Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris How To Stop Overthinking and Make Better Decisions | Bidhan (Bobby) Parmar About this episode A Darden School of Business professor explains how to use doubt to your advantage.
Bidhan (Bobby) Parmar, PhD, MBA https://www.radicaldoubt.com/, is the Shannon G. Smith Bicentennial Professor of Business Administration and Associate Dean for Faculty Development at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses on business ethics, collaboration, and creative and critical thinking.
In this episode we talk about:
The common human allergy to discomfort and uncertainty The benefits of doubt The difference between choice fatigue and 'analysis paralysis' The nine subtle signs of analysis paralysis Why we need to be paying more attention to process vs. outcome How to have confidence in the face of doubt The role of rupture and repair in relationships The crucial final steps in the decision-making process – specifically one Bobby calls "After Action Reviews" And much more
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Additional Resources:
9 Subtle Signs of 'Analysis Paralysis' https://parade.com/living/analysis-paralysis radicaldoubt.com http://radicaldoubt.com/
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Transcript 15,070 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:31 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:46 Dan Harris? Hey, hey, how we doing, everybody? For so many of us, when we're in a moment of doubt, our system glitches and shuts down. We do not like it. We don't like not knowing what to do. It raises all sorts of questions about our competence and confidence. We want a simple answer. As I have said many times before on this show, it is one of the design flaws in the human operating system. We live in a complex, fluxing universe, and yet, we hate uncertainty. But my guest today argues that those moments of doubt, handled correctly, are actually massive opportunities. Of course, the trick is handling them correctly, and that's what my guest is going to teach us how to do. Bobby Parmar teaches at the prestigious Darden School of Business
1:31 Dan Harris? at the University of Virginia. He's got a new book. It's called Radical Doubt: Turning Uncertainty Into Sure-Fire Success. We talk about the common human allergy to discomfort and uncertainty, the benefits of doubt, the difference between choice fatigue and analysis paralysis, the nine subtle signs that you're in a state of analysis paralysis, why we need to be paying more attention to process instead of outcome, how to have confidence in the face of doubt, the role of rupture and repair in relationships, the crucial final steps in any decision-making process, specifically something Bobby calls after-action reviews.
2:08 Dan Harris? And much more. As you may know, the Buddha had a lot to say about the benefits of maintaining an open mind, of not clinging to your views, even if it's uncomfortable, especially if it's uncomfortable. So if you want to learn more about how to train that skill, today's episode comes with a custom guided meditation from our teacher of the month, Jeff Warren. It's called How to Let Thoughts Go. I should say these custom guided meditations are only for subscribers over on DanHarris.com. If you sign up, you get all of the meditations that come with our podcast episodes, and you get to come to our weekly live meditation and Q and A sessions. We do these every Tuesday at four. The next one is coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, December 16th. I'm going to host an unusual and very fun session where I will
2:48 Dan Harris? be joined by some special guests. It will be unveiling details of an exciting new project in 10% happier world. More to come on that. We'll get started with Dr. Bobby Parmar, right after this.
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4:04 Dan Harris? Dr. Bobby Parmar, welcome to the show. Thanks so much.
4:07 Speaker 04 For having me on.
4:08 Dan Harris? Pleasure. Okay, let me just get a little background on you. How did you get so interested in this subject of doubt?
4:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, great question. So, you know, growing up as a first generation American Indian, I felt like I was always sitting at the intersection of different cultures, different practices, and a lot of my life growing up was filled with doubt. Is this how I'm supposed to act at school? Is this how I'm supposed to act at home? How am I supposed to ask someone out when that's not something that happens in my culture? And so, you know, we say that all research is really me search. And so, ultimately, I wanted to understand my own experience of dealing with multiple conflicting interpretations. And then, when I got my PhD and started to teach in a business school, I noticed that many of my students were dealing with very similar themes, maybe not in the exact same way that I was, but they experienced doubt. They didn't know how to handle it in the context of
5:00 Speaker 04 their decisions. And I felt like this was a great way of really making a contribution and understanding something deeply human.
5:07 Dan Harris? Yeah, I see it. I see how it resonates so deeply with you, and I can see how it's a huge problem in the culture. Before we go deeper into like what to do about it, I wonder if we could define some terms. One of the terms you use is choice fatigue. Another is analysis paralysis. Can you define those and maybe distinguish between them?
5:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, for sure. So, choice fatigue is something that happens to all of us when we face multiple choices and we're not quite sure which one to pick. So, the best example of this is something that happens to me all the time when I go to the grocery store and I'm trying to pick a bottle of ketchup and there are like 45 options of ketchup and I'm not quite sure which one to pick and why I would pick a certain one. And just having so many options leads to something that we call choice fatigue. Analysis paralysis is related, but distinct in the sense that analysis paralysis can happen only when you have two options and you're not sure which one to pick. But it's the rumination, it's rethinking and thinking over and over again about which option to choose and
6:08 Speaker 04 why you might choose one versus another, and collecting data and asking more and more folks, but delaying making a decision. And so, sometimes when we think that there's a right answer out there, the best way to get to that right answer is by analyzing the hell out of a problem. And we can get stuck doing that and not actually testing and learning and finding smart ways of making that decision.
6:30 Dan Harris? I have a million questions on that score, but just staying lexical for a second. If I understand it correctly, choice fatigue is a kind of a symptom of the societal situation in which we find ourselves right now. We're overwhelmed with information and choices, et cetera, et cetera. Analysis paralysis can happen as a result, but it sounds like a particular pitfall in the current environment.
6:58 Speaker 04 Absolutely. You know, another example is when you're choosing what to watch on Netflix. There's just so many different options. It's very hard to pick which one. Should I invest time in this new series or this, you know, new show? But analysis paralysis can happen even when you're choosing like, hey, should I keep my kid in the school or should I pull them out and go to another school? Because the stakes are so high and we really want to make the right decision.
7:21 Dan Harris? Yes.
7:21 Speaker 04 And so we're just constantly going back and forth and not actually acting.
7:26 Dan Harris? Just picking up on the stakes are so high and we really want to make the right decision. Do you think perfectionism, which previous guests on this show have argued is on the rise in our culture, do you think perfectionism is a major contributing factor to analysis paralysis?
7:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, I absolutely think that. All throughout our education, we learn that being smart means getting the right answer. And then we hit a point in our lives where there isn't a single right answer to get.
7:53 Dan Harris? Yeah.
7:54 Speaker 04 And we apply those old models to our new problems. And so I talk about helping people make the transition from being right answer getters to becoming better answer makers. And becoming a better answer maker means dealing with doubt effectively, means running small experiments, testing hypotheses, not getting caught up on getting the right answer, but learning to get to something that is workable, usable, good enough.
8:20 Dan Harris? So in order to make that transition from right answer getter to better answer maker, in order to make that transition, you really do have to wrestle with your perfectionism.
8:32 Speaker 04 That's right. Absolutely. If you're trying to get the perfect answer, well, most of us are trained to get the perfect answer by more analysis.
8:40 Dan Harris? Yes.
8:40 Speaker 04 Right? Like, you double-check your numbers, you ask four different people, but you're not doing it by experimentation, because experimentation means you're saying, "I don't know, but I'm gonna find out by running an experiment or trying something small." And that's a very different toolkit than the toolkit that is about getting the perfect right answer.
9:00 Dan Harris? You touch on another thing there, obliquely, that I think, to me, seems like another major contributing factor to analysis paralysis, which is, "I don't know," and our dislike of "I don't know." This is not an original insight on my part, but I've spent a lot of time talking about how one of the major design flaws in the human operating system is that we are living in a world of constant flux, and yet we hate uncertainty. And so this allergy to the discomfort of uncertainty seems like another major contributing factor to analysis paralysis.
9:36 Speaker 04 100%. You know, most of us associate this feeling of not knowing something or being caught between multiple conflicting interpretations as a sign that there's something wrong with us, that we're not smart enough, that we don't have the right experience, that somehow we're an imposter. But one of the things I try to help people see is that that experience of doubt can also be a positive. It's a signal that we don't know. That means it's an opportunity to learn. And if we were to apply that kind of thinking in other domains of life, let's say you're at the gym and you're doing bicep curls. The first couple of bicep curls is just warming up. By the time you get to the eighth rep or the ninth rep, you're actually starting to feel the burn. And if we were to drop the exercise at that point and say, you know what? I'm not good at this.
10:19 Speaker 04 The burn is a sign that I'm not strong enough and I'll never be strong. Then we'd be giving up on improving ourselves and getting stronger. And in the same way, if we think about doubt as the moment where, wait a second, it's a sign that I'm about to learn something new. It's a sign that I'm about to get smarter or more capable. We wouldn't give up and flee situations where we experienced doubt. We'd see it as an investment in our future capabilities.
10:44 Dan Harris? This reminds me of a major teaching emphasis of my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who is a great friend and just a brilliant guy. Although I hope he doesn't hear me say that because then, because I like to make fun of him. He talks about, I'm not sure if he uses doubt in the way you are, but he talks about using rushing or certainty as mindfulness bells, as alarm bells to wake you up. If you're rushing, use that as a feedback. Oh, okay, let me take a breath. Let me wake up a little bit and see what's going on. Similarly, with certainty, which is a major design flaw in the human animal, I think related to our dislike of the unknown, of an uncertainty.
11:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:24 Dan Harris? But I think what you're adding here is, oh, when you're in a moment of doubt, that doesn't mean, fuck it, I can't figure this out. I don't know. I'm an imposter. You know, this is hopeless. It's like, oh, no, no, no. This is a time to wake up and get curious.
11:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, absolutely right. Those are great signals and signposts to help us have a different orientation to the situation that we're facing. When we feel very certain or when we're rushing, why do we rush? In part because we think that there's a right answer that we're not getting. Other people are getting it. We're not getting it. Well, we better work faster to get there. And so those are moments where particularly in novel circumstances, where we're not practiced or we're seeing something for the first time, it's a great mechanism to step back and say, what else do I need to learn here? How else can I get curious about what's happening? So I don't rush into something that is a bigger danger than where I am now.
12:16 Dan Harris? Yes. The listener will have heard many times, will have heard you try to make this conversation constructive and proactive and give us things we can do about the doubt. And I'm gonna get there eventually, but I want to marinate in the problem a little bit longer.
12:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
12:32 Dan Harris? Because there's a list that I read in an article about you called nine subtle signs of analysis paralysis. And I like this list, and I'm gonna read it out loud, and then you can just pick up on whatever you think is most interesting. So here are the nine subtle signs. You're doing endless research. One. Two, you're constantly seeking advice. Three, you have this overwhelming fear of making the wrong choice. Four, you're obsessing over worst-case scenarios. Five, you're dressing up avoidance and disguising it as productivity. Number six, you're missing or stretching your deadlines. Number seven, you're problem-focused, not solution-focused, which, by the way, is what I'm doing in this interview at this point. Number eight, you're overthinking every detail.
13:15 Dan Harris? Number nine, you're experiencing emotional exhaustion and anxiety. Okay, so I just read that list. Anything or any things in there that you want to pick up on and expand upon?
13:26 Speaker 04 Those are all symptoms of trying to find the right answer in a moment where we can't find a right answer, we have to make a right answer. And so, these things can be really useful. Asking people for help, trying to gain more information, those are all valuable strategies. But when we take them to an extreme and avoid acting, it can prolong our analysis paralysis and prolong some of these negative emotions that we feel in stewing in the problem. And so, when we encounter something novel, something we haven't seen before, it's helpful to try to shrink the doubt and to name it and say, here's what I don't know. I'm really unsure about what's gonna happen with this regulation, or how my mom is gonna react to X, Y, and Z.
14:08 Speaker 04 And by shrinking it, you can get much more specific about how can I learn that thing that is gonna help me make a decision? Or how can I move forward in a small, tangible way? When we try to get the right answer, we make the doubt so big, because we have to get the perfect answer, no matter what the circumstance is. And those problems become intractable, because the world changes, something else happens, and we're constantly analyzing and reanalyzing the problem, rather than saying, what's a small way I can move forward so I can learn what to do next?
14:37 Dan Harris? Okay. Now, finally, I'm going to exceed to your unspoken demand to talk about what we can actually do about this. In that same article I read about you, which I'll put a link to in the show notes because it's a really good article, there are six strategies for overcoming analysis paralysis. So instead of reading you the whole list, I'm actually, I want to walk through this list one by one. The first is, and you kind of hinted at this in your last answer, make the uncertainty bite-sized. Can you say more about that?
15:04 Speaker 04 So sometimes we have these big questions, and it's so hard to know where to start. Should I move to a new city and take a job? I don't know. How happy will I be in that city? Will there be congestion and traffic? And because there's so many questions, it becomes really difficult to move forward. And so by making it bite-sized, we pick off one of those questions and say, wait a second. Instead of making this big decision and having everything sorted out, why don't I go spend a weekend in that city and get a sense of what it's like to live there? Let me see if there are people that I know in that city who can give me some more information about what the congestion is like, or good places to live. By making things bite-sized, you can move forward with confidence, but if it's something that's large and amorphous, the problem is always going to morph to keep
15:49 Speaker 04 us in that frozen state.
15:50 Dan Harris? I'll bring it back to Buddhism for a second. In vipassana meditation, or insight meditation, there's this notion of seeing by dividing. If you're mindful of your anger and breaking it up into its component parts, you see that it's not an anger monolith, it's a shifting process that's moving through. And once you break it up into its component parts, it's much easier to deal with. I think that's a rough analog to what you're describing here.
16:17 Speaker 04 That's a great analog.
16:19 Dan Harris? I'm always looking for gold stars. Thank you, professor. The second on your list here is to run small experiments. You've made allusions to this in the last 15 minutes or so, but can you expand upon it now?
16:32 Speaker 04 Absolutely. When we don't know something, the best way to figure out what we need to learn in order to make a difficult decision is to try to test things out. Whether that's, I have to break this really difficult news to my parents and I'm not quite sure how to do it, and I'm really worried about their reaction. You might start by finding a trusted advisor, a sibling, and saying, how do you think mom is going to react to this? How do you think dad is going to react to this? And by getting that additional data, you can hone your strategy and your tactics to put yourself in a better position when you're actually making the difficult decision or having that difficult conversation. And so little experiments, one, are bite sized, but they also teach us valuable things about our approach so that when we're in that moment where we have to choose or do the hard thing, we're much more capable.
17:18 Dan Harris? So it really does feel like curiosity, a willingness to learn and openness is central.
17:25 Speaker 04 100%. And those are really easy things to say, but very, very hard things to do in the moment when you're being flooded by negative emotions, you're stressed. And so a lot of these things are what might seem like common sense when we're in a cool, collected state, talking to each other. But in a moment where you're feeling really nervous or anxious or worried about how your colleagues will see you, curiosity feels like the last thing that you should be exercising.
17:50 Dan Harris? Yes.
17:50 Speaker 04 I like to say that doubt plus fear equals some kind of paralysis, some kind of avoidance.
17:57 Dan Harris? Yes.
17:57 Speaker 04 But doubt plus motivation is curiosity. And so in those moments, we have to try to find ways of connecting with our motivation. Why is solving this problem going to benefit me, those that I care about? How is it going to make the world a better place? What am I going to learn? How am I going to become more capable by addressing this problem? If we can connect to that motivation in those hard moments, we can unleash the potential for curiosity. These are skills. They're easy to say, but incredibly hard to do.
18:24 Dan Harris? Okay, so I'm going to do a digression, just to reset for the listener and for you. We're working our way through these six strategies for overcoming analysis paralysis. But you've just made a nod to something really important, which is, these strategies sound Good in a vacuum, but if you're freaking out, it's really hard to operationalize them. So you actually have some strategies in your book for emotion regulation or emotional regulation in moments like this. So I actually want to leave this list and go to that other list.
18:56 Speaker 04 Sure. Let's do it.
18:58 Dan Harris? All right. Am I being too confusing?
18:59 Speaker 04 No.
19:00 Dan Harris? Okay. I have the list in front of me. Just for anybody who's listening, isn't watching this on YouTube, the professor just reached for his book to look at his list, but I have it in front of me because my producer, Eleanor, is such a good prepper for me that I have the list in front of me. So we're going to come back to the strategies for overcoming analysis paralysis. We're taking a digression after step number two, which is run small experiments to talk about emotional regulation. Before we get into this list that's in your book, you just said something there that's not on the list, which is coming back to your core motivation as a strategy for calming your nervous system. I feel like maybe dwelling on that makes sense. I'll just say, and I apologize for hijacking the conversation
19:42 Dan Harris? in this way, but for me, you know, I have a little tattoo that I've talked about many times on this show, so I'll make this quick, that just is a reminder that for me, my life is for the benefit of all beings, which is off brand in its earnestness, but really true. And so when I look at this little tattoo that's next to my watch, it re-centers me, it pulls me out of the toilet vortex of anxiety, and I think that's what you're pointing at.
20:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, and we all have our version of the tattoo. The goal is to find what that reset button is for us. Just a little bit of context here in terms of how the brain works to create these experiences that we can find so difficult to deal with. There are kind of three interconnected circuits in the brain. The first, the technical term here is our mesolimbic pathway. It's our reward system. I like to call it our pursue system because it lets us go after those things that we find valuable and rewarding somewhere out there and in the future. We're going to work extra hard to get that promotion. We're going to walk down the hall to have a conversation with that colleague who makes us laugh. We're going to go walk down the street and get that doughnut because it's going to taste so good. That's awesome. When there are clear signals that something is
20:52 Speaker 04 valuable in the future and out there, our body gears itself to go after that thing. The opposite is also true. There are also very clear signals that something is threatening or dangerous. And it could be physically threatening, but it could also be socially threatening. This is a situation where I might look stupid. People might respect me less. Someone might reduce my status. I might put myself in a position where I respect myself less. Those are also very threatening. And so the part of the brain that gets activated there is our protect system. And that's typically what we would call our fight, flight, freeze mode. Something is overwhelming us and we need to get the hell out of wherever we are because we're in danger. And when the world is composed of clear signals of reward or threat, these two systems work beautifully. They keep us safe.
21:37 Speaker 04 They keep us focused after prizes and perils. But often, the world doesn't give us very clear signals. Sometimes there are signals where we want to approach and avoid the exact same stimulus. Or there are two things that we want to approach at the same time. Should I vacation in Hawaii or the Bahamas? I don't know. They're both great. Or two things we want to avoid. I don't want to get stuck between a rock and a hard place. And so when there are these conflicting signals and we don't know how to move forward, the third part of our brain becomes active. And that's what I call our pause and piece together system. It's what recognizes that there are multiple conflicting interpretations of the present moment and we don't know what to do. And most of us have come to associate that feeling with feeling inferior, or stupid,
22:19 Speaker 04 or not good enough, rather than saying, wait a second, this is a moment where I'm about to get more capable and strong. And that's what really the book is about, is the shortcuts we take in our decision making when we become overwhelmed by moments of doubt and the things that we can do in those moments to try to move forward with confidence.
22:38 Dan Harris? Okay, so one of those things is, as stated by you, coming back to what am I all about?
22:44 Speaker 04 Yes. And if I could just close the loop there, sorry, I lost my train of thought.
22:47 Dan Harris? Please.
22:48 Speaker 04 The example you gave about that tattoo is really powerful because in those moments when our protect system is active, when we're feeling like this is a situation I need to get the hell out of, or I'm at risk, my reputation is at risk, by connecting to your purpose, your motivation, connecting to who you help, connecting to maybe people that have helped you. Those are reminders to activate our pursue system, that there is something valuable and positive in what might feel like challenging, difficult and frustrating. And so those are really powerful strategies that when we're feeling flooded by negative emotions or anxiety or the negative side of doubt, that there's some good here. And if we can identify that, focus our attention on that,
23:32 Speaker 04 we can start to move forward and not flee or freeze in that situation.
23:38 Dan Harris? I love it. So some of the other strategies you reference in the book, actually, I'll take these one by one. One of them is to switch up your circumstances. What does that mean?
23:48 Speaker 04 Oftentimes, particularly when we feel a strong emotion, like anger or frustration, they tend to happen in very predictable circumstances, whether that's scrolling on social media or dealing with a difficult family member or someone difficult at work. And there's this feedback loop that happens that creates this habit of someone says something frustrating, I get angry and upset. By switching up the circumstance, you're actually changing the context so that the normal habit is disrupted. So if I'm on social media and something happens that makes me angry, I might put the phone down and go for a walk. That makes it a lot harder for me to sustain that anger. I'm paying attention to different things. I'm using my body in a very different way that allows me to channel that energy in other places. And so by switching up the circumstance,
24:33 Speaker 04 you're disrupting that habit circuit that leads to a particular, in this case, not very helpful emotional response.
24:42 Dan Harris? That makes a lot of sense. Another strategy is distraction, which you call, "Look over there."
24:50 Speaker 04 So true, right? Because when I talked about these three systems, particularly our protect system and our pursue system, they work by creating certainty. So that actually narrows our field of vision on the things that will maintain that emotion. So if we're feeling angry at a colleague, all of a sudden, what happens is all the things that we're paying attention to were the five times that you did me wrong in the workplace or that time you lied to me or that time you took credit for that thing that I did. And by looking elsewhere and distracting ourselves... We actively look for what others have called disconfirming data, or data that makes us say, actually, you know what? Maybe this person isn't all bad. Or maybe there was some other reason why they're acting this way. And so you're being very careful about how you deploy your attention
25:34 Speaker 04 so that you're not getting in this reinforcing loop that makes you angrier and angrier, or more frustrated, more frustrated, and you can't get out of that cycle. So you've got to break that cycle by distracting yourself and looking for things that are different than that pattern that's leading to that intentional motion.
25:49 Dan Harris? So it seems like we've moved from moments of individual paralytic doubt and how to get out of them to moments of group doubt or group frustration, where there's somebody else implicated in the situation?
26:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think a source of frustration and doubt in daily life is other people. And the fact that they don't behave in the way that we want them to behave, or react in the way that we want them to react. And so particularly in the context of thinking about regulating emotions, and particularly strong emotions, other people and groups of people that we might have difference of opinion with are a source of that frustration and doubt.
26:30 Dan Harris? Yes, okay. Another strategy in your book is reframing. What do you mean by that?
26:37 Speaker 04 When we experience a strong emotion, we are so sure that we are right. Man, that waiter has been ignoring me for the past 45 minutes. Clearly, they have it in for me. And by reframing, we're changing that story that leads to that strong emotion, right? If that waiter is actively ignoring me, of course, I have every right to be justified in being angry and frustrated. But if I were to look out and say, wait a second, this waiter is dealing with 20 tables and they're short-staffed. Maybe they're not ignoring me on purpose. Maybe they haven't seen me. That reframing, again, allows us to add just enough of a pause to that building cycle of thinking and emotion for us to regulate ourselves and say, actually,
27:20 Speaker 04 let me stave off this building frustration and anger, and let me look around for other ways of explaining this thing that is causing me to feel frustrated or angry.
27:29 Dan Harris? You're describing this as an emotional regulation tool, which I agree with. But when the mind and body are dysregulated, it can be hard to remember to even do what you're asking for with the reframing.
27:42 Speaker 04 That's exactly right. These are skills that take a lot of time and practice. And so if you're working with a very skilled therapist or meditation coach, even in my lab here at the business school, I put my students through frustrating situations with actors and I record everything for them to watch. And only by getting that third person perspective on yourself, by seeing like, ah, when that actor said that really frustrating thing, I just took the bait and I rose, you know, and I got upset and I lost my cool. By seeing that and seeing it actually had a negative impact on our relationship or on the conversation, it opens a space for that person to say, okay, let me try it differently. And then, just like workouts at the gym, you got to get reps in to get better and better
28:23 Speaker 04 at that skill of reframing or distracting yourself or switching up the circumstance. The starting place is to know that there are strategies. But just like me watching a video on how to do pull-ups, that's great. I now know cognitively how to do better pull-ups. It doesn't mean anything until I get my butt in the gym and start actually practicing.
28:42 Dan Harris? Yes. I suck at pull-ups.
28:45 Speaker 04 Me too.
28:49 Dan Harris? Coming up, Dr. Parmar talks about some more practical tools for dealing with difficult emotions and analysis paralysis, why we need to pay more attention to process instead of outcome, and how to have actual confidence even when you're in a state of doubt.
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30:08 Dan Harris? Okay, so there's another strategy in the book that we haven't touched on yet, which is what?
30:14 Speaker 04 I call it trying something new. And what that means is actually changing the behavior that results because of an emotion. In a simple example, we might say, "I feel angry, and because I feel angry, I have to yell." But the yelling part of that equation is optional. There are lots of ways of showing and demonstrating anger. There's probably some culturally similar ways. They might vary from culture to culture. But people who have tried to find universal ways of displaying anger, or frustration, or sadness, have not been able to find them. What that means is that we have choice on the behavior that results because of a particular emotion. Just because something makes you angry doesn't mean you have to yell.
30:57 Speaker 04 It means that there might be a behavioral response, but you get to choose it. You might choose to laugh. You might choose to whisper. You might choose to get really introspective, or get really friendly. You have a choice on how to channel the energy that comes out of that emotion. And trying something new means disrupting, again, that habit or that circuit that says, "I'm angry, therefore I should yell," and say, "I'm angry, therefore I'm gonna go for a walk." Or, "I'm angry, therefore I'm gonna write down all the things that make me angry until I feel better." And so changing that behavior is critical to demonstrating that emotion in a productive, healthy way.
31:33 Dan Harris? I think this is sometimes described in psychology circles as opposite action.
31:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's a great way of operationalizing this is saying, okay, my normal response is to get upset. What could I do? That's the exact opposite of that. How could I get really friendly or curious or empathetic when I'm feeling this emotion? And that's a good skill to practice is not just to have this tape that plays as, oh, Bobby's anger button was pushed, therefore he's going to act this way. Well, Bobby gets a choice in how he shows up when he's feeling angry.
32:04 Dan Harris? Well, Bobby's been very patient with me jumping all over the place during this interview. So let me just reset for you and for the audience. We started by talking about six strategies for overcoming analysis paralysis. But then in the middle of that excellent list, you started talking about emotional regulation and we jumped to another list, which we have now completed. And so I'm going to go back to your strategies for overcoming analysis paralysis. There may be some redundancies ahead, just as a warning, but that's fine. I need to hear things a million times before they actually penetrate. So number three on your list of ways to overcome analysis paralysis is avoid alternatives that lock you in. What do you mean by that?
32:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, this is another version of making the doubt smaller, shrinking it. So there are times where when we make decisions, it's really hard to undo it. We might quit our job because we're so upset at our boss or our colleagues. And that's a really hard decision to walk back. And so when we're experiencing analysis paralysis, we want to keep our options open and we want to avoid decisions that lock us into, oh, I've definitely left this job and I can never go back. We might decide instead to say, can I get a transfer to another team? Or can I work from home for a few days? These are options that allow us to come back in some way. They don't close the door on a particular set of actions or strategies. But as we just talked about, when we have really strong emotions, because they force
33:29 Speaker 04 our hand to do something and to do something big, the likelihood of making those irreversible decisions is a lot higher when we're feeling emotionally excited or aroused.
33:39 Dan Harris? Yes, it can lead to a kind of impetuosity, which can lead to irreversible damage if not tended carefully. Okay, so number four is a bit of a repeat, but in moments of analysis paralysis, number four is to remind yourself of your big picture goals.
33:55 Speaker 04 That's right. So by zooming out and saying, why am I trying to solve this problem? What benefit might I gain or might others gain? What skills might I develop? Who's helped by this? It can help you say like, wait a second, I don't have to get this completely right. I don't have to be perfect in this. Let me move forward in ways that are good, but maybe not perfect.
34:14 Dan Harris? Number five is be open to positive surprises.
34:18 Speaker 04 It's one of the hardest things, particularly when we're ruminating on negative things. So typically, when we're experiencing analysis paralysis, it's a negative thing, right? We're feeling like we're stuck in this decision. We don't know how to move forward and we're paying attention to all the negatives on all the options that we're considering. But being open to positive surprises means that there are times where we're not able to imagine something great around the corner. If, for example, I do decide to move to this city, maybe I'll make a new group of friends. Maybe I'll get a new job that I didn't imagine. So many of the best decisions in our lives, when we look back, weren't decisions that we planned or knew, we just kind of fell into them. And when we get stuck in analysis paralysis, it's important to remember that we don't know what's going to happen.
35:01 Speaker 04 That means we don't know what negative things are going to happen, but equally, we don't know what positive things might happen. And just opening ourselves to the fact that there might be positives can make that analysis paralysis feel less negative.
35:16 Dan Harris? Number six is consider what you can afford to lose.
35:21 Speaker 04 This is a really important strategy for individuals and organizations. In the process of learning, there are obviously lots of things that we don't know in order to make a decision. And sometimes we feel like before we do anything, we have to have the perfect answer. But thinking about this principle that others have called the principle of affordable loss says, you know what? I can spend a weekend and it's okay if I come out of that weekend and realize I don't want to move to this city. Or I can have a call with someone and get a sense of like that 30-minute call. It taught me that I don't want that job or I don't want to work at that company. And that is something I can afford to lose. And so identifying like, look, I can spend up to X amount of dollars or X amount of
36:05 Speaker 04 time learning about this decision and I can afford that. That's a good investment for you to me to make, even if I don't end up choosing option A over option B is critical. But when we're trying to get the perfect answer, we throw all kinds of resources at that question regardless of whether we can afford them or not.
36:24 Dan Harris? Sounds familiar, if I think back through my own life. This is coming to mind as I'm listening to you talk. Have you heard Ellen Langer's thing? Ellen Langer, as you know, the legendary psychologist from Harvard.
36:35 Speaker 04 Yeah.
36:36 Dan Harris? She has this thing where she says, instead of worrying about making the right decision, make whatever decision you make right. Do you agree with that?
36:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's such a great line. And I think that there's a lot of wisdom in that. Part of what I take from that powerful quote is this distinction between process and outcomes. Right? So we get so focused on the outcome of, I have to get the right answer, that we forget about the process of learning, experimentation. And so I think it's a really useful and powerful quote. Where I might disagree slightly is that the reason we care about a good process is because it's supposed to get us to better outcomes. And I don't think it's as easy to divorce ourselves from that positive outcome. And so we want to think about both, a good process and keep our eyes on what we think might be a good outcome and understand when that process might be taking us away from
37:29 Speaker 04 that or when it might be getting us closer to that.
37:31 Dan Harris? So, let me just make sure I've got this. Where you might slightly diverge from her is that we shouldn't just make decisions willy-nilly and then make them right afterwards. We should actually run a good process to get as close to a solid answer as possible and then be nimble in the aftermath.
37:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think that's right. A lot of times, decision scholars will say things like, look, we can't predict the outcome. All we can do is run a good process. And that is important. We should be running a good process. But how do we define a good process? Why do we know that, for example, framing problems effectively, generating multiple options, why are those good practices? Why are those a part of a good process? Because we know that they're more likely to lead to good outcomes. So I don't think it's as simple as saying, don't think about outcomes, focus on process. You've got to think about both of those things.
38:19 Dan Harris? Got it. You've got a chapter in the book called, "How is," and you use a mathematical symbol, "how is greater than, if not equal to, what?"
38:30 Speaker 04 One of the symptoms of being focused on getting the right answer is we think we are done demonstrating our expertise, making a good decision, when we have defined what we're gonna do. I am going to move to this new city. I am going to break up with this person. I'm gonna take this new job. But it turns out that so much of what we consider to be a good decision comes from actually how we do it. The way that we show care in that process, the connections that we maintain. And so, many decision makers and decision-making scholars have focused on getting people to pick what? Am I gonna invest in stock A or stock B? Am I going to launch product A or product B? But it turns out that equally important to that is how we do it.
39:14 Speaker 04 Is it, how are we engaging with our customers in launching this product? How are we advertising that product? Are we being true to our values in that process? Because all of those things create their own set of outcomes that then shape whether we're satisfied with that decision or not. An example I like to give is a bucket of activities that we might call getting fired. On the face of it, getting fired sounds terrible. Getting fired is terrible if your boss doesn't give you any notice. They come into your office and say, "I know you were gonna get promoted, but actually we're letting you go." It feels terrible. But we can also imagine a world where getting fired doesn't feel so bad because our boss is looking out for us. They're helping us get another job.
39:57 Speaker 04 They're explaining to us exactly why they can't keep our current role in its current form in the organization. They're reaching out to colleagues to help get us training and skills for the next job in another organization. And that very same set of what, getting fired, can be radically different depending on how it's done. And one of the things that we notice about really good decision makers is they're paying just as much attention to the how as they are the what.
40:23 Dan Harris? Are they paying attention to the how, both in the process of getting to the what? And in the how they're executing on the what?
40:32 Speaker 04 Correct. Yes. The chapter is more focused on the latter, is on the execution of what. But you're right, it's both of those things. We're thinking about the process that we've used to make the decision. And then when we get to the decision, it's not just what we've decided. Shut down the factory, don't shut down the factory. But how do we do that? How do we implement the shutdown or the lack thereof? Are we being honest and candid with people? Are we giving people warning? What are we doing in terms of severance pay? What other options are there for people? How we decide to shut down the factory in terms of the decision process? And once we've made that decision, how we actually shut down the process are incredibly important.
41:10 Dan Harris? I think maybe your core point here, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, is that we need to be paying attention to process more than outcome. Or if not more than, at least equal to.
41:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's right.
41:24 Dan Harris? How do we effectuate that kind of cognitive shift? Given how outcome oriented, let's check the box and move on, we are in our culture.
41:33 Speaker 04 Both at a personal level and at an organizational level, there's such an emphasis on being a right answer getter that we want to very quickly make the right decision, focus on the what, and move forward. Part of the reason why learning and experimentation is important is because it teaches us how to do something. It teaches us that by trial and error, we can engage with our employees in this way. Or we can deliver a message with a certain tone of voice. We can demonstrate our caring in a particular way. And so that focus on how do I do this effectively has to be just as important as what do I do? Lots of times when I work with organizational leaders, they'll tell me things like, look, I gotta make a fast decision. And it's hard for me to do all this process stuff and think about how I'm going to do it. And then they make fast decisions,
42:18 Speaker 04 but those decisions end up backfiring. And we've really got to reconcile, do I want to get to the wrong destination fast? Or would I be willing to endure a little bit more time and effort to get to a better destination?
42:31 Dan Harris? Right. Maybe at least one.
42:35 Dan Harris? Effective learning mechanism here is just thinking about all the bad decisions we've made and learning from putting our hand on the stove.
42:43 Speaker 04 Trying to avoid that regret is a big motivator for many individuals. And I think another piece that can help shift that mindset is thinking about and making sure people understand that there are different types of decisions. In my opinion, too much of the decision-making literature has assumed that there is a single process that works for all decisions. And what we've done is we've taken processes that work for simple decisions where people have a lot of experience and expertise and tried to use those processes for more complex decisions where there's multiple conflicting interpretations, where we're not sure how to move forward. In this book, I'm trying to elucidate a different process for those kinds of difficult problems. There are times we can rely on our intuition. There are times where we can be more safe by flying by the seat of our pants because we have some experience.
43:28 Speaker 04 And there are times where we want to be a little bit more thoughtful and careful. And distinguishing those two doesn't mean that we're giving up a skill set that has gotten us some success. It just means that we're adding tools to the toolkit.
43:38 Dan Harris? How do we distinguish between those two?
43:41 Speaker 04 So it's very critical to try to distinguish between decisions that we've made 100 times and decisions that are novel. And sometimes it's very tempting to convince ourselves that something new and novel is something that we're going to be really good at. But one of the things we would really want to ask ourselves is, is this a decision where I feel comfortable? What do I know? What's my level of confidence? And if I have a high degree of confidence, perhaps it's a sign that I have done this several times. And if I have a low degree of confidence, it might be a sign that maybe I need to step back and learn.
44:14 Dan Harris? Yeah, but for me, many of my dumbest decisions have been at moments of peak confidence, pride goeth and all that.
44:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's a good point, right? So oftentimes, we overestimate our ability to make novel decisions. But going back and saying, how similar is this choice to choices that I've made in the past? What could be different about this? So I think it's a useful skill here is to say, how is this choice similar to things I've done in the past? But to also ask yourself, how is this different than things I've done in the past? Because often, it's really easy to focus on the similarities, and that's exactly where the overconfidence comes from. This is just like what I've done 20 times before. But if we don't step back and say, well, how is this different? Well, this is a new context, or this is a new employee, or this is a new set of skills that I haven't mastered.
45:06 Speaker 04 Then we can become overconfident and not appreciate that this might be distinct from what we're used to.
45:12 Dan Harris? So there's a whole section in the book about confidence and how to achieve some level of confidence in the face of doubt. I have a bunch of questions I want to ask about this, but anything to say off the bat?
45:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think the core part of this is that doubt is not something that should erode our confidence, that we can maintain our confidence to learn and grow even when we don't know what to do.
45:35 Dan Harris? So in this section on confidence, you've got anticipation tactics and resilience tactics. Do I have that right?
45:43 Speaker 04 Yep.
45:44 Dan Harris? Okay, so what do you mean by anticipation tactics as a source of confidence?
45:49 Speaker 04 So oftentimes, when we don't know what to do or how to move forward, we can step back and say, what could go wrong? And how can I anticipate things that might happen and be prepared for that world if it were to occur in that way? And so oftentimes in organizations, we call this a pre-mortem. So one of the tactics here is to say, okay, if I made this decision and I regretted it in four weeks, why might I regret it? Well, maybe because I rushed through it, or maybe I didn't quite take this into account. And so you think about those things that might cause you regret or cause the decision to fail ahead of time and say, what can I do now to make it less likely that I will regret this choice, or less likely that I will feel bad about this decision? And we're doing that by anticipating what might go wrong.
46:35 Dan Harris? Okay, so some of the anticipation tactics you list here, the first is anomalizing.
46:41 Speaker 04 Yeah.
46:42 Dan Harris? What does that mean?
46:43 Speaker 04 So when we anomalize, we're looking for subtle signals that something is different than what we expect. We're looking for, you know what, the way that so and so raised their eyebrow at me. Maybe, maybe they're not tracking with everything that I'm saying. And by paying attention to those subtle signals, we can find places where things are going off of our expectations or deviating from what we thought would happen faster. And by anticipating them quicker, we can do something about it faster.
47:10 Dan Harris? Got it. Okay. We're in another list here. The second is waiting, which it seems so obvious, but we forget to do it because, again, we're rushing.
47:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's right. We're rushing. Oh, I'm a good decision maker. I need to make fast decisions. But stepping back and saying, wait, if I come back to this in a week, we'll have more information. Or this other thing will have happened that will make it easier for me to make this decision. If you're building a house and you're like, I don't know what color to paint my house. Well, in two weeks, they're gonna put the floor in. And once they put the floor in, I'll have a better sense of how to make this decision. And so sometimes, being strategic about waiting is really helpful. Where this can get counterproductive is people just keep waiting and keep waiting and keep kicking the can down the road versus being very clear about, I'm waiting to know what color the floor is gonna be, so I can match the wall to that. You have to get really specific about what it is you're gonna learn in that time that you're waiting.
48:08 Dan Harris? Okay. Again, we're working through a list of what you call anticipation tactics. If you've got a problem, what kind of helpful thinking can you do in advance? What kind of forecasting can you do in advance? None of these fall in the category of analysis paralysis unless you take it too far. So number three on your list is flexible plans.
48:28 Speaker 04 So we imagine a future and there's only one thing that we can do. Then it's very hard to pivot if things change. But if we set out and say, okay, wait, actually, I have three options. Or if I see this happen in the world, I'll pivot in this particular way. Those flexible options allow you to learn and adapt. When we only have one option, we are tempted in twisting the world to make that one option the right answer. Versus if we have multiple options or we have some flexibility in how we implement, we can adapt a little bit more flexibly. One of my favorite examples of this is FedEx. FedEx can't always predict exactly where different weather events or thunderstorms are going to hit.
49:11 Speaker 04 So they fly a certain capacity of their planes half full. And what they do with that half full capacity is it allows them to reroute those planes to different cities where there might be weather patterns so they can pick up those packages and get them to their destination. They don't know exactly where those weather patterns are going to hit, but by allowing themselves that flexibility, they can still deliver those packages on time, no matter where there are severe weather events.
49:36 Dan Harris? So, right before I sat down to do this interview, I was having lunch in, I'm recording this from my home studio, and I was having lunch in my living room with two of the people on my team who happen to be working out of my house today. Tony is our CEO and Taylor, who's our head of operations. And they were working on the budget for next year. And I was watching them do this, I was listening to this as I was eating a salad, and they're deliberately pessimistic. You know, it's kind of like, well, let's estimate the speaking fees that Dan will generate next year at 10% less than this year, so we can have some upside surprise. But, you know, if it's higher, well, then we can do X or Y thing with the budget.
50:18 Dan Harris? It seems like they're doing a form of what you're describing.
50:22 Speaker 04 Exactly, right. So thinking through multiple scenarios, saying what will happen at these three different levels of speaking fees that allow us to open up this particular initiative or do this really cool thing.
50:31 Dan Harris? Yes, yes.
50:32 Speaker 04 That allows you to pivot when those cool things happen. And most importantly, it allows you to pivot in ways that are consistent with your values because you've thought about it ahead of time, rather than in the moment you find yourself flush with cash and then you're like, oh, this is the first opportunity that came to me, let's go after that.
50:48 Dan Harris? Yes. And note, they're not stuck in analysis paralysis. They're making decisions, they're doing this kind of anticipatory forecasting wise strategy, or as George W. Bush would say, strategery, without even having read your book, although I guess they, maybe they have read their book, your book, I should check. Another anticipation tactic that you list here, and again, this is all under the rubric of, you know, how can we be confident in the face of doubt? One of your anticipation tactics is reducing and refining uncertainty by acting.
51:21 Speaker 04 That's right. This goes back to the idea that many times we think before we do anything, we should have the right answer, we should have everything planned out to a T, we should know exactly what the financial models are going to do and say, and that just perpetually kicks the can down the road for doing anything. Whereas if we were to say, we can learn something really critical by acting in this particular way. Let's go interview this person. And if we interview them, we'll learn something about whether it makes sense to pivot our podcast in that particular direction and generate that revenue. Now, we're not just worried about that uncertainty. We now have done something that reduces that uncertainty and makes us feel like, okay, actually, we learned some really cool things. This is exactly where we should be going. Or maybe let's try one more. And
52:04 Speaker 04 so oftentimes, we have this separation between thinking and doing, between learning and acting. And one of the best ways of dealing with doubt is to shrink those cycles and to try something out and learn from it and try something else out and learn from it. So having shorter and shorter cycles of trying something and learning, rather than one big cycle of, let me get the perfect answer and then go implement this thing.
52:29 Dan Harris? Yes. Tony, our CEO, talks a lot about crawl, walk, run. Learning by doing, but doing in small increments, AKA the experiments that you referred to earlier.
52:40 Speaker 04 Absolutely, right? Because you're so much more confident walking once you've crawled, and you're so much more confident running once you've walked and crawled, because you've learned about the environment and the people that you're working with.
52:52 Dan Harris? Coming up, Bobby talks about some resilience tactics when you're in a state of doubt, tools for building psychological safety, which is incredibly important if you want to have healthy and highly functioning teams, the crucial role of rupture and repair in your relationships, and the crucial final steps in any decision-making process, specifically one Bobby calls the after-action review.
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54:24 Dan Harris? In this section of our conversation, we're talking about how to generate some degree of confidence in the face of doubt. And you just listed four anticipation tactics. There are also, in your book, two what you call resilience tactics. What is a resilience tactic and how can it help you be confident in the face of doubt?
54:43 Speaker 04 So our tactics for anticipation allow us to step back and say, what could happen? And how could I be ready for all of those possible eventualities? Resilience takes very seriously the idea that you can't anticipate everything, that there will always be something that you are blind to or that you can't expect, what others have called unknown unknowns. And so instead of trying to plan for everything and figure out the right way to adapt, we can build systems for resilience that allow us to bounce back when we inevitably find that bump in the road that we're all gonna hit.
55:16 Dan Harris? Okay, so one of the resilience tactics is building psychological safety. That's a term that comes up a lot in episodes. Can you explain what you mean by building psychological safety?
55:28 Speaker 04 So when your team or the folks that you're working with have psychological safety, they believe that you or the rest of the team is a safe place to take interpersonal risks. And so they can try things out. They can say, you know what? I'm really worried about the budget for next year or next quarter. And no one's going to say, well, Bobby, that's your fault. You should be handling that. Psychological safety allows people to be resilient because it's a safe place to fail and then bounce back from saying, actually, I'm concerned about this budget. Well, let's all work together and figure out what we can do to alleviate these concerns or create a strategy that's going to help us move forward, even if they're unknowns. So psychological safety is critical to resilience because even when we stumble, we can pick ourselves back up and we're not afraid that people are going to think
56:13 Speaker 04 less of us for having stumbled.
56:15 Dan Harris? I mean, I think a lot about how to create psychological safety on my team, and I'm not sure I've aced it. It's a beautiful concept and it makes a ton of sense. And it is, there's data to show that it's like a huge contributing factor to the success of any organization or team. And yet, it's easier said than done. So what are your thoughts about how to actually do it?
56:38 Speaker 04 One of the tactics that I really like is more of a structural part of the conversation. Obviously, there are things that you can do as a leader to share your own vulnerabilities, to praise people for taking efforts, even if they haven't quite achieved what they wanted to achieve. But when I mean structural, I mean actually having a part of the conversation designated to, let's think about the weaknesses in this plan. And we're all going to do that. Not just Dan, but all of us are going to poke holes in this. Let's all think about, what are the strengths of this plan? And when you have defined someone to play the role of devil's advocate or someone to poke holes, they're playing a role that's beneficial for the team, rather than just being an ass, right? And so by creating space for those conversations, you can make it much easier for people to say, I have these concerns.
57:23 Speaker 04 I'm worried about this. I'm also really excited about this other thing. And so thinking about how we spend our time in a meeting and a discussion. Let's focus on What are the strengths of this idea? Now, what are all the weaknesses that we see? And we're not pointing out those weaknesses because we want to be mean, but because we want to figure out how to make that idea better.
57:43 Dan Harris? So, for example, tomorrow, we have a big team meeting about a new app we're launching. And I, as the founder of the company, as the face of the company, I could say, after Toni and her team have made their presentation, I could say, hey, look, you know, I think one really healthy thing to do for those of you who are coming to this with fresh eyes, is what have we not thought about? Like, where could this go wrong?
58:05 Speaker 04 What should we have our eyes on that maybe we're missing?
58:07 Dan Harris? Yes.
58:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think that's a great tactic.
58:09 Dan Harris? Okay.
58:11 Dan Harris? Another resilience tactic that you list in your book is called building buffers. What's that all about?
58:16 Speaker 04 So particularly when we're doing novel things that we haven't done before, we're going to stumble. And building buffers is about making sure that when we stumble, we stumble in ways that are affordable, that are small, that we can kind of pick ourselves back up. And so when we're investing in a new app, we might invest in an app that has kind of a smaller user base at first that we can grow out. We might say, we're going to invest only this amount of money in this app so that if it doesn't work, we've got other resources to do other things. And so if you're in a factory setting or working in a chemical plant, those buffers allow you to say, well, actually, there was a very small chemical spill, but we caught it early, we cleaned it up, and we were able to patch that tank right away because even though we made an error, we were able to pick ourselves back up quickly.
59:01 Speaker 04 And so buffers just allow us a little bit of wiggle room to say, things can get slightly out of hand, but not so out of hand that we can't rein it in.
59:11 Dan Harris? Another sort of crawl, walk, run situation. There's a lot in your book about, and we've touched on it in this conversation, but I think I want to go a little bit deeper. There's a lot in your book about, and I was trying to articulate this earlier ham-fistedly, I think, like, there's not only the doubt that I may face as an individual when I'm solo confronting a decision, but there's also kind of group doubt or doubt in interpersonal doubt as you're trying to tackle a decision together. You talk about that a lot in the book and have thus far in this conversation. Although you have a chapter in the book where you talk about the limits of cooperation. So what do you mean by that?
59:55 Speaker 04 One of the biggest sources of doubt that we face in our day to day life and our day to day decision making is about the motives of others, other human beings, and how we might work together, we might cooperate together, how we might compete against each other, or war with each other. And so often, we're unsure about whether we should take a risk to help someone, whether we should work together with someone we don't know. And when we think about the limits of cooperation, cooperation is an incredible tool that human beings have invented that has allowed us to basically take over the planet. And there are these competing views. People at the bottom will say that ultimately, human beings are selfish and they're only after their own interests.
1:00:37 Speaker 04 On the other hand, we might think about human interests fitting together, or folks having positive emotions towards others. And when we think about the limits of cooperation, it's about trying to understand how we can make sense of the motives of others and the conditions under which we can cooperate wisely, rather than just say, "Well, everyone's got my best interests at heart, I should work with everyone, or I should help everyone." That feels like a very blunt strategy. And so does the opposite strategy, which is, "Everyone is out to get me, I should just focus on my own work." And so, being able to distinguish when someone is trustworthy, and when it's worth our time and effort to be vulnerable to that person, and when it's not, is critical. And so, an important source of doubt in our day to day lives is, "Can I trust this person
1:01:22 Speaker 04 over there?"
1:01:23 Dan Harris? How do you know? I've fucked that up many times. How do you know?
1:01:28 Speaker 04 This is one where we want to collect evidence. We want to talk to folks that that person has worked with. We want to get a sense of their motivations, or when are they willing to sacrifice to help others, or help us in particular. And we're kind of going back and forth between what we know about that person from other interactions, from the past. And again, in those moments, because it's a source of doubt, we don't just go all in and say, "Well, now I'm going to hand over the keys to my company to you." We create small experiments that allow that person to continue to earn our trust and allow us to continue to be vulnerable to that person so that we have a positive, cooperative, working relationship that we both can believe in.
1:02:08 Dan Harris? Yes. Okay, another aspect of working with other people, side note, I often joke that the human curse is that we need other people to thrive and other people are a Titanic ass ache. So this is tricky, but one of the aspects of working with other people in situations of doubt and uncertainty is that when things go pear-shaped, we can get into a blame game. And you dedicate a decent amount of ink to blame and our temptation to blame. What's your TLDR take on that?
1:02:44 Speaker 04 So when we make decisions, there are all kinds of outcomes of that decision that might affect people differently. Even when we're making decisions as an individual, we belong to a community. We're part of a social context. And we might put blinders on and say, look, this is none of your business, this is my decision, but we still have to justify our choices to others. And when, in particular, things surprise people in a negative way, ah, can't believe I was fired for that, their intuition is to try to blame us. And so in those moments, there can be many times where we're unsure, am I blame worthy? Did I really have responsibility for this? A key source of doubt, particularly in the organizational space, is what am I responsible for and who am I responsible to?
1:03:29 Speaker 04 And there's lots of ways of thinking about responsibility. One way to think about responsibility is that I intended for this to happen. Another way to think about responsibility is that I was a part of the causal chain events that led to this thing happening. So, for example, typically in the legal space, we might talk about, if we have a suspect for murder, we might talk about motive and means. And when motive and means go together, we know, hey, Bobby was the killer, hey, arrest this guy. But oftentimes in organizations, there's a separation between motives and means. Senior executives might do a lot of the strategizing and intending. People lower in the organization might be doing a lot of the acting like, hey, I signed this form, or I asked this customer to do this thing, or I put the number on the test that said XYZ for emissions.
1:04:14 Speaker 04 And that becomes really tricky because then we can start to doubt whether we're responsible. Well, I didn't actually put the number in that file. I'm not responsible. Well, but you created the strategy that put a lot of pressure on people to do that. So many times we can have a hard time figuring out the conditions under which we're responsible to others. And so what this chapter does is say, here's how we can attribute responsibility. We think about, I just talked about intentionality. Did I want for this to happen? Causality, was I a part of the chain of events that led this to happen? But also things like capacity. Did I have the resources, the skills to stop it or to actually do it? And then the obligation, was I obligated to do something about this?
1:04:56 Speaker 04 I might have the resources, but there are lots of times where I don't have the obligation. And so when we face moments of doubt about whether I'm responsible for this harm that happened to someone, we can think more deeply about intentionality, causality, capability, and obligation to help sort out some of that confusion.
1:05:13 Dan Harris? There seems to be a difference between what I'm hearing you, or I think I'm hearing you describe, which is Bobby as an individual thinking about how much responsibility he bears for an outcome that was suboptimal. There seems to be a difference between that, what I think is quite a healthy exercise, and how to apportion blame for other people.
1:05:34 Speaker 04 Yes.
1:05:35 Dan Harris? Which I think you'll also have to do, but it can get nasty pretty quickly.
1:05:39 Speaker 04 That's right. And blame here is a strong word because we can think about blame in lots of different ways, right? There's very severe blame, which is like, Bobby, you should go to jail for this. But there's also holding people accountable, which is a softer version of blame. And even when we're holding people accountable, we're paying attention to things like intention, causality, obligation, and capacity. So that model of how we think about responsibility is useful even when we're reflecting on ourselves and when we're reflecting on others.
1:06:09 Dan Harris? So this, I think, does, correct me if I'm wrong, but this does bring us to your section in the book on rupture and repair.
1:06:16 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:06:16 Dan Harris? Can you say a little bit more of what you mean by that? Because this strikes me as like a, as really important in human affairs.
1:06:24 Speaker 04 When we're focused on getting the right answer,
1:06:28 Speaker 04 once we get the right answer, the world is going to be a perfect place. Once I choose that I'm, I'm going to marry the right person, or I'm going to raise my kid in this particular way, nothing could possibly go wrong after that, right? Except wrong, anyone who's been in another relationship with a human being knows that relationships have this pattern, this ebb and flow of rupture and repair. We disagree about things. I talk a lot about how I would, without question, lay down my life to protect my family, undeniably. And sometimes, they annoy the crap out of me.
1:07:00 Dan Harris? Yes.
1:07:00 Speaker 04 And I annoy the crap out of them. That's a human thing. If we think about relationships as having this rupture and repair ebb and flow, then it helps us say like, wait a second, I did this thing that was annoying, that happens. How do we focus on repair? Rather than saying, wait a second, you're the wrong person for me because you did this thing that I didn't like, or I should go find another relationship or work at another company because this thing happened that I didn't like. It helps level set these expectations for how we interact with each other. We're not going to like things that everyone says or does. How do we build the skills to repair even when there's been that rupture?
1:07:37 Dan Harris? Yes. It's a key, I think I'm using this word correctly, but it feels like a key heuristic, like a, it's goggles through which to view your relationships with other people.
1:07:47 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
1:07:48 Dan Harris? There's also, as we enter our final moments here, there's also a section in the book about what you call after-action reviews. You've made the decision, and then what? Can you talk a little bit about that?
1:08:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, this goes back to what we were talking about earlier about shortening the cycle between learning and action. And often, when we think like, okay, we're done. We've implemented this new app. We've launched this new product. We've decided to date so and so. We're done. There's no more learning that can happen. After-action reviews, close that loop and say, we just did a thing. What did we learn from doing that thing that might change how we approach similar decisions in the future? And so after-action reviews, popularized by our military, but similar things happen in companies, in hospitals, where we step back and we ask ourselves four questions. The first question is, what did I think would happen? What was my expectation about what would happen?
1:08:44 Speaker 04 Well, I thought we would launch the app and it would be a raging success. The second question is, what actually happened? Well, what actually happened was we launched the app and it was quiet for a couple of weeks. And then in week seven, all of a sudden, there was like this giant uptick. That's interesting. The third question is, why? Well, maybe we weren't quite reaching our audience in those first couple of weeks. You start to hypothesis about why there was this gap between the world you expected and the world you actually encountered. And then the fourth and final question is, what does this mean for what we do differently next time? Well, given the fact that there was this lag between what we expected, maybe we need to engage in marketing sooner. And so at the end of any decision, whether it's a small decision, like, oh, okay, we
1:09:27 Speaker 04 ran this small conference, or it's a big decision, we decided to move into this new product portfolio, we can step back and ask ourselves these four questions. What did I expect would happen? What actually happened? Why? And what will we do differently next time? In order to close the loop between learning and action.
1:09:44 Dan Harris? Crucial step and one that I frankly often skip. So this is a good reminder. So your core thesis, as I understand it, is many of us React to doubt in suboptimal ways, but actually it's a rich field of exploration and opportunity if we can get our minds right. And then, once you've got the right attitude about that, then there are a bunch of other skills to be applied, like how are you working with other people? How are you thinking about taking responsibility and holding other people accountable and surfing the inevitable ups and downs of relationships, et cetera, et cetera? Would you say, and none of us knows like how AI is going to play out, but would you
1:10:25 Dan Harris? say that in an era of an increased artificial intelligence, that this kind of deeply human intelligence, intrapersonal and interpersonal, is going to become more and more important?
1:10:43 Speaker 04 I certainly hope so. From what I know about AI today, it feels like this is a distinctive human advantage, this ability to interpret data in multiple, flexible ways. Obviously, the communication and connection with human beings in order to bring groups forward in the face of doubt. A lot of AI is programmed around a specific way of thinking about data, and if that way doesn't bear out, you've got to use another AI model, right? And they're not quite good at switching interpretations. And that's why I think this is so critical. When I work with organizational leaders, there are lots of decisions they feel perfectly comfortable using AI to solve. And then there are a bunch of decisions where like, I'm not sure. And in those moments, they just kind of ignore whatever artificial intelligence they're
1:11:27 Speaker 04 using, and then they fall back on these tools and techniques. And so I'm trying to kind of really highlight and elucidate these uniquely human capacities for interpreting flexibly, for testing, for iteration, in ways that don't get us to the right answer fast, but get us to a better answer that we're happier with in the long term.
1:11:46 Dan Harris? At the end of the interview, I always ask two questions. One is, is there something you were hoping that we would get to that we haven't?
1:11:55 Speaker 04 First thing I'd like to highlight is dealing with these moments of doubt. This is how we build a good life. All of us have had difficult decisions. And in those moments, sometimes we've shown up exactly how we want to show up and we're proud of those decisions. And at other times, we've shown up in ways that maybe we're less proud of. But those difficult moments of doubt, those defining moments, are critical to building a good life. And I think the pendulum also swings in the opposite way. That if we want to be good at making difficult decisions, we've also got to think about the kind of life that we lead. And an exercise that I do with lots of my students and executives is what I call a good life audit. And what this exercise asks people to do is to go through these important domains in
1:12:40 Speaker 04 their life. Their nutrition, their sleep, their relationships, their exercise, their work, their meaning and purpose. And to say, how is this showing up for me day in and day out? And is this eroding my capacity to make difficult decisions? Or is it helping me to do that? Let's say I go through this audit and, man, I'm just not sleeping well. And it makes it really hard because in the moment, I'm really cranky and I'm tired and I just don't have the bandwidth to sit with all of these different options. Well, then what can we do about our sleep? What are some things that we can try to help shore up that foundation so that we have the resources we need in order to make these difficult decisions? This isn't something that's optional.
1:13:24 Speaker 04 It's only a question of when we're going to face these difficult moments in our life. And so to build that capacity means trying to understand these different facets and how they set us up for success rather than drain us.
1:13:36 Dan Harris? Anything else you were hoping to get to?
1:13:38 Speaker 04 I'll just talk about one final study that is really counterintuitive. I talked to my students about this and they're pretty surprised. This study takes place in the context of entrepreneurial incubators and accelerators. And so these are organizations that have popped up where entrepreneurs get a lot of mentoring, advice, sometimes they get financial support. And their goal is to grow these small businesses into something larger. And there's two models of how these incubators work. One model is each set of entrepreneurs, each business gets a single mentor. And they work with that mentor for a couple of weeks and they get a new mentor. So you might have a mentor that's a genius at marketing or someone who's really good at like supply chains or programming, whatever that might be, depending on your business.
1:14:22 Speaker 04 Another model is a model where you get like 30 mentors at the same time. In the space of a very short period of time, you're talking to 30 people who are telling you radically different things about your business. Ah, this app isn't going to work, or this app is going to be great, and here's why, or here's what you should worry about in terms of your logistics or your supply. And when I ask my students which model they'd like to belong to, most of them say Model One. Like, it's going to feel so great to have a single mentor, and they're going to tell me what to do, and it's going to feel awesome. And then I ask them which model is more successful, and they're not quite sure. But what the research shows is that entrepreneurs who belong to the second model, where they're getting multiple conflicting perspectives early in the business, their businesses last
1:15:05 Speaker 04 longer and they raise more money because they're able to notice patterns quicker. They're able to say, wait a second, these two different experts on marketing are telling me radically different things about how I should market my product. Let me go figure that out before I do anything. And to me, this study really shows the benefits of doubt that we underestimate. Most of us think it'll be much better to work under Model One, where we're getting an expert to guide us and tell us exactly what to do, when it turns out that actually our business is much more likely to be successful and thriving if we learn how to deal with doubt.
1:15:37 Dan Harris? Yeah, we want the warm blanket of certainty. We want somebody to take care of us, but actually, we do better when we do the uncomfortable thing of opening our mind to lots of potential outcomes and routes. Bobby, this has been a pleasure. The final question that I always ask people is, can you just remind us of the name of your book and anything else you've put out into the world that we should know about?
1:16:01 Speaker 04 Absolutely. The book is called Radical Doubt. It's available in bookstores everywhere. I also produced a documentary film about the purpose of business called Fishing with Dynamite. Check it out wherever documentaries are available.
1:16:13 Dan Harris? And do you have a website?
1:16:14 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely. Radicaldoubt.com.
1:16:17 Dan Harris? All right. Great job with this, Bobby. Great to meet you.
1:16:20 Speaker 04 Likewise. Thank you so much. You're so fun to work with. I love, you know, the candor and, you know, just the care. It's very rare to find someone who could do both of those things simultaneously and do them well.
1:16:31 Dan Harris? Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I'll take the compliment.
1:16:37 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Dr. Bobby Parmar. Go check out his book. Go check out DanHarris.com if you want a guided meditation that will help you take everything you just learned and pound it into your neurons. We don't like to be in a state of uncertainty, but this meditation from my old friend Jeff Warren will help you be okay with uncertainty and let go of your thoughts. If you want to hear that meditation, it's available for subscribers over on DanHarris.com. If you sign up, you get all of the meditations that come with our podcast episodes, and you get to come to our weekly live meditation and Q&A sessions. We do these every Tuesday at 4:00. The next one is coming up tomorrow, Tuesday, December 16th. I'm going to host the live meditation and Q&A session, and I'm going to have some special guests to talk about a very cool new project we're launching.
1:17:22 Dan Harris? Finally, thank you so much to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the Van Islands wrote our theme.
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