List
Print This Post Print This Post

These three things are different. They represent three forms of decision making, but I suggest they also represent three different kinds of people. Call it personality, or genetic predisposition, or both. It’s important to understand these differences because in our organizations we have a mixture of the three. You as manager or leader would fall into some of these categories.  Ignoring the differences between them has a price, mostly in the form of driving each other mad.

‘Driving each other mad’ is a main feature of teams (top or otherwise), or any other form of social grouping, when people do not understand the impact of differences in ‘work preferences’ or their their different mental frames on decision making. Labelling it ‘we have a communication problem’ doesn’t help because it doesn’t mean anything. In fact most ‘communication problems’ have little to do with communication and more with differences in ‘zones of comfort’. Decision making is one of these zones.

Maximising implies making the most of the utility of things. Optimising, obtaining the best possible outcome from what is available. These two approaches are easy to understand although you see people, again and again, confusing one with the other. Far less entrenched in language is the concept of satisficing: declaring something good enough, once this is found amongst a number of alternatives. Satisficing is an old concept defined by Herbert A. Simon (psychologist, sociologist, economist) in 1956, ‘to explain the behaviour of decision makers under circumstances in which an optimal solution cannot be determined’.

The good maximiser needs to know and explore all possibilities in order to decide what the maximum benefit is. The optimiser will choose ‘the best possible outcome’ as a priority, and this may not be the maximum. The satisficer will shortcut quite a lot of the exploration and will make a decision once an acceptable threshold of ‘good’ or ‘desired’ has been found. I repeat, this is done at the expense of not looking at all possibilities and therefore, potentially missing something much better. Its not that the satisficer settles for just anything, but that his mind does a mental calculation: Is the cost of exploring all possibilities in order to maximise or optimise worth the effort, or is this good enough to decide, move on, and spend that energy somewhere else?

Lets say we go shopping. I need to buy a new suit. The big shopping mall has at least 10 places where I can buy it but I don’t know them particularly well, so I can’t go straight to the one that I like, and know that I should buy from. I start from the South and move up. I hit the first suit shop. I don’t like what I see. I keep moving and find the second. Here, there is a decent suit, good price and very suitable for what I need. I like it. The maximiser will say, keep it for me, I’ll come back later, and he will continue to visit the other eight shops until he has all the data to make a decision, which will based upon the best value for money. The optimiser will do the same but may buy the best, in his judgement (and concept of ‘optimum’) even if not the cheapest. Both will need to know what all the possibilities are, so both will visit the entire mall. The satisficer buys the suit in shop 2 and spends the time that it would have taken to visit the rest of the mall doing something else. His mind has asked the question: ‘Is it really worth spending three more hours here if the suit I have in front of me is great?’ And: ‘Get out, and finish that book at home before you get trapped in the rush hour traffic’.

The maximiser and optimiser think that the satisficer is lazy, or has bad judgement, or does not care much about suits other than getting one. The satisficer finds the others tedious, obsessive and trying to rationalise something (decision making for suits) that does not deserve this level of rationalisation.

The above are, of course caricatures. However, if you, as leader try to understand your people in terms of the mental models they are using for decision making, you may find yourself well advanced to avoiding conflicts and not simply reverting to labelling them ‘communication problems’.

Note 1: maximization and optimization are politically correct options in organizations.
Note 2: try to assess yourself on these criteria without using ‘it depends’ as the start of your sentence.
Note 3: you may think that you are a satisficer when buying suits and optimiser when writing a strategic plan. If so, imagine a strategic plan written with the ‘satisficer decision making’ hat. You may discover some major benefits.

Keep up with the Daily Thoughts

Twitter Email

Would you like to comment?

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To search my website, please use the form below.

  Daily Thoughts

September 27th, 2023

Redefining Talent Wealth

The war on talent McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it […]

September 8th, 2023

What I Learnt From The Monks: A Little Anthropology Of Leadership And Space On One Page

My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, […]

August 23rd, 2023

Can We Rescue DEI From Its Trap (The Label)?

Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about […]

August 10th, 2023

Restructuring to force collaboration, is likely to create more anxiety than collaboration. Structural solutions for behavioural problems hardly work.

Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. ´A people´ don’t talk to ´B people´; if […]

July 18th, 2023

The ‘Impossible To Disagree With’ School Of Management

‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have […]

June 29th, 2023

Large scale change is not small scale change repeated many times. Small wins repeated are lots of small wins.

Large scale change, as a series of cascading small scale interventions (often under the philosophy of ‘small wins’) has dominated […]

June 6th, 2023

Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have […]

May 19th, 2023

Value is an overused term in business and, as such, it’s becoming meaningless

Value, as usually used, means transactional monetary value. Usually it doesn’t mean intrinsic value, or value per se. For example, […]

May 4th, 2023

The importance of ‘critical thinking.’ Your own critical thinking is more effective at making your workplace better than any generic employee survey.

Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong. Here are three baskets full of concepts: Basket […]

April 21st, 2023

´Busy-Ness’ Is A Trap

I went to a big conference where I was introduced by the chairman like this: “Welcome everybody. Lovely to have […]

April 14th, 2023

Training and culture change. The love affair that ends in tears.

It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals […]

April 11th, 2023

Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-Habitants in team-work, riders in net-work

The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was […]

April 5th, 2023

3 Ways To Get Approval From Your CEO Or Your Leadership Team

Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us […]

March 29th, 2023

A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.

Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you […]

March 16th, 2023

Critical Thinking Self-Test: A 10 Point Health Check For Your Organization And Yourself. If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to put ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply.

Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply? Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure […]

March 9th, 2023

A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated […]

March 2nd, 2023

Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? Employee […]

February 24th, 2023

A simple question will jumpstart your organization into change. It will also save you from months of pain spent reorganizing your people and teams.

The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, […]

February 20th, 2023

Lead Via Peer-To-Peer Networks – If you don’t lead via peer-to-peer networks, you’re only driving your car in first gear.

Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the […]

February 7th, 2023

Write a script, not a strategic plan

If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, […]

January 26th, 2023

3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]

January 10th, 2023

Who should be involved in culture change? All inclusive versus going where the energy is.

Many times, in my consulting work, I find myself facing a dilemma: Do I involve many people on the client’s […]

December 23rd, 2022

Tell what won’t change – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

In any change programme that any organization wants to start, they will start by thinking of the things that they […]

December 16th, 2022

Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

When creating effective change in any organization, there are 40 rules that, in my experience, are the key between success […]

December 5th, 2022

Assets & Strengths Base – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

For more than 30 years I have been involved in ‘change’ in organizations. Again and again, some fundamental principles, and often […]

November 25th, 2022

Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change […]

October 31st, 2022

Hybrid or not hybrid? That’s not the question…

Culture is the new workplace If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of […]

October 24th, 2022

‘Powered by Viral Change™’: A Social Transformation Platform for the organization of the 21st Century

When we started to work on Viral Change™, as a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, and […]

October 14th, 2022

Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units or divisions. But these are not […]

October 7th, 2022

Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is […]