8. How confident are you that your partner
and you will be together in six months?
In a year? Three years? For a lifetime?
How satisfied are you in your romantic
relationship? How committed are you?
For example
9. In the 2004 Olympics combat sports
competitors wearing red won 60% of
encounters on points but only 50% of
those involving knock-outs (Hill & Barton
2005).
For example
10. A third example
Source: University of Exeter
Short men (below 5ft 9)
and women who are heavier
(than 11 stone) earn
£1,500 less than their
colleagues
13. The power of deadlines
Group 1: pre-commit to your own deadlines
Group 2: just one deadline (end of term)
Group 3: rigid deadlines every 4 weeks
Which performed best?
15. There are downsides!
1. Goal inhibition
If you focus on one thing, it means you are not
paying attention to other (important) things
2. Cognitive depletion
A loss of intelligence & self-control
16. Cognitive depletion: the case of the
Israeli parole judges
Source: Danziger, Levav and Avnaim-Preso, 2011
28. In praise of uncertainty
“Chance favours the prepared....
Invest in preparedness, not in
prediction... [but]... remember that
infinite vigilance is just not possible.”
29. In praise of uncertainty
“Chance favours the prepared....
Invest in preparedness, not in
prediction... [but]... remember that
infinite vigilance is just not possible.”
“Seize any opportunity,
or anything that looks like
opportunity....”
41. Relatedness in practice
“how intelligent and nice the people they
worked with were, and how much the
organisation cared for and appreciated them"
Pfeffer (Six Dangerous Myths About Pay in Harvard Business Review, 1998)
43. The importance of identity
People experience positive
utility when they work for
an organisation with which
they identify...
(...and negative utility when
they don’t).
46. Hiring without bias
• Interviewing several candidates in batches
rather than in an ad hoc manner decreases
bias
• Structured interviews are twice as effective as
unstructured ones
• The wisdom of crowds: four interviewers are
better than one, two or three...but no worse
than twenty
49. Who influences the culture most?
“People defer to those in
positions of authority and
typically underestimate their
tendency to do so.”
“People do things they see
other people doing.”
50. The importance of leadership
Study of 120 top management teams globally:
“Healthy norms ‘take’ only in teams in which
the leader gave explicit attention to modelling
the norms and reinforcing them to the team.”
Source: Wageman & Hackman, in Handbook of Leadership Theory &Practice, 2013
52. 10 Lessons
1. Context matters
2. Tight deadlines work
3. Take more breaks
4. Plan for error
5. Embrace luck
6. Embrace data
7. Open up
8. Human context matters most
9. Question intuition
10. Model norms
53. The value of an external perspective
“It is much easier to identify a minefield when
you observe others wandering into it than
when you are about to do so.”
Daniel Kahneman
54. Thank you
John Owen, The Decision Practice
www.decisionpractice.com
john.owen@decisionpractice.com