A632.2.3.RB -Sheena Iyengar: How to Make Choosing Easier

We all want customized experiences and products, but when faced with “700” options, consumers freeze up. With fascinating new research, Sheena Iyengar demonstrates how businesses (and others) can improve the experience of choosing. Identify four of the methodologies Sheena Iyengar suggests as methods of helping us improve our experience in choosing. Discuss the implications of two of these methods in terms of your personal decision-making and then as a member of an organization. Are there other ways can you improve your ability to decide?

In Iyengar’s Ted Talk video, “How to make choosing easier “(2012) she describes the American assumption that more choice is better than less choice. However, she points out that more choice also comes at a cost. She found three major consequences when we are given too much choice:

1.) We delay our choices, or we don’t choose at all

2.) The quality of our decisions decrease

3.) We are less satisfied with the choices that we make (Iyengar, 2012).

In addition to this, Barry Schwartz (2006) has found that more choice can actually lead to anxiety, self-blame, regret and excessively high expectations. To help alleviate some of the stresses that come with making choices Iyengar (2012) offers four tips on how we can make our choices easier.

The first technique to making choices easier is to actually cut the amount of choices or options that are redundant (Iyengar, 2012). For example, when researching prices on the internet to limit the internet search to three sights (Tugned, 2010). By doing this the chooser is not only saving time, but is less overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite possibilities, and is more likely to be satisfied with the choosing experience (Tunged, 2010). The second technique is referred to as concretization. In other words, to make the abstract concrete so one can feel the consequences of their decision (Iyengar, 2012). For example, my bank offers a phone app where they show my daily and monthly spending by using charts. As a result, I can understand the consequences of saving or spending my money more clearly. It also helps me to choose categories of spending that I can cut back on to increase my savings. The third technique categorization, or to organize similar items together (Iyengar, 2012). For instance, I could organize my movies by genera so there are five choices instead of choosing from all 100 individual movies. By doing this, Iyengar (2012) suggests that I will have an easier time choosing a movie because I can more easily see the difference between my choice offerings. The last technique is to condition for complexity (Iyengar, 2012). This technique helps the chooser make complicated, multistep choices by starting off with small, easy decisions and then increasing the complexity of choices as you go.

Discuss the implications of two of these methods in terms of your personal decision-making and then as a member of an organization.

One of the techniques that I use regularly to help me make decisions is categorization. I use this method frequently in my personal life, from filing important documents to organizing our garage. However, one of the ways that categorization has really helped me to make multiple decisions was by organizing our food pantry. I had several frustrating moments of trying to make dinner and looking for a particular item that I thought I had and not finding in the chaos of a small cabinet; then going to the store to buy it, only to find the item I needed a few days later in the cabinet. After about four months of this I purchased about $100 worth of lumber and shelving brackets and had my husband help me install shelving in our pantry. By having the expanded space I was able to organize and categorize our food so we could easily see what we had. As a result, I not only had the added benefit of not being frustrated by looking for items, but my husband and I could make quicker decisions on what to cook because we could see everything easily. On top of this, by investing about $100 we are actually saving money because we can make smarter choices about what we need when we go to the grocery store. 

            I’ve also used the categorization technique at work as well. However, Iyengar (2012) made a very important point when it comes to categorization: the category must inform the chooser. When I started my current job my co-worker had a spreadsheet of all 250 of our students on one page that she attempted to track all of our students on. The problem was she was having a really hard time keeping the spreadsheet up to date because it had way too much data on a single spreadsheet and we had to pull up several other spreadsheets to update it. After spending all day working on the spreadsheet I asked her to consider reorganizing the entire spreadsheet. As Hoch (2001) suggests, when faced with a problem that requires multiple decisions to be made, it is beneficial to define goal, or purpose, of what is to be achieved and then use this information to make a decision. My co-worker and I spent a lot of time discussing and defining what the purpose of the spreadsheet was actually for, and then weeding out the excess information that was distracting us of that purpose. In addition to this, we also had to agree on how we were going to label and set up our categories so both of us could understand the meaning and purpose each category. All said and done, I created multiple tabs that categorized our students into prospect, admitted, and matriculated students. We also came up with a simple color coding system so we could see other demographic information about the student at a glance. As a result of categorizing this data, it not only saved us a lot of time, but we now have  a clearer understanding of our student body that allows  us to make better decisions because I can quickly identify one student demographic from another. For example, now every Monday when I come into the office I can look at the spreadsheet and make decisions on the students that I need to contact that week, and choose how to set up the rest of my week’s schedule. I also can make decisions about how we can target a certain demographic due to the trends I can see in the spreadsheet. Before we categorized the spreadsheet we were making decisions almost strictly off of intuition and “winging it”, now our decisions are informed and much more strategic.

            I also use concretization as a method to make choices easier. Concretization with regards to decision making is to make the abstract information more concrete to the chooser (Iyendar, 2012). For example, my husband and I have been slowly improving the landscape of our yard and we have built several garden and flower beds. As with all couples, we sometimes have very different ideas and opinions of how we want our yard to look and what we wanted to plant. We had a lot of verbal conversations about our ideas, but we often had to get paper and pen to draw out what we were trying to describe. Ironically, we often had very similar ideas, but we couldn’t “see” these ideas by relying on our verbal explanations alone. We often went outside and measure our yard and outline what we were thinking of on the ground. This way we could make a better and easier decision about where to put the garden, and how big the garden could be given the restraints of our yard. In this way, the consequences of our decisions became more real because we had more information to go off of and we could visualize the end product, and as a result we could decide to move forward with a project, or go back to the drawing board.  

            At work I use concretization to help students make informed decisions about their class schedules. The majority of my students are active duty military, and as a result the often have to juggle a very demanding workload, moving, deployments and travel on top of school and family commitments. When students get overwhelmed they contemplate taking a term off of school to focus on other areas of life, and often come to me for advice. When a student communicates that they are thinking about skipping a term I print out a projected version of what their schedule would be if they choose to skip a term. I also put a projected graduation date, and a mini picture graph that shows how many classes they have taken and how many they need before they graduate. By having this information organized on paper the student is better able to make an informed decision and “see” the implications of their choices. Although it is my job to help the student persist through their degree and sign them up for classes, sometimes this information helps the student to determine that the best decision for them is to take a break from school. Other times, it motivates the student to keep pushing forward. Either way, it makes the process of choosing easier for the student because they have a clearer understanding of the implications of their decision.

Are there other ways can you improve your ability to decide?

            When I started researching more about how to make choosing easier Barry Schwartz’s name kept popping up. Schwartz echoes Iyendar’s findings that as more does not always mean better with regards to choice. He suggests that a technique people can use to make better decisions is by lowering their standards and expectations (Schwartz, 2006). At first I, thought this sounded a bit silly and quite frankly naïve, but as I reflected more on it there is some wisdom to this decision making technique.  By having so many choices available to us in modern society we expect to receive the best each choice has to offer, but when our expectations are not met we are disappointed. Part of the problem with this is that we are constantly comparing what could have been possible if we had just picked different choice vs. being satisfied with the choice that we made (Schwartz, 2005). I don’t think Schwartz is calling us to be under-achievers, or to live in mediocracy, but instead to reframe how we measure the quality of our choices. For example, instead of asking ourselves, “Is this decision the best possible decisions that I can make?” he calls us to instead ask, “Am I happy?” (Schwartz, 2005). I would personally expand on this concept and ask myself, “Are my needs being met?”  By reframing the goal of my choices I am less likely to be concerned about unforeseen negative consequences that have little to no impact to my life, if in the end, I decide that my needs are met.  For example, when we bought our house we knew it was not our forever home and we were looking at our purchase in very practical vs. emotional terms. Since we only had 3 days to house hunt it was very difficult to not second guess our decisions and think out but what else could have been out there on the market. However, my husband and I had a conversation about this and decided that overall our home met our needs, and we were happy. After we came to terms with this we stopped talking about the possibilities of what could have been and we started to settle into our home much quicker and made quicker decisions about upgrades that we wanted to do to the house.

After reflecting on Iyendar’s teachings, to me the irony about choice is that we are not very conscious of the decisions we are actually making on a daily basis. Even within the first week of class of being asked to provide examples of decisions I’ve made to expand my learning, my mind of goes blank. I think to myself, “I haven’t made any choices recently.” I think most if this is due to the fact that I am not conscious of the choices I am even making. Along with this, especially in the work place, the burden of choice is deferred to a single leader, or is given to a collective group of people that have to compromise on the final decision. In both of these cases my role in the decision process can be blurred, but I am starting to see that I am making choices and decisions all of the time.

With this reflection I am forced to ask myself if I am selling myself short with regards to leadership by not actively choosing to make decisions and instead deflecting the burden of decisions on others. I know that as an individual, and as a leader I place a high value on team work. I feel that two brains are better than one and I get the most value out of sharing my ideas, and I get energized by hearing other’s ideas to help implement a decision. However, if I’m honest with myself there are a lot of times at my current job that I don’t make decisions or voice my opinion because that team atmosphere isn’t as valued as in other places I have work in. There is a strict hierarchy and boundaries within job titles and as a result where I normally would have made my own decisions, or worked with others to implement a decision, I have gotten complacent with just letting my boss handle the decision because of where I stand on the totem pole and the cultural norms of the organization. In order to grow as an employee and as a leader I will have to find solutions to break this glass ceiling. I don’t have the answers yet, but hopefully by being aware of the decisions I want to defer, or and told to defer, I can request more feedback on how I can play a larger role to grow professionally and as a leader.  

References:

Hoch, S. J., Kunreuther, H., & Gunther, R. E. (2001;2002;). Wharton on making decisions (1st ed.). New York: Wiley.

Iyendar, Sheena. (November 2011). How to Make Choosing Easier. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose.

Schwartz, Barry. (June 2011). More Isn’t Always Better. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2006/06/more-isnt-always-better

Schwartz, Barry. (July 2005). The Paradox of Choice. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.

Tugend, Alina. (26 February 2010). Too Many Choices: A Problem That Can Paralyze. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/your-money/27shortcuts.html.