Other Tips For Better Choices

Beyond the spoken words, the tone of voice, body language, and what isn’t said also convey valuable information.

But most people overrate their listening skills. 

“The word listen contains the same letters as the word silent.”

• Engage and empower the entire team. Everyone in your organization should feel empowered to unleash his or her entrepreneurial spirit.
• Suspend judgment. Identify “the good” in the ideas instead.
• “Fail big, but fail soon.” Team members must also know that they have permission to fail.  Sometimes you must move quickly and you can’t always play it safe.
• Set a good example. Take time to connect, mentor and develop your team members. Inspire them to create, look for new approaches and think outside the box.
• Pay attention to the details. Designate specific goals, projects, times and expectations. These types of details ensure the innovation process doesn’t turn into a time suck.
• Don’t forget about the physical environment. The physical environment people are in can influence how they feel, think and interact and can impact the quality and quantity in the innovation process.

1. Psychological safety: team members feel safe to take risks and to be vulnerable in front of each other.
2. Dependability: Team members get things done on time.
3. Structure and Clarity: team members have clear roles, plans and goals.
4. Meaning: work is personally important to team members.
5. Impact: team members think their work matters and creates change.

• We’re (sometimes) stupid: irrational, tired or distracted;
• We have the wrong information;
• We use the wrong model;
• We fail to learn;
• We go with what's easy over what's right. 

Fear of failure, fear of making the wrong decision, and fear of our own inadequacy all affect the actions we take and quality of the decisions we make.

If you frequently question your ability to make sound decisions seek out a coach or mentor who can help you boost your confidence.

Multitasking slows us down as the brain is optimized to focus on one task at a time. Spreading our attention across multiple tasks becomes draining and leaves little energy for those tasks that matter most.

Pay attention to what you're doing. Turn off any distractions that may take your mind elsewhere.

• We’re not as rational as we think. 
• We’re not prepared. We don’t understand the invariant ideas — the mental models — of how the world really works. 
• We don’t gather the information we need. We make decisions based on our “guts” in complex domains that require serious work to gather all the needed data. 

We live in a society that demands specialization. Being the best means being an expert in something.  A byproduct of this niche focus is that it narrows the ways we think we can apply our knowledge without being called a fraud.

We should apply all the knowledge at our disposal to the problems and challenges we face every day.

Today’s career landscape isn’t a lineup of tunnels, it’s a massive, impossibly complex, rapidly changing science laboratory. 

Time. A typical career will take up somewhere between 20% and 60% of your meaningful adult time.

Quality of Life. Your career has a major effect on all your non-career hours.

Impact. Whatever shape your career path ends up taking, the world will be altered by it.

Identity. We tell people about our careers by telling them what we are.

Distancing yourself from a problem can help you face it in a more objective way. 

Instead of remaining in your own frame of mind, consider yourself as an outside observer, such as a friend giving advice or a fly on the wall. Removing yourself in this way helps you filter out some of your cognitive biases and lean you toward a more rational decision.

Accuracy and reliability in decision making tends to increase if you first give yourself some time to decompress and collect yourself.

This may also help you remove yourself from the problem, knocking out two of these strategies at a time.