PERSONAL SPECIAL..Staying On Track

 Staying On Track 

Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino on the forces that derail our best laid plans — and how to counter them

It has happened to every one of us. You walk into a meeting clear about what you want to say or do, and 60 minutes later are left wondering what got into you that you said what you did. Or you plan a shopping trip and have a clear idea of what you need to buy. Once you are back from the mall, you realise that you didn’t get more than half the stuff on that list, instead picked up other stuff that you didn’t want, and most definitely didn’t need. Francesca Gino, associate professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, has spent a decade researching this behaviour and the mismatch between our plans and our final outcomes which eventually resulted in her first book, Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed and How we can Stick to the Plan.
    Gino describes herself as ‘a behavioural scientist curious about individual decision making and its consequences for groups and organisations’. Explaining how she got started, she says, “Over and over again, I found myself saying "not everything goes according to plan." So many times I set out to reach a certain goal, but reached a totally different outcome instead. A few years ago, my husband and I travelled to Dubai. My sister and her family were living there at the time. One of the places we visited while we were there was the Gold Souk in the old part of Dubai. The souk is a marketplace where you can buy all sorts of products, from clothes to vegetables and gold. A place where you could really experience the authentic life in the Middle East. So, my husband and I set out to spend the day at the souk, to have an authentic experience. As it turns out, some of the stores at the souk sell fake products. A very skilled salesperson ended up convincing my husband to buy a fake watch for cheap. By the time we were walking back to the car, my husband started feeling inauthentic while wearing his new watch. He was feeling exactly the opposite of our initial plan: feeling authentic by spending time at the souk.” Further conversations with friends and colleagues revealed that they too often got sidetracked when trying to implement their wellthought out plans.
    According to Gino, people are constantly aware that they aren’t doing things as planned, but fail to think about why it’s actually happening. “There is an interesting difference in the way we treat our mind versus internal organs, such as our heart or our kidneys,” she says. When our bodies don’t function as we expect them to, we invest time and energy in learning more about how they work and in making sure our health is in check, but believe we understand exactly how our mind works. “Even when we reach disappointing outcomes, we often do not investigate what went wrong and try to find out how we might improve our thinking. By recognising the common forces that derail our decisions and correcting them, we can be more successful in staying on track in both our personal and professional lives,” she says
    Through the course of her research, Gino has narrowed it down to three key factors which play a role when we it comes to disrupting our decisions. These are: forces from within ourselves, forces from our relationships and forces from the outside world. In one of the experiments conducted by her, people were asked to rank top basketball player Michael Jordan’s and Mother Teresa’s chances to get into heaven. They averaged out at 65% and 79% respectively. What was interesting was that they ranked their own chances at 87%, way over Mother Teresa. “We all tend to have overly positive views of our competence and skills (a force from within). We commonly rate ourselves as better than others on a wide range of dimensions, from intelligence to trustworthiness to our ability to make good decisions. This overly positive view of ourselves can sidetrack us as we execute our plans,” she explains.
    Another finding was that how seriously we take advice from others is inversely proportionate to how difficult the task is. If we think the task is not too complicated, we tend to be overly confident of our ability to get it right. Similarly, who we receive the advice from also colours our judgement. The senior management at Walmart is said to have received sufficient warnings from the mid-level German managers on German corporate laws and corporate culture on aspects like store timings when setting up operations there, which they chose to ignore. Germany is one of the few countries where Walmart had to pullout from.
    No matter what, most people tend to start out with the right intentions. These forces come into play somewhere between the planning and execution stage, and often throw us off track. “Being human makes all of us vulnerable to subtle forces that can dramatically impact our behaviour, such as the type of watch we are wearing or the emotions we are experiencing at the moment of the decision. These subtle forces can completely overshadow the effects of our underlying personality on our behaviour,” says Gino. Take the case of Jerry Yang turning down Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo! in 2008. Yang was one of the co-founders of the company, which for a while was the most popular search engine worldwide. Yang took over as CEO when the company hit a rough patch amidst intense competition in 2007. “At a time when Yahoo’s market value was about $39 billion, Microsoft offered Yang $45 billion. But, as an inside source told the New York Post in February 2008, “The emotional part of Yang would rather do anything but sell to Microsoft.” Yang rejected what many viewed to be a highly attractive offer. The company’s stock price kept dropping, and its profit continued to shrink. The business press speculated that Yang’s emotional attachment to the company he had founded clouded his judgment, and Yahoo! was suffering as a result. In this case, emotions derailed Yang's decision,” she says.
    When weighing the pros and cons of complex decisions, we may feel overwhelmed. Our emotions may direct our attention and energy toward what we believe to be the most important aspects of the decision, but they may also lead us astray, as seems to have been the case for Yang. So how do we avoid getting sidetracked because of emotions? Gino suggests ‘taking your emotional temperature’. “Reflecting on our emotional state and its source when we are facing important decisions can help us figure out whether our emotions were triggered by the current situation or by an unrelated event, and whether they are unduly influencing our judgment,” she says.
    It’s important to ensure that your judgements are based on sound information and awareness of the impact of situational factors. Making plans is easy, but it’s when you start to implement them that things go astray. Understanding what these factors are can help you stay on track and actually achieve what you set out to do.

Priyanka Sangani CDET130406