Delayed Decision Making

Frank Partnoy: I teach decision-making in my courses and do some research in the area, and although psychologists and behavioural economists and neuroscientists have told us a lot about how we make decisions and what kinds of decisions we should make and why we make certain decisions, they haven’t said much about when.

And I started thinking about a two-step process of decision- making, where first you ask the question, what is the maximum amount of time I can take for a decision, what kind of time world am I living in – is it a minute, is it a month, is it milliseconds? And then second, just the idea of exploring delay within that time world. So waiting as long as you possibly can within that time world. And one of the things that I found in the last several years of research was that applying that two-step process often leads to better decisions.

Female interviewer: Can you tell us how?

Frank Partnoy: It enables people to process information, to gather information, to get an advantage over others by having more time. And I found interviewing senior executives and senior government officials that they would wait until the last minute to react even when an employee would come in with something that looks like a crisis.

Because we are hardwired in certain ways to react quickly with certain biases, if we take time, if we pause, we can often either reduce or even eliminate some of those biases.

Female interviewer: So, when it comes to waiting to make a decision, how long is too long?

Frank Partnoy: There’s no science to this but there is a kind of guidance and a kind of wisdom that comes out of looking at different scenarios and having a database of expertise for different kinds of decisions. So, for example, apologies. We are taught as children that we should say we are sorry right away, that you should apologise instantly and often that is the case is the transgression is unintentional or minor or straightforward.

But if we have wronged someone in a more complex or intentional way, if we take a moment to think about what an apology could do, a lot of research supports this, we should delay our apologies as long as possible. It is counterintuitive but often waiting in the realm of days for apologies is the right amount of time and there are really two reasons for that. One reason is that a person who has been transgressed against, the victim, benefits from having additional time to process information about exactly what it is that you did, who was involved, why you did it, what the details were.

And if you apologise too quickly then the apology won’t reflect all of that information. And then the second reason is that if you delay an apology, you give the victim a chance to express their emotions. And again, if you apologise too quickly in a way you are taking that away from them. Now, if you wait a month or a year to apologise, it has probably taken too long.

But I think people, if they think about timing, will develop a king of intuition about how long different kinds of decisions should take.

Female interviewer: Today’s business world is incredibly fast-paced. What would you say to leaders or managers who feel that they simply don’t have time to wait?

Frank Partnoy: I think we always have time to wait and I was struck in interviews by how really the most senior and most successful people reacted to my questions and enquiries by just agreeing and saying they understand the crush of technology and the press of email and social media and 24 hour news, but they fight viciously against it and carve out large chunks of time for strategic thinking throughout the day. Many executives say that they only check email a couple of times a day. People at the bottom of an organisation really don’t have time to wait. They are expected to, and really need to, respond instantaneously to requests. And part of success as a leader, part of moving up within an organisation is really about being able to carve out time to wait, and as people move up the ladder, successful employees are those that are able to make big pictures, strategic decisions, add value in ways that require more thinking time and thought. The challenge is to create that time.

Female interviewer: We normally think of procrastination as a bad thing. Do you believe that we should embrace it instead?

Frank Partnoy: When we are talking about procrastination, instead of using that loaded term we might be better off using the term, managing delay, so that we are thinking more actively and to justify post- managing delay against just being lazy. Psychologists view the distinction between what they call active procrastination and passive procrastination. Passive procrastination is just being lazy, lying around on your sofa not doing anything and no one thinks that that’s a good idea. But active procrastination is putting things off but putting them off in a more conscious active way.

Female interviewer: So, should we always wait before making a decision?

Frank Partnoy: Sometimes we shouldn’t wait. Sometimes things need to be done right now. Sometimes there really is a crisis. The key studies that Gary Klein did of decision-making with fire-fighters show that often times fire-fighters can use their intuition when they are experts and react quickly and do so in a very informed and accurate way and that those were kind of situations where there is no need to wait, if we are prepared and we know what all the problems and contingencies are, we should go ahead and act right then and there is no need to wait.

But when we are confronted with a new scenario and we are not necessarily an expert, there is one example of a group of fire- fighters who arrived at a fire and it was burning hot and they couldn’t figure out why the heat wasn’t dissipating, whereas normally they would rush in with hoses and try to put the thing out, they sensed that something was wrong but they weren’t experts and they waited and delayed actually for more than a day and they ultimately discovered that there was a gigantic pipe underneath the fire, pumping oil into and feeding the fire, and if they had gone in right away, as their intuition might have told them, they all would have died.

So, a lot of the question has to do with whether we’re an expert and whether we understand all of the variables or whether we just think we are an expert and actually are a novice confronting a new situation, in which case we could use more time.

Female interviewer: Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 best seller Blink explores the concept of thinking without thinking. Would you say that Wait is a direct challenge to Blink?

Frank Partnoy: I loved Blink. I loved reading Malcolm Gladwell. I thought it was a fascinating book and the last third of the book is actually devoted to the dangers of snap decision-making.

And so I’d describe Wait as more of a friendly amendment to the actual book Blink but one of the problems with the way Blink was received was that people read it as being just a book about the benefits of snap reactions and some of that was because of some of the rhetoric in Blink that says it a book about the first two seconds and two seconds became a kind of mantra that two seconds is the best, you know, optimal amount of time to take in reacting.

And so, Wait is very much pushing against that idea and in fact in the social sciences and among psychologists and economists and neuroscientists, they have really pushed back against that idea since Blink was published in 2005 and have shown repeatedly that two seconds is not the right amount of time.

It is undeniable that we as human beings are very good at what some researchers call ‘thin slicing’, that we get huge amounts of information very quickly about a person’s faith, about a scenario. There is danger associated with thin slicing. We often have snap reactions that are not accurate or that are biased in certain ways. We’re often better at getting information about scenarios if we take longer. So, if we want to learn something about someone’s personality, we’re much better off taking a minute or even an hour or longer to glean information. And in fact, even studies that were featured in Blink, the people who were involved in those studies who advocate thin slicing, have shown that we’re better off if we slice thicker, that thick slicing is sometimes preferable to thin slicing.

And so even, for example, John Gottman, the psychologist who famously was depicted in Blink as being able to tell whether a couple would stay together just by observing them for a short period of time, even his original studies weren’t for two seconds, they were for minutes. But when John Gottman wants to figure out whether a couple will stay together and he is serious about it, he invites them to his private island for two days.

Female interviewer: So how can these ideas be applied in the workplace?

Frank Partnoy: I think there are a number of specific changes that organisations can implement.

The first I would say is to build intentional pauses into the work day as often as you can to fight against the crush of technology. One of the simplest is lunch. To create instances for people to take time out for lunch to break the day up, to spend lunch with each other, talking through problems face-to-face. Those are the kind of optimal interactions that lead to creative breakthroughs and that have a kind of rich context.

Another is to rethink the speed at which people are expected to respond to email. In particular, I think email is one of the most insidious kinds of demands on work time and there are various ways to do this but one is to create a kind of chit system within an organisation where you only have the right to have a certain number of emails responded instantaneously to, that the expectation within the organisation is not that emails will be responded to right away and that it’s okay to delay them.

People in organisations also can think about the pernicious effect of being charged out by the hour. One of the things research has shown is that when we start to be paid by the hour, we start to think about our time as being measured in hourly increments, even if it’s leisure time. And so you will have less happy employees if you pay them by the hour. They will start to think about going to a kid’s sporting event as costing them several hundred dollars; they’ll start to think about time with the family as trading off with hourly work. Most companies who develop innovative products are working on them over a period not of seconds or days or months, but years or even decades.

So, the overall message is to take a step back, resist the way we are hardwired to react to technology and wait.

Female interviewer: Do you have any final thoughts to share with us?

Frank Partnoy: There’s a dog on the cover of Wait with a bone on its snout and it is showing how it is able to delay gratification and it’s a kind of role model for us delaying gratification. But what distinguishes us as human beings really is that we have the capacity to think about the future for much longer than an animal can and as technology overwhelms us and we start to think about the future less and less and we start to live in the present much more, we’re in some sense becoming less human or at least harnessing less of what is uniquely human, what we are uniquely capable of doing.

If there is one word of advice, that’s the title of the book, we should wait and that would harness more of our human potential.

Female interviewer: Thank you for listening to our interview with Frank Partnoy. If you are interested in finding out more about decision-making, why not take a look at some of the other audio and written resources in your toolkit?