Don’t assume you “know” how things are going to turn out. Ask--Tough Choices: The Science Behind Making The Right Call

 

Be your own devil’s advocate.

Psychologists call this process “dialectical bootstrapping” and studies have shown that it can improve a single person’s judgments by encouraging broad-minded thinking and a consideration of all the facts.
We know that, in the right conditions, the summed wisdom of a group of people is superior to the judgment of any person deciding alone. But not all of us have the benefit of a trusty committee to navigate us through each day. An alternative approach is to summon the crowd within.
Let’s say you need to decide how many orders to make for a product used in your work. Ask yourself once and write down your answer. Now assume this first estimate was wrong and think about the reasons this might be.  In other words, put yourself in the shoes of someone inclined to disagree with you. Take these two results and walk through the logic for each. The combined insight gained can help you form a better-informed decision.
Squash your biases.
Suppose I told you I’m sitting opposite a man who is wearing glasses and listening to Mozart. Do you think it’s more likely that he’s a literature professor or a truck driver? If you choose the former, you’ve just fallen for what psychologists call “base-rate neglect”. The “base-rate” is the likelihood for the most important factors at play.
As Rolf Dobelli explains in The Art of Thinking Clearly (from which the example is taken) – there are vastly more truck drivers than literature professors, so even allowing for stereotypes, it’s far more likely the man is a trucker than a professor. When making judgments for your business or career, it’s always worth remembering the base rate – most books never get published, most tech start-ups fail, most MBA students end up working in middle management. This isn’t to demoralize you, but to help guard against reckless unrealistic optimism. As Dobelli says, “When you hear hoofbeats, don’t expect a zebra.”

Stop thinking about it.

Sometimes if we think too hard on a problem we can get stuck in a mental dead end. One antidote is to distract ourselves from making a judgment and let our non-conscious minds do the work. Research suggests this can be especially advantageous if you have relevant expertise and you’re attempting to make an accurate prediction about the future – which book cover design is likely to be most effective, say, or which candidate will be most suitable for your team.
This idea of “not thinking” about a problem is based on psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis’ Unconscious Thought Theory. In one relevant study he showed that people with soccer expertise made more accurate predictions about upcoming results in a Dutch league if they distracted themselves for two minutes before making their judgment calls. “… Unconscious thought may well be helpful in more situations than some people currently think,” Dijksterhuis and his team wrote at the time.

NB: WATCH OUT FOR Adopt an emotionally ambiguous attitude
All by Christian  Jarrett