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Biographical Sketch SA: NLP offers a comprehensive way to understand our thinking and behavior that is very specific and practical. In a way it is what psychology promised about a hundred years ago, but never quite delivered. One of the basic ideas in NLP is that all human experience and thinking uses a scope of one or more of the five senses, visual images, auditory sounds, kinesthetic feelings, and usually to a lesser extent, olfactory (smell) and gustatory (taste). For instance, when someone sits down in a restaurant and reads the menu, they have to have some way to decide among the different options on the menu. A common way to decide is to read the word on the menu, “hamburger,” visualize an image of a hamburger, and then imagine biting into it. Then they imagine the taste and texture, and then have a kinesthetic feeling response to that, what is usually called liking or disliking. Then they imagine another option, and do the same, and choose the one that provides the strongest kinesthetic feeling. Of course there are many variations of this. Some people do this with the entire menu, while others decide ahead of time what they want, and don’t even look at the other options on the menu. Some use a remembered visual image of a hamburger, while others will construct an image of the hamburger that they expect they might get at this particular restaurant, etc. DC: What led to your interest in decision-making? SA: Talking with you in advance, and e-mailing back and forth, has really been interesting because I hadn’t realized how much of what I do has to do with decision-making. Any time someone has a problem, usually it’s because they can’t make a decision—they’re stuck somehow—or they’ve made a decision that hasn’t worked very well for them. This may be a conscious decision that didn’t work out well, or an unconscious decision that was made by default.
Although that is positive, it doesn’t fulfill the condition that it be under your control. So the next step is to ask, “What could you do (that is under your control) that might result in your wife being affectionate in those ways?” There’s an expression called “video talk,” where people are asked to speak in a way that gives a videotape description of what it is that they want. “What does it look like?” “Give me pictures, give me sounds, so that I can understand exactly what it is that you want that’s positive.” Even better is a behavioral demonstration: “Show me what it would look like; pretend to be your wife and show me what she would do if she were acting in the way that you want.” Many people spend a lot of their time going away from something without having a direction to go toward. “I’m hot. I don’t want to be hot. I’m out of here.” But they don’t know where they’re going to, and often where they jump to is worse than where they were to begin with--out of the frying pan, into the fire is as true now as it was hundreds of years ago. NLP divides decision-making into a number of sequential steps. The first step is generating a positive outcome over which you have some control. Many people spend a lot of time going for outcomes that they have no control over whatsoever, a waste of time. After specifying a positive outcome, the next step is finding or thinking of options that would satisfy that outcome. You can generate options in a number of ways: you can ask friends, you can make images in your mind, you can remember things from the past, you can construct images of the future, and so on. And then the next step is to select from those options that you generated. Selecting is best done in two separate steps: first screening by using digital criteria so that you can eliminate the options that just don’t have a chance of satisfying you. For instance, if you’re selecting a car, and you have a family of five, an example of a digital “dealbreaker” criterion is that it have at least five seats. That is a way of quickly discarding all the options that can’t possibly be satisfying. Next you need to take the relatively small number of options left and decide between them. This is best done by taking two options at a time and comparing them. You keep the one you like best and then compare that one with another option, and repeat that process until you are done. SA: Well, remember that’s one of the criteria for generating an outcome. “What resources do you need in order to reach this outcome, and of those, which do you already have and which do you need to get?” Some of them you might need to learn; you might need to do some research. Sometimes you have to go on a little side-loop into a smaller nested decision: “How can I generate options? “How can I find criteria that will help me distinguish between options? And which ones would satisfy me best?” So, the side loop becomes a nested decision within a decision. DC: You keep adjusting to the right level of specificity for moving through the process? SA: Well, you want to be as specific as you can all the way through. It’s not so much specificity, per se. You need to be sure that the entire decision process works well; there can be problems at any step. Some people have trouble deciding on their values and criteria for what would satisfy them, some have difficulty choosing between options, and some people have trouble generating options, etc. For instance, my wife had a client once who didn’t come in asking for anything about decisions but she came in for an overweight problem. And my wife said, “OK, when do you overeat? Do you overeat at work? Do you overeat at lunch or breakfast?” And the client said, “No, I overeat when I come home after work.” It turned out that when this woman came home from work she went into her decision strategy, which started with an internal voice, “What shall I do?” However, the only option that popped into her mind was go to the refrigerator and eat. In that case, the main thing was to create a sub-loop in which the client could generate options; rehearse different things she could do. “I could knit, I could watch TV, I could call up a friend, etc.” After rehearsing through a few alternatives like that, the client expanded her options. She could still choose to eat, but it was no longer the only default option. Basically, her initial decision strategy was absurdly simple, “What do I do—eat.” Once she had a way to generate options, she could come home from work and generate five, ten, twenty, a hundred options, and then choose between them. Then she wasn’t locked into going to the refrigerator. Another example from our book, Heart of the Mind, is from an early training seminar where our task was to elicit each other’s decision strategies. My partner in the exercise was a woman who, when faced with a decision at a restaurant, would ask herself, “What shall I eat?” which is a useful beginning. Then she heard a voice that said, “Look to see what other people are ordering.” That wasn’t so useful, because then she would be choosing based on what other people like, rather than what would satisfy her criteria. Then, another voice in her head said, “No, think for yourself!” These two voices argued for a while, and each time they went through this little loop of arguing, she felt worse. Finally, when this unpleasant feeling got to a certain point, she would randomly point at the menu and order. Since all her choices were essentially random, her whole life was filled with disappointment. Her choices had nothing to do with her criteria, her values or desires. She’d been in therapy for a year, exploring her feelings of disappointment. DC: How did you help her? It’s not uncommon for people to have competing voices or competing commitments. SA: Well, sometimes two voices can cooperate and be very useful in broadening the scope of a decision because they are attending to different aspects of the decision, just as two people can often make a better decision than either one could alone. But in this case, the voices just argued. I was just a beginner at the time, and the trainer in the seminar came up and laughed and he said, “Well, her strategy’s a ‘junker.’ ” DC: A “junker”? SA: As in “There’s nothing to be salvaged here.” Some people will have a decision strategy that basically works pretty well, but one step needs adjustment, like the woman who went to the refrigerator needed a way to generate options. But in this case, the whole thing was a wreck. So I gave her my strategy. I rehearsed her through several different contexts where she would make images of several options, and then evaluate those options. For example, I had her imagine going into a store to buy a dress. She would imagine looking at four different dresses, and then feel them, noticing the material, the color, the style, imagining trying them on to feel the fit—basically picturing visual and kinesthetic information—and then she would choose the one that she liked best. Then I rehearsed her through a different situation where she was choosing some food, in which the taste and the smell would be important. By shifting contexts, she learned to generalize and use the new sequence in any context of deciding. DC: So, by rehearsing and walking her through sample situations in which she would be satisfied, she became familiar with her own sense of satisfaction. SA: Well, she had her sense of satisfaction before, but her decision
strategy ignored it, because she got caught up in the argument between
the two voices. And then she got dissatisfied later.
SA: Let’s take the two different vacations. The most common mistake people make is that they evaluate their criteria one at a time, sequentially. So, they’ll say, “Well, I could go to Hawaii or I could go to Alaska. Oh, Hawaii is nice and warm and I can swim, but Alaska has big mountains and high peaks, and I really like hiking in the peaks, but I really like snorkeling.” etc. Usually when you hear the “but” it’s an indication that they are going around in circles without being able to decide, because they are only thinking of one aspect of the choice at a time.
DC: So you’re creating as complete a representation as you can and then focusing on that, rather than trying to break the decision down into smaller elements of the criteria, sequentially, one at a time? SA: Well, breaking down criteria sequentially can be useful in
terms of narrowing down possibilities, but when you come to the
final decision, you really have to evaluate the criteria all at
once. No choice is perfect, so every choice is going to have a down
side and you’ve got to represent that too or you’ll
get buyer’s remorse. Often when people make decisions they
don’t think of the whole scope of the decision, what is often
called “the big picture.” If they leave out a lot of
elements, they don’t participate in the final choice. Then
when they go on the vacation, they notice all the things that they
didn’t think about while making the decision. SA: Basically, they don’t represent all the aspects that they like and don’t like about a given option. They often don’t visualize the consequences in space or time. Let’s say you’re going to buy a car. “How are you going to use the car?” “Who’s going to drive it?” “How many kids do you have to carry in it?” “What is the mileage?” “What does the insurance cost?” All those different factors need to go into the decision if it’s going to be an intelligent and satisfying one, and most people just don’t include many of the factors. They don’t think about: “How fast is it going to depreciate?” “Do I have a garage for it?” “Is it going to sit in the sun so that the dashboard’s going to crack?” or whatever the consequences might be—both positive and negative. DC: Part of the being thorough, then, involves having a fairly complete set of questions to elicit that information? SA: Yes. You need to ask yourself, “What am I not considering that’s important to me in regard to this decision?” DC: It’s often difficult for people to anticipate the questions that they need to ask to get that information. SA: That’s certainly true. Often it can be useful to consult
an expert who already knows what questions to ask, based on his/her
experience. As you make decisions, and make mistakes, you learn
to anticipate what you are likely to leave out, which brings up
yet another aspect of decisions. It is particularly important to
have a way to review decisions to get feedback that you
can use to make your decision-making better. Some time after a decision,
when you have more information that you didn’t have at the
time you made the decision, you review it. “Okay, what did
I leave out?” “Oh, I forgot to get my wife’s opinion
on this car.” “Oh, I forgot that you have to get special
plates for this car and it costs extra money because it’s
a sports car.” So, you deliberately use feedback to adjust
your future decision strategy. Noticing the factors you
didn’t think of at the time you made a decision, insures that
you do think of them next time. SA: Oh, sure. DC: Are there areas where you find you still have a blind side? SA: Well, you can’t possibly know everything, not even in
your own field. So your information is always incomplete, and there’s
always a potential for making a mistake and a poor decision. But
in terms of the basic processes—generating outcomes
and options, screening options, selecting between options,
reviewing decisions—everything I’m talking about is
practical and something that I can teach other people how to do
by simple rehearsal. DC: There’s something useful about letting it gestate, letting the idea or decision go underground for a while? SA: Absolutely. Your brain keeps working, even if consciously you’re just staring at the wall. The literature on creativity and creative thinking is full of this idea called “incubation.” A colleague did a study of software engineers. She wanted to know what made the difference between the really good ones and the ones that were just OK. And the only difference she could find was that the ones that were really good knew when to take a break. If they’re working along on a problem and get stuck, they know it’s time to go to the water cooler, or walk outside, or make a phone call, or do something else totally different from the problem they’re working on. When they come back to the problem, often the solution or a new approach pops up, because their unconscious has been working on it. The conscious mind is a wonderful thing, but it tends to be sort of one-track and get stuck in that one direction. You think, “Oh, I’ve got to solve the problem this way; this is how I’ve got to do it.” Then if you go away from it and come back, you may not be on the same track. Using images is also a way of deliberately accessing the unconscious, because it is really true that “one picture is worth a thousand words”—you can represent an immense amount of information simultaneously in a movie. DC: I’m curious what drew you into investigating these kinds of processes in NLP? SA: It’s the most fun thing I can think of doing; I enjoy
it. Recently I’ve been writing a two-volume book that goes
into these kinds of processes—and many more—in much
more detail. For instance, I’ll come to a place in the writing
where I realize that I don’t really understand how something
works, or how to express what I do know. Then I go into my little
laboratory upstairs in my brain and ask, “What are the alternatives
and what’s a counter-example?” I just keep playing at
describing it differently and thinking about what is it that I don’t
understand. Usually, sooner or later, something pops up and a little
light bulb goes off and I go, “Oh, I know how that works.” SA: Well, the inner landscape of the mind is really very poorly
understood so far, though there is some wonderful and important
work going on with brain scans. But in terms of day-to-day things,
how people’s mental processes work, how they get into and
out of trouble, that is little-known and fascinating to me. SA: The kinds of things I’m talking about are very straightforward. You can work with kids, even when they are very young. You can offer them pictures of things and say, “Which would you like best, and how do you know which one you’d like best?” to direct their attention to the feelings that they have in response to two different alternatives, and engage them that way. Let’s say you put up three pictures of stuffed animals and ask, “If you had your choice, which one of these would you want most?” After they pick you ask, “Now, how did you do that?” “Oh, well, I thought that one looks really soft and I could cuddle with it at night,” and so on. And you ask some other kid and they might give you a completely different set of criteria for how they would choose. But the point is to use a simple choice to educate them on the little events that happen in their minds, which otherwise they wouldn’t notice. DC: To get them to be curious about their own way of classifying or creating criteria? SA: Yes, give them choices and encourage them to be curious about their own process. With our kids we’d say something like, “Well, what do you want to have for dinner?” And almost automatically at a certain point, from an early age on up, they’d say, “What are my choices?” They’d literally ask that question. We’d say, “Well, we could have this or we could have that, we could have the other.” We walked them through decisions all the way through their life. So many parents try and make their kids’ decisions for them. “Oh, you don’t want that; you want this,” or “Oh, that’s not good for you.” That teaches kids to ignore their own criteria and just follow the parents’ criteria, and often the parents’ criteria aren’t well specified at all. For instance, many parents just say, “This is the right way,” without saying why it’s right. Many people make decisions based on socially-accepted values which may not be very valid at all. Even when they’re valid, when they’re delivered from an authority, then you don’t get to go through the decision process yourself. The more opportunities kids have to make decisions, the better they get at it, especially if you teach how to review decisions. What if every school, from the first grade, started out each day with something like this: “I want you to think of a decision you made yesterday or the day before that didn’t work out very well. Think about how you made that decision. What did you omit? Did you think would be really nice, but when you got it, you didn’t like it as much? What kind of question would you want to ask yourself the next time you have a decision to make?” It wouldn’t take long. DC: A wonderful idea. SA: Maybe the decision would be just a little thing about not putting put a pencil in your pack so you’d have it at school. “How did that work out? What did you think about? What could you think about next time.” When you walk people through decisions when they’re younger and you have them review decisions and learn to use feedback, it is initially a conscious process, just like hitting a tennis ball or riding a bicycle is initially a conscious process. But very soon it becomes completely unconscious. DC: So generating options just naturally comes up? SA: Yes. So, what becomes conscious is, “Well, I don’t
really know enough about this to make an intelligent decision.”
And then you go find information, or whatever is missing. The option generator thinks up all kinds of things that they could do, and the selector is the guy who gets down to earth and gets practical about what wouldn’t work, or would need to happen in order to make it work. They’re complementary and they make a great partnership. The guy who generates options—most of which won’t work—would just go off the deep end on his own. And the other guy, the critic let’s say, would have nothing to do without an option generator to give him something to review. Usually a selector in a group will say, “No, that won’t work,” and kill the idea. However, if he says, “Well, if we did that, there will be these problems to deal with; how could we make it work?” that will be much more productive. Part of making a group decision process effective is educating the critics to speak more positively and say, “Well, if we did that, there would be this problem to overcome.” That presupposes that there might be something good in the idea, and that the problem can be overcome. “Yes, here’s an obstacle, and how can we overcome it?” JE: That gets back to the positive outcomes piece. SA: Absolutely. What we have talked about here is only a very brief
“broad brush” introduction to how people make decisions.
For more detail about how you can determine how someone makes a
decision, and teach them to make better ones, take a look at Heart
of the Mind, or my new book, Six Blind Elephants: understanding
ourselves and each other. |
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