Finding a Way

by Loren Paulsson on August 22, 2011

Compass When lost, a person’s first response is to deny reality and explain away the evidence. As the realization that he or she is lost sinks in, the person usually becomes frantic. As the person becomes exhausted, he or she tries to form a strategy to make reality match his or her perception of where he or she should be. When this strategy fails, the person’s mental and emotional condition continues to deteriorate, and he or she reaches the final stage—resignation. In his book, Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales documents his lifelong study of survivors and the reasons many don’t survive, even when they have the means of survival within reach.

Recognize your surroundings

Gonzales’ research points to a lot of factors—getting enough rest, using resources to best effect, having someone else to be concerned about, reorienting as quickly as possible to the new reality, and even appreciating the beauty of it. One of the worst things a person can do is to just keep pushing through. If you’re just reaching the base of Half Dome in Yosemite and a thunderstorm is coming up, the right thing to do is to find shelter, but if a person has already hiked miles anticipating the view from the top, the tendency is to get tunnel vision and ignore the developing threat.

But the wilderness isn’t the only place where human thoughts and feelings lead a person astray. In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer uses the growing knowledge of neurology to draw a more detailed map of human decision-making.

As it turns out, the popular conception of reason and emotion in conflict isn’t quite accurate. The intuitive and the rational work together and support each other. It was his rational brain that saved Wag Dodge when he recognize he would not outrun the fire at Mann Gulch in 1949, and he quickly lit an escape fire and took shelter in the small burned area. It was intuition that alerted Lieutenant Commander Michael Riley that the radar blip moving toward the USS Missouri on February 24, 1991, was a missile, not a friendly aircraft.

**Think and feel**

The key to making better decisions is not to rely on reason or intuition, Lehrer says, but to recognize the situation and know which is more likely to lead to a better decision. When facing a decision with relatively fewer factors, taking a rational approach generally yields a better result. When facing a novel situation, it’s also a good idea to stop and think it through. When dealing with an area in which you’re an expert, your intuition is probably generally reliable because long experience has equipped the emotional mind to account for many more variables much more quickly.

Ask questions

Whatever the situation, a person needs to stay open to other possibilities. One study Lehrer cites discovered experts who appear more certain often make less accurate predictions…apparently because their certainty prevents them from seeing other possibilities. In order to avoid this, Lehrer says a person can intentionally entertain competing hypotheses and continually recognize what he or she does not know.

Though they rely less on neurological research and more on case studies of Costco, eBay, Patagonia, and others, John Mullins and Randy Komisar apply many of the same ideas to business planning in their book, Getting to Plan B. Instead of trying to answer every question from scratch, Mullins and Komisar recommend identifying analog and antilog companies. An analog company is already doing something the new entrepreneur would like to try.

If someone else is already doing it, and it works, it’s probably possible in the present case as well. An antilog company is an organization doing something the new entrepreneur believes could be improved upon.

Test ideas

By getting experience this way, an entrepreneur can answer a lot of the questions he or she has about the new business. And whatever questions remain become the entrepreneur’s “leaps of faith.” Once an entrepreneur has recognized what the “leaps of faith” are, Mullins and Komisar recommend setting up metrics to monitor the results and testing the model on a smaller scale.

This approach places the emphasis on what’s actually happening and allows an entrepreneur to tweak the business model in response to the real business environment rather than continue trying to work a flawed plan. One wonders what might be possible if more businesses—or even careers—adopted this way of doing things.