Sidetracked

Francesca Gino: So, I think flexibility is certainly an important component when we think about developing plans and adjusting as we implement them. But, too often, I think we have great plans and we thought a lot about our goals and what we want to reach, and flexibility is not an issue because, in fact, we identified the goals that would be fantastic for us, or for the organizations that we work for. And these are particularly situations where maybe there isn't a lot of ambiguity or uncertainty, and so the issue really is how we can best implement our plans, and those are the situations that I studied. And even in those situations where actually sticking to the plan is a good idea, rather than continuing to adjust the plan as we implement it, in those cases we get sidetracked, and so I was curious and interested in trying to understand why that happens and what we can do to actually stick to the plan. But I'm not saying that flexibility is not important, especially when there is a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity in the situation that we're facing, and remaining flexible and adjusting the plan is certainly important.

Rachel Salaman: In your book, "Sidetracked," you outline nine principles for sticking to the plan. How did you decide on that number, particularly since some of them are quite closely related?

Francesca Gino: I decided to discuss nine ways in which we can get sidetracked, the nine principles to stay on track, based on what I thought were the most critical forces that derail our decisions. So, as I say in the introduction to the book, I spent quite some time, it's over 10 years of studying ways in which we get sidetracked and ways in which we can stick to the plan, and what is interesting is that there are some common themes that emerged from my research, and there ended up being nine of them, and, as you read in the book, I categorized the nine forces and the nine principles under three main brackets. So, I talk about forces from within, and I talk about three of them, forces from our relationships with others, and again I talk about three of them, and then forces from the outside world, and again three forces. And, for each of them, I discuss a principle that can help us reach our goals and stay on track. So, the decision of the nine principles and the nine forces were really driven by examining the ones that I thought were the most critical and the most important, and also the ones that get in trouble in terms of derailing our decisions most often.

Rachel Salaman: Let's talk about the first principle, which is, "raise your awareness." Could you tell us what you mean by that?

Francesca Gino: Yes, so one of the forces from within that I discuss is having views of ourselves that are overly positive. So, I think the best example of this (which is also a little bit funny) is a survey that was conducted in the U.S. by "U.S. News and World Report" in 1997, where people were asked, "Who is the most likely to go to heaven?" And they had to rate different people. So, for example, Bill Clinton was one of them, and, if I remember correctly, got a 57 percent chance of going to heaven, and then Michael Jordan was a little bit higher. But, the most interesting ones were Mother Theresa, who got a 79 percent chance of going to heaven according to the respondents, and then the respondents themselves gave themselves an 87 percent chance of going to heaven. So I think this is a very nice illustration of what I mean by an "overly positive view of ourselves." So, we think that we are better than Mother Theresa when it comes to good deeds that we do in our daily life, and so we have better chances of going to heaven. And, so, the principle that I talk about, raising your awareness, means raising your awareness of the ways in which we think too positively about ourselves, and on a series of dimensions from how good we are at making decisions, from how nice we are to other people, we think too highly of ourselves and that comes in the way of us making good decisions and actually implementing our plans. So, raising our awareness should allow us to recognize that this is the case, and being able to adjust our views of ourselves so that we are a little bit more truthful and our views are less inflated.

Rachel Salaman: So, what are some ways that people can become more aware of the true situation?

Francesca Gino: I'll answer the question by telling you about how this particular force from within can come in the way of good decision making and can sidetrack us. So, one area where I studied the consequences of having a too-positive view of ourselves is in the realm of advice taking. So, if you think about our daily life, both in our professional life and in our personal life, there are a lot of situations where we receive advice from others, and oftentimes the advice is quite good, and, in fact, there is quite a bit of research suggesting that being open to the opinions and perspectives of others will lead to better decisions, simply because we were looking at the situation or a decision from a different perspective, and they are likely to have something useful to say about it. So, having a view of our skills and competence that is inflated and is too positive can lead us to completely discount the advice that we receive from others, and, so, instead of reaching better decisions thanks to a different perspective, we reach worse decisions and we get sidetracked. So, raising our awareness in this case means just asking the question of, "Am I actually giving too much weight to my own opinions because I think too highly of myself and my competence and my perspective, and should I revisit what other people are saying about this decision or course of action so that I can reach a better decision?" So, a lot of the principles like raising your awareness are about really asking the question of, "Am I actually considering the potential working of this particular force from within?"

Rachel Salaman: The second principle is, "Take your emotional temperature." Can you give us an example of how emotions can derail us?

Francesca Gino: Yes, even here for this principle there is a funny example that I think is going to resonate with a lot of people, and it's an example from a movie, "Defending Your Life," where the protagonist is preparing for a negotiation where he's going to negotiate his salary with his boss. And, in order to prepare, he actually decides to have a role play with his wife the day before, and it's interesting because he has a salary in mind and it's very strict, so whenever his wife tries to come up with offers that are not as good as the one that he has in mind, he pushes back. In this first scene he is negotiating with his wife, where he's doing an excellent job of sticking to his plan of not accepting an offer that is lower than what he thinks is fair for his own salary, but then you see another scene where he actually is negotiating with his boss and his boss starts off the discussion with an offer that is lower than what he wanted, in fact is almost $20,000 lower, and, without even letting his boss finish, this protagonist actually accepts the offer. I think that that's a great example of how emotions can derail us. In that case the protagonist failed to anticipate the anxiety that he would feel negotiating with his boss, and so he wasn't prepared to deal with that emotion and he ended up reaching an outcome that is not what he wanted. What is interesting about the research on emotions is that in the case I've just mentioned the emotion was actually triggered by the situation the person was in, so he was anxious because of the negotiation with his boss, and he's a person who is going to have some control over him doing his job. But, there are also situations where emotions are not triggered by the situation at hand. So, an example of that is when I was once in the car with an executive going to his office, and we were talking about the meeting that was about to happen and that I was supposed to observe where he was going to receive perspective from different team members on an important decision that the company had to make. And, on the way to the office, this was Los Angeles, we got stuck in traffic for quite some time and you could see from his face how he was getting angrier and angrier by all the traffic that we encountered on the way to the office. By the time we got to the office we didn't have the chance to really prepare for the meeting, and this was something that he really wanted to do, and obviously I was just interested in getting more thoughts before getting into the meeting, and it was clear during the meeting that he was still angry for what he experienced before, even if the anger of being stuck in traffic is something that had nothing to do with being in the current meeting. And, so, because of that anger, I think he was unable to be open to the various perspectives that were being voiced during the meeting, and so he ended up really making decisions based on his own view, rather than the views of the team. So, that is a situation where an emotion that was triggered by something different carried over to the new event, and the principle of taking your emotional temperature should help, in this case by helping us recognize that the emotions that we feel right now as we are facing an important decision, may not be relevant to the decision at hand and so they may actually sidetrack us.

Rachel Salaman: So, it's about self-control?

Francesca Gino: In a sense it is, it's being aware of the fact that emotions might tell us something important about the situation, but in a lot of cases they really derail our decisions, especially when we failed to anticipate them, as in the case of the negotiation that I talked about before. Anger is actually one that is quite interesting, more in the negotiation context, because oftentimes the anger that we experience, may be because we are dealing with a difficult counterpart, really derails us in terms of leading us to make arguments that sometimes are completely irrational and they have nothing to do with the plan that we had in mind prior to coming to the negotiation table. It's actually not only negotiation, you can think about how that happens sometimes when we have conflicts with our partner or spouse, I think that we experience the same type of dynamics where we end up forgetting why we're even discussing the topic in the first place, and we're just angry and making irrational requests or irrational arguments.

Rachel Salaman: Moving on to the third principle in your book, it's "zoom out," which advises us to always try to see the bigger picture. Can you explain how this differs from your first principle, which was "raise your awareness," because they're quite closely related aren't they?

Francesca Gino: Yes, so both "raise your awareness" and "zoom out" are principles that I discuss when talking about forces from within, and raising your awareness is more about stopping and thinking about becoming more aware of the subtle influences that derail our decisions, and, in particular, the influence of thinking too positively about our competence and capability. So, if you think about the strategy that you would use in the case of losing weight, for example, which is also something that I mention in the book. So, in that case you would exercise more frequently and you would start paying more attention to what you eat, and you might go as far as using a diary where you count your own calories, and that would help you stay on track. Raising your awareness, in a sense, is doing the same thing in the case of staying on track when it comes to implementing your plans, and you are being more careful of the fact that we think too highly or too positively of our competence and capabilities. Zooming out is a little bit different because it's a principle that helps us with a different force that comes in the way of good decision making, and the force there is having too much of a narrow focus when we look at our decisions, so oftentimes the narrow focus is due to the fact that maybe because we have these positive views we focus too much on our own opinions and perspectives, and we fail to zoom out and look at how the perspective of others or other information that we should consider is affecting the broader picture. So, they are definitely related, but I think they point to helping us address two different forces. Raising your awareness helps us stay on track in terms of considering the influence that having too overly positive views of ourselves might figure, and zooming out instead involves widening our focus when considering information such that we are not too narrowly focused when we are considering the broader picture.

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Rachel Salaman: That leads on quite nicely to the second set of principles in your book, which is "forces from our relationships," and the fourth principle, which is the first one in this section, is "take the other party's point of view." So, could you give an example of how that works?

Francesca Gino: Yes, so again think about the context of negotiation for a second. This is one of the contexts where I've done the research on this principle, and also the force from our relationships that this principle helps us address. If you were to think about some of the things that you want in a negotiation, or some of the things that you are bringing out as arguments to support the fact that you want certain things in this negotiation, oftentimes we find some resistance from the counterpart and we really have a hard time understanding why there is so much resistance. And, instead, if we were to use the principle of taking the other party's perspective we could realize that maybe the other party is feeling different or the same on certain issues in the negotiation and that's what is causing the resistance. So, for any decision or any negotiation issues, there are usually multiple perspectives that could be used, and often we are too stuck on our own rather than putting ourselves in others' shoes, and, in a sense, I think the taking others' perspectives sounds like a very intuitive principle, and, yet, too often we fail to predict how others are going to see the same situation. Another fun context where I applied this principle is in the context of gift giving, and I thought that that was an interesting context to study because we have a lot of experience being on either side of the exchange. So, sometimes we are givers of gifts and sometimes we are receivers of gifts, and yet even though we have that experience, when it comes the time to figure out which gift to buy for another person, we fail to put ourselves in the shoes of the receiver, and so we end up buying gifts that the other person doesn't appreciate as much as we think they should or they would.

Rachel Salaman: So, in your experience do you think it's just a matter of practice being able to put yourself in the other person's shoes - is it really about consciously forcing yourself to do it and practicing?

Francesca Gino: Exactly. And really asking the question of "what would the other party think about this, or do when facing this situation?" So, it's asking the question and then really practicing.

Rachel Salaman: The fifth principle is an interesting one, it's "question your bonds," which is an unusual idea. What do you mean by this?

Francesca Gino: We are obviously social human beings and so our relationship with others is definitely important to our wellbeing and to our happiness, but what we don't realize is that oftentimes the social bonds come in the way of good decision making. So, one of the examples that I used for my own research in the book is about ethical decision making, and I used this set of research to study because I think that most people when thinking about their ethics think that they have a very strong moral compass and nothing is going to sway it. In reality my research shows that social factors like our bonds with others can really derail our decisions. So, just to give you an example, I conducted a series of research projects where I was interested in looking at whether the behavior of others when they cheat or when they behave unethically influences our own, and so what I found was that, yes, this is in fact the case. If we observe another person who we feel psychologically connected to, maybe because we are similar, we are peers, we are friends, we are colleagues, if that person engages in unethical behavior we are more likely to engage in unethical behavior, too, even when we set out to be moral and ethical people. So, questioning your bonds is a principle that should help us examine the links and similarities that we have with the people around us, and it should make us reflect on whether those links and bonds are actually derailing our decisions. Again we should be asking the question whether we are behaving in a certain way or we are choosing a certain course of action just because another person that we feel similar to is following that course of action.

Rachel Salaman: The next principle is "check your reference point." And you have a really nice example in the book about two job offers, I wonder if you could share that?

Francesca Gino: Yes, so it's a different principle because, once again, it acts on a different force, and the force that I discuss in this case is social comparison. So, across all sorts of dimensions when we try to evaluate ourselves, we tend to look at others, and what is interesting is that the comparisons that we make between ourselves and others are comparisons where we may fall short, for example, not as good on a certain dimension when we compare ourselves to our peers and colleagues then we may experience distress and envy, and those types of feelings might actually lead to dysfunctional behaviors. So, in the book I applied this by talking about some research that was conducted where the dimension of comparison is related to money, and these types of wealth-based comparisons are actually quite salient, and once again they might derail us. So, imagine that you just graduated from an MBA program, and this is exactly the type of question and scenario that people were facing in this particular research, and now you're looking for a job, so this should be a common situation, so you have two offers. Let's actually consider the first offer from a consulting firm, and the offer is going to expire at the end of the day and you have no chance to negotiate it further, and the offer is from a company where your salary is going to be $75,000 a year (or you can make it £75,000 a year), and it's widely known that this firm pays all starting MBAs from top schools at $75,000 a year. So, just take a second to consider the situation and how you'd feel about that job offer, and the question that I want to ask you is, "How likely do you think you would be to accept it?" Now let's consider a slightly different situation for a different offer. In this case the offer is from a different company and your salary is £85,000, a year and it's widely known that this firm is paying some other graduating student from your own program £95,000 a year. The question that I want to ask you is, "How likely do you think you would be to accept this offer?" And what is interesting is that the second offer is one where we might feel that, in comparison to others, we are not doing as well because others are being paid more. And so it turns out that a lot of people prefer the first offer rather than the second one, which is completely irrational if you think about it, because you are accepting a job that pays less, knowing that everybody else like you is being paid the same amount, rather than a job where you could get more, but you know that other people are getting paid more than you will.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose in that particular example it might reflect on your attitude to the employer; you might think the employer isn't being fair in the second scenario.

Francesca Gino: Yes, you might have that reaction, but what this type of research tends to suggest is that we just don't like to fall short on this type of social comparison. In fact, this is actually research that goes beyond the scenarios of job offers. In another interesting set of studies a scholar from the University of Michigan has looked at what we do when we evaluate, for example, candidates applying for jobs, so, in this case, we are on the side of being in the role of, for example, managers evaluating other people. So, imagine the following situation: you're evaluating a person who is very good on a dimension you are very good at. So, for example it could be creativity or innovativeness, and it turns out that you would find that candidate a little bit threatening to you because you don't want another person who is as good as you are, or maybe better than you are, on that particular dimension, and so you'd rather choose another candidate who is good on a different dimension but not as good on the dimension that you think you are particularly good at. So, once again we fall short potentially on these social comparisons, and as a result of it we engage in behaviors that can be quite dysfunctional and costly for the groups or organizations we work for.

Rachel Salaman: Let's move onto the third part of your book, which is about forces from the outside, the last three principles that you talk about. One of these is "investigate and question the frame," and to illustrate this you include a great story about a campaign photograph of Teddy Roosevelt. Could you share that story with us?

Francesca Gino: Yes, it's a wonderful illustration of that principle, this is a story that brings us back to the early 1900s. So, Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 ran for president, and there was something really interesting about his presidential campaign. At some point the campaign manager realized that he made a mistake; he printed out three million campaign brochures using a photograph of the potential president without asking permission of the copyright owner. The campaign manager realizes the error before the brochures are distributed and he has to decide what to do. Now, take a few seconds imagining what you would do in this situation, but let me tell you about what he ended up doing. He ended up sending a telegram to the copyright owner saying, "Planning to distribute three million copies of campaign speech with photographs, excellent publicity opportunity for photographers, how much are you willing to pay to use the photographs, respond immediately." And the photographers replied by saying, "Appreciate opportunity, but can only afford $250." So, this is a wonderful example of a situation where the campaign manager, you could argue, was in a situation of weakness, but he thought very carefully about the situation, and, in a sense, he applied the principle that we were talking about earlier of putting himself in the other person's shoes. And he understood that, in order to reach a good deal, he had to really think carefully about how to present the argument to the other party and how to frame it, and so I think this is a wonderful example of thinking carefully about how you can control the frame, and, thanks to that framing, figuring a certain behavior in your counterpart.

Rachel Salaman: The last principle in the book is, "Make your standards shine," and this touches on ethics. What did you discover about the difference lighting makes to sticking to a plan?

Francesca Gino: I conducted some research on the effect of lighting on our decision making, when it comes to wanting to be good and moral and actually end up being unethical and immoral. What we were interested in was comparing situations where there is a lot of light, for example, in a room and situations where the light is a little bit dim, and we used that as a proxy to affect how anonymous people feel, and it turns out that if you put, for example, people in a room where there is dim lighting they feel a sense of anonymity, even if you can actually see them or they can see the actions that they're engaging in, but from a psychological perspective they have this sense of anonymity, and that is enough to lead them to be more likely to engage in unethical behavior. And, what I think is really striking about that research is that such a subtle force from the outside world, in this case the amount of lighting, can really affect us psychologically by making us feel anonymous, and, as a result of it can also affect our decisions, and, in this case, making us more likely to engage in unethical behavior.

Rachel Salaman: From your research, how difficult do people find it to stick to an ethical decision, and what keeps them on track when the lighting is low, metaphorically speaking?

Francesca Gino: Both situational and social forces can lead us astray when it comes to trying to stick to the plan of being moral and ethical, what does help keeping us on track is simple reminders. So, let me tell you about a research project where we studied exactly that. So, in this case, we worked with an insurance company where people fill out forms where they indicate the number of miles that they drove the prior year, and we worked with this company to try to move the location of the signature on the form. So, usually in this type of form, but also in many other forms that we tend to fill out, for example, for our taxes, we report our numbers and then at the end we sort of sign next to a pledge of honesty that says the numbers that I reported are correct and truthful. Now, what we did for half of the customers is produce a form where they actually sign at the beginning prior to reporting the numbers, and that signing is a reminder for people of the fact that they care about being ethical and moral, and we actually found a difference of about 2,500 miles per car just by that simple intervention, suggesting that signing up front and having that type of reminder is more likely to keep us on track and make us more honest.

Rachel Salaman: We've covered a lot of ground here, what do you think are the one or two most important take away lessons?

Francesca Gino: I think that our two main lessons that I'm hoping the book is going to bring out, the first one is that we often think that we are swayed and moved by very big factors or arguments, and I think the book teaches us, I hope, that we can be really swayed by very subtle forces that come from within, from our relationship or from the outside world. The second lesson is that there is something we can do about it. So, I think in trying to apply the nine principles that I discuss in the book we can be better at sticking to our plan, but we can also be better in trying to understand the decisions that other people are making that seem totally puzzling to us and we can figure out ways in which we can help them stick to their plans.

Rachel Salaman: Francesca Gino, thank you very much for joining us.

Francesca Gino: Rachel, thank you so much for having me.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Francesca's book again is "Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed And How We Can Stick To The Plan." You can find out more about her and her work at www.francescagino.com. I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.