to swing wherever it wants. This is, in part, an effort by our brains to conserve energy. The ability to relax in this manner gives us huge advantages: It helps us subconsciously control stress levels and makes it easier to brainstorm, it means we don’t have to constantly monitor our environment, and it helps us get ready for big cognitive tasks. Our brains automatically seek out opportunities to disconnect and unwind.
• Cognitive tunneling can cause people to become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of their eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks. It’s what keeps someone glued to their smartphone as the kids wail or pedestrians swerve around them on the sidewalk.
• Reactive thinking is how we build habits, and it’s why to-do lists and calendar alerts are so helpful: Rather than needing to decide what to do next, we can take advantage of our reactive instincts and automatically proceed. Reactive thinking, in a sense, outsources the choices and control that, in other settings, create motivation.
• One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see. These people tell themselves stories about what’s going on as it occurs. They narrate their own experiences within their heads. They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple responses. They say when they daydream, they’re often imagining future conversations. They visualize their days with more specificity than the rest of us do.
• Psychologists have a phrase for this kind of habitual forecasting: “creating mental models.”
• But some of us build more robust models than others. We envision the conversations we’re going to have with more specificity, and imagine what we are going to do later that day in greater detail. As a result, we’re better at choosing where to focus and what to ignore. The secret of people like Darlene is that they are in the habit of telling themselves stories all the time. They engage in constant forecasting. They daydream about the future and then, when life clashes with their imagination, their attention gets snagged.
• Cognitive tunneling and reactive thinking occur when our mental spotlights go from dim to bright in a split second. But if we are constantly telling ourselves stories and creating mental pictures, that beam never fully powers down. It’s always jumping around inside our heads. And, as a result, when it has to flare to life in the real world, we’re not blinded by its glare.

Case Study on Superstar Workers 

• The firm’s most productive workers, its superstars, shared a number of traits. The first was they tended to work on only five projects at once—a healthy load, but not extraordinary. There were other employees who handled ten or twelve projects at a time. But those employees had a lower profit rate than the superstars, who were more careful about how they invested their time. – Focus on less but with more quality. 
• Conventional wisdom holds that productivity rises when people do the same kind of tasks over and over. Repetition makes us faster and more efficient because we don’t have to learn fresh skills with each new assignment. But as the economists looked more closely, they found the opposite: The superstars weren’t choosing tasks that leveraged existing skills. Instead, they were signing up for projects that required them to seek out new colleagues and demanded new abilities. That’s why the superstars worked on only five projects at a time: Meeting new people and learning new skills takes a lot of additional hours.
• Something else the superstars had in common is they were disproportionately drawn to assignments that were in their early stages. This was surprising, because joining a project in its infancy is risky. New ideas often fail, no matter how smart or well executed. The safest bet is signing on to a project that is well under way.
• Finally, the superstars also shared a particular behavior, almost an intellectual and conversational tic: They loved to generate theories—lots and lots of theories, about all kinds of topics, such as why certain accounts were succeeding or failing, or why some clients were happy or disgruntled, or how different management styles influenced various employees. They were somewhat obsessive, in fact, about trying to explain the world to themselves and their colleagues as they went about their days.
• The superstars were constantly telling stories about what they had seen and heard. They were, in other words, much more prone to generate mental models. They were more likely to throw out ideas during meetings, or ask colleagues to help them imagine how future conversations might unfold, or envision how a pitch should go. They came up with concepts for new products and practiced how they would sell them. They told anecdotes about past conversations and dreamed up far-fetched expansion plans. They were building mental models at a near constant rate.
• “They’ll reconstruct a conversation right in front of you, analyzing it piece by piece. And then they’ll ask you to challenge them on their take. They’re constantly trying to figure out how information fits together.”
• Researchers have found similar results in dozens of other studies. People who know how to manage their attention and who habitually build robust mental models tend to earn more money and get better grades. Moreover, experiments show that anyone can learn to habitually construct mental models. By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes. These storytelling moments can be as small as trying to envision a coming meeting while driving to work—forcing yourself to imagine how the meeting will start, what points you will raise if the boss asks for comments, what objections your coworkers are likely to bring up—or they can be as big as a nurse telling herself stories about what infants ought to look like as she walks through a NICU.
• If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.
• The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. “We look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative,” Andy Billings, a vice president at the video game giant Electronic Arts, told me. “It’s a tip-off that someone has an instinct for connecting the dots and understanding how the world works at a deeper level. That’s who everyone tries to get.” “So really good pilots push themselves to do a lot of ‘what if’ exercises before an event, running through scenarios in their heads. That way, when an emergency happens, they have models they can use.”
• To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge. When you’re driving to work, force yourself to envision your day. While you’re sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you’re seeing and what it means. Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next. If you are a parent, anticipate what your children will say at the dinner table. Then you’ll notice what goes unmentioned or if there’s a stray comment that you should see as a warning sign. We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention. The key is forcing yourself to think. As long as you’re thinking, you’re halfway home.

 

4. Goal Setting: Smart Goals, Stretch Goals, and the Yom Kippur War

Cognitive Closer

• About 20 percent of test takers, and many of the most accomplished people who have completed the exam—show a higher-than-average preference for personal organization, decisiveness, and predictability. They tend to disdain flighty friends and ambiguous situations. These people have a high emotional need for cognitive closure.
• A high need for closure has been shown to trigger close-mindedness, authoritarian impulses, and a preference for conflict over cooperation. Individuals with a high need for closure “may display considerable cognitive impatience or impulsivity: They may ‘leap’ to judgment on the basis of inconclusive evidence and exhibit rigidity of thought and reluctance to entertain views different from their own,”
• Put differently, an instinct for decisiveness is great—until it’s not. When people rush toward decisions simply because it makes them feel like they are getting something done, missteps are more likely to occur.

 

SMART Goals

• • SMART goals -These objectives had to be 

• Specific 

• Measurable 

• Achievable 

• Realistic

• Based on a timeline

• In other words, they had to be proveably within reach and described in a way that suggested a concrete plan.
• “Some 400 laboratory and field studies [show] that specific, high goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals such as the exhortation to ‘do one’s best,’ The reason, in part, is because goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. The process of making a goal specific and proving it is achievable involves figuring out the steps it requires—or shifting that goal slightly, if your initial aims turn out to be unrealistic. Coming up with a timeline and a way to measure success forces a discipline onto the process that good intentions can’t match.
• though useful, can sometimes trigger our need for closure in counterproductive ways. Aims such as SMART goals “can cause [a] person to have tunnel vision, to focus more on expanding effort to get immediate results,”

Stretch Goals 

• Numerous academic studies have examined the impact of stretch goals, and have consistently found that forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark outsized jumps in innovation and productivity.
• Stretch goals “serve as jolting events that disrupt complacency and promote new ways of thinking,” “By forcing a substantial elevation in collective aspirations, stretch goals can shift attention to possible new futures and perhaps spark increased energy in the organization. They thus can prompt exploratory learning through experimentation, innovation, broad search, or playfulness.”
• Studies show that if a stretch goal is audacious, it can spark innovation. It can also cause panic and convince people that success is impossible because the goal is too big. There is a fine line between an ambition that helps people achieve something amazing and one that crushes morale. For a stretch goal to inspire, it often needs to be paired with something like the SMART system.
• Stretch goals can spark remarkable innovations, but only when people have a system for breaking them into concrete plans.

 

Problem with To-Do Lists

• The problem with many to-do lists is that when we write down a series of short-term objectives, we are, in effect, allowing our brains to seize on the sense of satisfaction that each task will deliver. We are encouraging our need for closure and our tendency to freeze on a goal without asking if it’s the right aim. The result is that we spend hours answering unimportant emails instead of writing a big, thoughtful memo—because it feels so satisfying to clean out our in-box.
• One solution is writing to-do lists that pair stretch goals and SMART goals. Come up with a menu of your biggest ambitions. Dream big and stretch. Describe the goals that, at first glance, seem impossible, such as starting a company or running a marathon.

 

5. Managing Others: Solving a Kidnapping with Lean and Agile Thinking and a Culture of Trust

• In fact, when Baron and Hannan looked at their data, they found the only culture that was a consistent winner were the commitment firms. Hands down, a commitment culture outperformed every other type of management style in almost every meaningful way. “Not one of the commitment firms we studied failed,” said Baron. “None of them, which is amazing in its own right. But they were also the fastest companies to go public, had the highest profitability ratios, and tended to be leaner, with fewer middle managers, because when you choose employees slowly, you have time to find people who excel at self-direction.” Employees in commitment firms wasted less time on internal rivalries because everyone was committed to the company, rather than to personal agendas. Commitment companies tended to know their customers better than other kinds of firms, and as a result could detect shifts in the market faster. “Despite its being widely pronounced dead in Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s, the Commitment model fares very well in our sample,” the researchers wrote.
• One of the reasons commitment cultures were successful, it seemed, was because a sense of trust emerged among workers, managers, and customers that enticed everyone to work harder and stick together through the setbacks that are inevitable in any industry. Most commitment companies avoided layoffs unless there was no other alternative. They invested heavily in training. There were higher levels of teamwork and psychological safety. Commitment companies might not have had lavish cafeterias, but they offered generous maternity leaves, daycare programs, and work-from-home options. These initiatives were not immediately cost-effective, but commitment firms valued making employees happy over quick profits—and as a result, workers tended to turn down higher-paying jobs at rival firms. And customers stayed loyal because they had relationships that stretched over years. Commitment firms dodged one of the business world’s biggest hidden costs: the profits that are lost when an employee takes clients or insights to a competitor.
• The “Pixar method” was modeled specifically on Toyota’s management techniques and became famous for empowering low-level animators to make critical choices. When Pixar’s leadership was asked to take over Disney Animation in 2008, executives introduced themselves with what became known as “the Toyota Speech,” “in which I described the car company’s commitment to empowering its employees and letting people on the assembly line make decisions when they encountered problems,” Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull later wrote. “I stressed that no one at Disney needed to wait for permission to come up with solutions. What is the point of hiring smart people, we asked, if you don’t empower them to fix what’s broken?”
• When people are allowed to stop the assembly line, redirect a huge software project, or follow an instinct, they take responsibility for making sure an enterprise will succeed.
• A culture of commitment and trust isn’t a magic bullet. It doesn’t guarantee that a product will sell or an idea will bear fruit. But it’s the best bet for making sure the right conditions are in place when a great idea comes along.

 

6. Decision Making: Forecasting the Future (and Winning at Poker) with Bayesian Psychology

• The lessons on probabilistic thinking offered by the GJP had instructed participants to think of the future not as what’s going to happen, but rather as a series of possibilities that might occur. It taught them to envision tomorrow as an array of potential outcomes, all of which had different odds of coming true.
• This is probabilistic thinking. It is the ability to hold multiple, conflicting outcomes in your mind and estimate their relative likelihoods. “We only live in one reality, and so when we force ourselves to think about the future as numerous possibilities, it can be unsettling for some people because it forces us to think about things we hope won’t come true.”
• Simply exposing participants to probabilistic training was associated with as much as a 50 percent increase in the accuracy of their predictions. Learning to think probabilistically requires us to question our assumptions and live with uncertainty. To become better at predicting the future—at making good decisions—we need to know the difference between what we hope will happen and what is more and less likely to occur.
• Don Moore, a professor at UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business
  • Some researchers call this ability to intuit patterns “Bayesian cognition” or “Bayesian psychology,” because for a computer to make those kinds of predictions, it must use a variation of Bayes’ rule, a mathematical formula that generally requires running thousands of models simultaneously and comparing millions of results.*  At the core of Bayes’ rule is a principle: Even if we have very little data, we can still forecast the future by making assumptions and then skewing them based on what we observe about the world.
  • “It’s incredible that we’re so good at making predictions with such little information and then adjusting them as we absorb data from life,” Tenenbaum told me. “But it only works if you start with the right assumptions.”

• So how do we get the right assumptions? By making sure we are exposed to a full spectrum of experiences. Our assumptions are based on what we’ve encountered in life, but our experiences often draw on biased samples. In particular, we are much more likely to pay attention to or remember successes and forget about failures.
• Many successful people, in contrast, spend an enormous amount of time seeking out information on failures. They read inside the newspaper’s business pages for articles on companies that have gone broke. They schedule lunches with colleagues who haven’t gotten promoted, and then ask them what went wrong.
• We all have a natural proclivity to be optimistic, to ignore our mistakes and forget others’ tiny errors. But making good predictions relies on realistic assumptions, and those are based on our experiences. If we pay attention only to good news, we’re handicapping ourselves.
• “The best entrepreneurs are acutely conscious of the risks that come from only talking to people who have succeeded,” said Don Moore, the Berkeley professor who participated in the GJP and who also studies the psychology of entrepreneurship. “They are obsessed with spending time around people who complain about their failures, the kinds of people the rest of us usually try to avoid.”
• This, ultimately, is one of the most important secrets to learning how to make better decisions. Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible. We need to sit in crowded and empty theaters to know how movies will perform; we need to spend time around both babies and old people to accurately gauge life spans; and we need to talk to thriving and failing colleagues to develop good business instincts.
• “But the difference between prejudice and Bayesian thinking is that I try to improve my assumptions as we go along. So once we start playing, if I see that the forty-year-old is a great bluffer, that might mean he’s a professional hoping everyone will underestimate him. Or, if the twenty-two-year-old is trying to bluff every hand, it probably means he’s some rich kid who doesn’t know what he’s doing. I spend a lot of time updating my assumptions because, if they’re wrong, my base rate is off.”
• How do we learn to make better decisions? In part, by training ourselves to think probabilistically. To do that, we must force ourselves to envision various futures—to hold contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously—and then expose ourselves to a wide spectrum of successes and failures to develop an intuition about which forecasts are more or less likely to come true. We can develop this intuition by studying statistics, playing games like poker, thinking through life’s potential pitfalls and successes, or helping our kids work through their anxieties by writing them down and patiently calculating the odds. Chris Sparks’s masterclass on decision making from poker 
• There are numerous ways to build a Bayesian instinct. Some of them are as simple as looking at our past choices and asking ourselves: Why was I so certain things would turn out one way? Why was I wrong? The goals are the same: to see the future as multiple possibilities rather than one predetermined outcome; to identify what you do and don’t know; to ask yourself, which choice gets you the best odds? Fortune-telling isn’t real. No one can predict tomorrow with absolute confidence.
• The people who make the best choices are the ones who work hardest to envision various futures, to write them down and think them through, and then ask themselves, which ones do I think are most likely and why?

 

7. Innovation: How Idea Brokers and Creative Desperation Saved Disney’s Frozen

• But almost all of the creative papers had at least one thing in common: They were usually combinations of previously known ideas mixed together in new ways. It was this combination of ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, that typically made a paper so creative and important.
  • A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as “combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo container. The power of combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling techniques. “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.” by drawing on their own lives as creative fodder. We all have a natural instinct to overlook our emotions as creative material. But a key part of learning how to broker insights from one setting to another, to separate the real from the clichéd, is paying more attention to how things make us feel. “Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.” People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel.

• We’re more likely to recognize discoveries hidden in our own experiences when necessity pushes us, when panic or frustrations cause us to throw old ideas into new settings. “creative desperation.”
• Gary Klein indicates that roughly 20 percent of creative breakthroughs are preceded by an anxiety akin to the stress that accompanied Frozen’s development, or the pressures Robbins forced onto his West Side Story collaborators. Effective brokers aren’t cool and collected. They’re often worried and afraid. 
• “Intermediate disturbances are critical,” Within biology, this has become known as the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, which holds that “local species diversity is maximized when ecological disturbance is neither too rare nor too frequent.”
• Valuable lesson: When strong ideas take root, they can sometimes crowd out competitors so thoroughly that alternatives can’t prosper. So sometimes the best way to spark creativity is by disturbing things just enough to let some light through.
• If you want to become a broker and increase the productivity of your own creative process, there are three things that can help: 
  • First, be sensitive to your own experiences. Pay attention to how things make you think and feel. That’s how we distinguish clichés from true insights. As Steve Jobs put it, the best designers are those who “have thought more about their experiences than other people.” Similarly, the Disney process asks filmmakers to look inward, to think about their own emotions and experiences until they find answers that make imaginary characters come alive. Jerry Robbins pushed his West Side Story collaborators to put their own aspirations and emotions on the stage. Look to your own life as creative fodder, and broker your own experiences into the wider world.
  • Second, recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isn’t a sign that everything is falling apart. Rather, it’s the condition that helps make us flexible enough to seize something new. Creative desperation can be critical; anxiety is what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways. The path out of that turmoil is to look at what you know, to reinspect conventions you’ve seen work and try to apply them to fresh problems. The creative pain should be embraced. By forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from a completely different perspective, by changing the power dynamics in the room or giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before. Disturbances are essential, and we retain clear eyes by embracing destruction and upheaval, as long as we’re sensitive to making the disturbance the right size.

 

“Creativity is just problem solving,”

• People who are most creative are the ones who have learned that feeling scared is a good sign. We just have to learn how to trust ourselves enough to let the creativity out.”

 

8. Absorbing Data: Turning Information into Knowledge in Cincinnati’s Public Schools

• “The quality of people’s decisions generally gets better as they receive more relevant information. But then their brain reaches a breaking point when the data becomes too much. They start ignoring options or making bad choices or stop interacting with the information completely.” Information blindness occurs because of the way our brain’s capacity for learning has evolved. Humans are exceptionally good at absorbing information—as long as we can break data into a series of smaller and smaller pieces. This process is known as “winnowing” or “scaffolding.”
• Mental scaffolds are like file cabinets filled with folders that help us store and access information when the need arises. “Our brains crave reducing things to two or three options,” One way to overcome information blindness is to force ourselves to grapple with the data in front of us, to manipulate information by transforming it into a sequence of questions to be answered or choices to be made. This is sometimes referred to as “creating disfluency” because it relies on doing a little bit of work: Instead of simply choosing the house wine, you have to ask yourself a series of questions (White or red? Expensive or cheap?).
• The point wasn’t to suggest a good idea. It was to generate an idea, any idea at all, and then test it. Most of the theories were duds initially. Employees had all kinds of hunches that didn’t bear up under testing. But as each experiment unfolded, workers became increasingly sensitive to patterns they hadn’t noticed before. They listened more closely.
• “When you track every call and keep notes and talk about what just happened with the person in the next cubicle, you start paying attention differently,” Fludd told me. “You learn to pick up on things.” This is how learning occurs. Information gets absorbed almost without our noticing because we’re so engrossed with the information. 
• “the engineering design process,” which forced students to define their dilemmas, collect data, brainstorm solutions, debate alternative approaches, and conduct iterative experiments. “The engineering design process is a series of steps that engineers follow when they are trying to solve a problem and design a solution for something; it is a methodical approach to problem solving,” The engineering design process was built around the idea that many problems that seem overwhelming at first can be broken into smaller pieces, and then solutions tested, again and again, until an insight emerges. The process asked students to define precisely the dilemma they wanted to solve, then to conduct research and come up with multiple solutions, and then conduct tests, measure results, and repeat the procedure until an answer was found. It told them to make problems more manageable until they fit into scaffolds and mental folders that were easier to carry around.
• What interested the researcher was how much each group struggled to adopt an opposing viewpoint once they had an initial frame for making a decision. Once a frame is established, that context is hard to dislodge. Frames can be uprooted, however, if we force ourselves to seek fresh vantage points. “Our brain wants to find a simple frame and stick with it, the same way it wants to make a binary decision,” “But when we teach people a process for reframing choices, when we give them a series of steps that causes a decision to seem a little bit different than before, it helps them take more control of what’s going on inside their heads.”
• One of the best ways to help people cast experiences in a new light is to provide a formal decision-making system—such as a flowchart, a prescribed series of questions, or the engineering design process—that denies our brains the easy options we crave. “Systems teach us how to force ourselves to make questions look unfamiliar,” said Johnson. “It’s a way to see alternatives.”
• The people who are most successful at learning—those who are able to digest the data surrounding them, who absorb insights embedded in their experiences and take advantage of information flowing past—are the ones who know how to use disfluency to their advantage. They transform what life throws at them, rather than just taking it as it comes.
• They know the best lessons are those that force us to do something and to manipulate information. They take data and transform it into experiments whenever they can. Whether we use the engineering design process or test an idea at work or simply talk through a concept with a friend, by making information more disfluent, we paradoxically make it easier to understand.
• No matter what constraints were placed on the groups, the students who forced themselves to use a more cumbersome note-taking method—who forced disfluency into how they processed information—learned more.
• In our own lives, the same lesson applies: When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data.
• If you read a book filled with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts to someone sitting next to you and you’ll be more likely to apply them in your life. When you find a new piece of information, force yourself to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend—and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the core of learning.
• Every choice we make in life is an experiment. Every day offers fresh opportunities to find better decision-making frames. But it only becomes useful if we know how to make sense of it. 

 

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

• Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate (to ourselves) that we are in control—and that we are moving toward goals that are meaningful. It’s that feeling of self-determination that gets us going. TO GENERATE MOTIVATION Make a choice that puts you in control. If you’re replying to emails, write an initial sentence that expresses an opinion or decision. If you need to have a hard conversation, decide where it will occur ahead of time. The specific choice itself matters less in sparking motivation than the assertion of control. Figure out how this task is connected to something you care about. Explain to yourself why this chore will help you get closer to a meaningful goal. Explain why this matters—and then, you’ll find it easier to start.

 

Goal setting. The big takeaway is you need two kinds of aims: 

• I needed a stretch goal, something to spark big ambitions.
• The SMART goal, to help me form a concrete plan.

 

TO SET GOALS: 

• Choose a stretch goal: an ambition that reflects your biggest aspirations. Then, break that into subgoals and develop SMART objectives. We aid our focus by building mental models—telling ourselves stories—about what we expect to see. To make sure I stayed focused on my stretch and SMART goals, I had to envision what I expected to happen when I sat down at my desk each morning. And so, every Sunday night, I got into a habit of taking a few moments with a pad and pen to imagine what the next day and week ought to look like. I usually chose three or four things I wanted to make sure happened, and made myself answer a series of questions:

 

TO STAY FOCUSED: 

• Envision what will happen. What will occur first? What are potential obstacles? How will you preempt them? Telling yourself a story about what you expect to occur makes it easier to decide where your focus should go when your plan encounters real life.

 

TO MAKE BETTER DECISIONS: 

• Envision multiple futures. By pushing yourself to imagine various possibilities—some of which might be contradictory—you’re better equipped to make wise choices. We can hone our Bayesian instincts by seeking out different experiences, perspectives, and other people’s ideas. By finding information and then letting ourselves sit with it, options become clearer. Probabilistic thinking: Envision multiple futures, and then force me to figure out which ones are most likely—and why.

 

TO MAKE TEAMS MORE EFFECTIVE: 

• Manage the how, not the who of teams. Psychological safety emerges when everyone feels like they can speak in roughly equal measure and when teammates show they are sensitive to how each other feel. If you are leading a team, think about the message your choices reveal. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you showing you are listening by repeating what people say and replying to questions and thoughts? Are you demonstrating sensitivity by reacting when someone seems upset or flustered? Are you showcasing that sensitivity, so other people will follow your lead?

 

TO MANAGE OTHERS PRODUCTIVELY: 

• Lean and agile management techniques tell us employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decision making authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success. 
• By pushing decision-making to whoever is closest to a problem, managers take advantage of everyone’s expertise and unlock innovation. A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and solutions, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored and that their mistakes won’t be held against them.

 

TO ENCOURAGE INNOVATION: 

• Creativity often emerges by combining old ideas in new ways—and “innovation brokers” are key. To become a broker yourself and encourage brokerage within your organization: 
  • Be sensitive to your own experiences. Paying attention to how things make you think and feel is how we distinguish clichés from real insights. Study your own emotional reactions. 
  • Recognize that the stress that emerges amid the creative process isn’t a sign everything is falling apart. Rather, creative desperation is often critical: Anxiety can be what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways. 
  • Finally, remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to alternatives. By forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from different perspectives, by giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before, we retain clear eyes.

 

TO ABSORB DATA BETTER: 

• When we encounter new information, we should force ourselves to do something with it. Write yourself a note explaining what you just learned, or figure out a small way to test an idea, or graph a series of data points onto a piece of paper, or force yourself to explain an idea to a friend. Every choice we make in life is an experiment—the trick is getting ourselves to see the data embedded in those decisions, and then to use it somehow so we learn from it.