Dr.
Iyengar delivers another great video and set of ideas! I first thought that this was the same video
from MSLD500, however this one was completely different in that it provided 4
ways for individuals and businesses to cope with the large amount of choice that
is available to us. Her 4 ideas – cut,
concretize, categorize, and condition – allow people to get better at making
decisions by eliminating the excess. I
personally thought that cutting out the excess was the most useful to the
common person and I found her research on conditioning also very interesting.
As a
naval officer, cutting out choice is something that is ingrained in us from the
first moments we take the deck and the conn as officer of the deck. On a submarine, that watch is the end all – the
next stop is the CO – when it comes to making decisions. As a result, you can have a ton of
information bombarding you at critical times when decisions must be made. Through training, you learn to look/listen
for key pieces of information to help you make your decision while allowing
less important information to pass through your ears without interrupting your
thought process. This is not saying that
the extra information is useless however.
All information is relevant at some point or another and only very
little information is relevant all of the time.
Your job as OOD is to differentiate between the two quickly, thus cutting
out the excess choices that result from excess information, in order to
effectively/safely fight the ship. I
think this kind of mentality (cutting excess) could go a long way in helping
the public writ large; however I do think they already do it, they just need to
apply it more frequently. Take for
example buying a car. There are
literally hundreds of different makes and models for you to choose from. I would say it is safe to assume that many
people cut excess choices from their car buying experience by first removing
the cars that have excessive price tags, then removing the types of cars that
you don’t want (for example they don’t want a crossover), and then continue the
narrowing process until they have only a couple of choices to choose from. In this case it is easy to remove superfluous
choices because you can’t afford many of them.
On the other hand, people have a hard time applying these same
principles when they can afford all of the choices, as was the case with the
Jam jars. If they instead removed the
extra choices available to them and concentrated on just a few, perhaps the
sales percentage might go up.
I
found the conditioning study to be very interesting. Although I can’t say I’ve ever taken a test
like the one from the study where the choices available either decreased or
increased, what I can say is that I would probably find myself being exhausted
as the number of choices available increased.
If instead I knock out the tough choices first, I would think I would be
saying to myself that I am happy I only have to choose between a few options
vice the 56 different colors as the study moved forward. Conditioning your brain to deal with excess
does make sense from an operational standpoint though – this is probably one of
the reasons officers progress through different ranks while attaining higher
responsibility vice just starting off with the whole problem. By placing a young officer in a position to
deal with small amounts of information/choices, you can teach them methods to
deal with the amount of information coming at them so that when they are more
senior, they can draw from the experience.
