How Extraordinary Leaders Never Go with Their GutYour Gut is Loaded with Too Many Bias
Gleb Tsipursky and his wife set out to start a non-profit. But quickly they began to experience a lot of conflict trying to move things forward. Determined to successfully collaborate, they work to finally realize they had very different viewpoints and prospective on how to solve their problems. And they also came to realize they both had issues with judgement errors. Now they help others to avoid their own decision-making disasters.
Gleb was born in Chisinau, Moldova, a small country in Eastern Europe, in 1981. It’s famous for being one of the least happy countries in the world. Fortunately for him, when he was 10, his parents took him and his little brother, who was born in 1986, to New York City. That’s where he was raised.
As a kid, his dad told him with utmost conviction and absolutely no reservation to “go with your gut.” He ended up making some really bad decisions. For instance, wasting several years pursuing a medical career. Gleb also watched his dad make some terrible choices that gravely harmed his family as his dad followed his gut, such as hiding some of his salary from his mom for several years. After she discovered this and several other financial secrets he kept, her trust in him was broken, which was one of the major factors leading to their later prolonged separation. Fortunately, they eventually reconciled, but the lack of trust was never fully repaired.
From that experience, Gleb started learning about the dangers of people following their gut reactions. His conviction that the omnipresent advice to “follow your gut” was hollow grew only stronger as he came of age during the dotcom boom and the fraudulent accounting scandals of top executives of Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom leading to ruined reputations and long jail sentences. The best explanation for their seemingly irrational behavior comes from their willingness to follow their guts.
As someone with an ethical code of utilitarianism – desiring the most good for the most number – Gleb felt a calling to reduce suffering and improve well-being through addressing these problems. Therefore, he devoted himself to the mission of protecting people from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases, which devastate bottom lines and bring down high-flying careers. He focused on developing the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies, based on pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience, to empower leaders to avoid business disasters and maximize their bottom lines.
Studying the topic formally, doing research in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics with over 15 years in academia, including 7 as a professor in Ohio State University’s Decision Sciences Collaborative, he shifted away from academia to devote his full-time efforts to business as the CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts.
Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership has been featured in popular venues that include Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, The Conversation, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and Inc. Magazine.
Gleb has conveyed all his experience to date in his book, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. The legacy he hopes to leave is to empower leaders to notice and address the kind of dangerous judgment errors that decimate so many careers and businesses.
He lives in and travels from Columbus, OH. In his free time, he enjoys tennis, hiking, and playing with his two cats, and most importantly, he makes sure to spend abundant quality time with his wife to avoid disasters in his personal life.
Tweetable Quotes and Mentions
Listen to @Gleb_Tsipursky to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow – Click to Tweet
“I’ve seen so many leaders make terrible choices and then their followers suffer so much.” – Click to Tweet
“What we typically don’t consider is information that goes against what’s comfortable for us.” – Click to Tweet
“Our gut leads us to making some really bad choices.” – Click to Tweet
“You want to look at information that you didn’t consider that goes against your intuitions.” – Click to Tweet
“Think about all the ways that your plan can fail.” – Click to Tweet
“We all have some intuitive decision-making model in our head, but the vast majority of us don’t have a formal process.” – Click to Tweet
“There are many reasons why a pro-con list doesn’t work.” – Click to Tweet
“We tend to go way too long, not making a decision when we really should.” – Click to Tweet
“Are there opportunities you may be missing because you’re not making decisions?” – Click to Tweet
“Gather relevant information from a variety of perspectives; variety is critical.” – Click to Tweet
“Paint a clear vision of the outcome.” – Click to Tweet
“We don’t generate nearly enough options for important decision.” – Click to Tweet
“Weigh the criteria to the options that you have available.” – Click to Tweet
“Measure how well your decision is doing so that you’re able to revise it as needed.” – Click to Tweet
“We tend to assume everything will go according to plan.” – Click to Tweet
“Plans never survive contact with the enemy.” – Click to Tweet
“Failing to plan for problems is planning to fail.” – Click to Tweet
“The illusion of transparency, is the illusion that we are communicating much more effectively than we actually are.” – Click to Tweet
“Which of the 30 most dangerous judgement errors are you most prone to?” – Click to Tweet
“Your will-power is what you need to use to resist your gut intuitions and make wiser decisions.” – Click to Tweet
“We tend to be very black and white thinkers.” – Click to Tweet
Hump to Get Over
Gleb Tsipursky and his wife set out to start a non-profit. But quickly they began to experience a lot of conflict trying to move things forward. Determined to successfully collaborate, they work to finally realize they had very different viewpoints and prospective on how to solve their problems. And they also came to realize they both had issues with judgement errors. Now they help others to avoid their own decision-making disasters.
Advice for others
Become more emotionally aware and get in touch with your emotions.
Holding him back from being an even better leader
I’m a little too much of a perfectionist.
Best Leadership Advice
The feeling of comfort is not necessarily the feeling that is right.
Secret to Success
My ability to effectively collaborate with others.
Best tools in business or life
My ability to take effective breaks from work.
Recommended Reading
Contacting Gleb Tsipursky
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-gleb-tsipursky/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Gleb_Tsipursky
Website: https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/
Resources and Show Mentions
Show Transcript
[expand title=”Click to access edited transcript”]
Jim Rembach: (00:00)
Okay. Fast leader Legion today. I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who’s going to give us some insights into how we can actually make some better decisions not falling back on our guts.
Jim Rembach: (00:11)
Gleb Tsipursky was born in Chisinau Moldova, a small country in Eastern Europe in 1981 it’s famous for being one of the least happy countries in the world. Fortunately for him, he was 10 his parents took him and his little brother who was born in 86 to New York city and that’s where they were raised as a kid. His dad told them with utmost conviction and absolutely no reservation to go with your gut. He ended up making some really bad decisions. For instance, wasting several years pursuing a medical career live. Also watched his dad make some terrible choices that gravely harmed his family as his dad followed his gut, such as hiding some of his salary from his mom for several years and after she discovered this and several other financial secrets he kept, her trust in him was broken, which was one of the major factors leading to their long separation.
Jim Rembach: (01:03)
Fortunately, they eventually reconciled, but the lack of trust was never fully repaired. From that experience, Gleb started learning about the dangers of people following their gut reactions, his conviction that the omnipresent advice to follow your gut was hollow, grew only stronger as he came of age during the.com bomb and the fraudulent accounting scandals of top executives of Enron Tyco, WorldCom, which led to ruin reputations and long jail sentences. The best explanation for their seemingly irrational behavior comes from their willingness to follow their gut. As someone with an ethical code of utilitarianism desiring the most good for the most number, glove felt a calling to reduce suffering and to improve wellbeing through addressing these problems. Therefore, he devoted himself to the mission of protecting people from the dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases, which devastate bottom lines and bring down high flying careers. He focused on developing the most effective and profitable decision making strategies based on pragmatic business experience and cutting edge behavioral economics and causing cognitive neuroscience to empower leaders to avoid businesses asters and maximize their bottom lines.
Jim Rembach: (02:20)
Studying the topic, formerly doing research in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics with over 15 years in academia, including a seven years as a professor in Ohio state university’s decision sciences collaborative. He shifted away from academia to devote his fulltime efforts to business as the CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training from disaster avoidance experts, dr supersedes cutting edge. Thought leadership has been featured in popular venues that include fast company, CBS news time, scientific America, psychology. Today, the conversation business insider, government executive, and the Chronicle of philanthropy and inc magazine glib has conveyed all his experience to date in his book. Never go with your gut. How pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. The legacy he hopes to leave is to empower leaders to notice and address the kind of dangerous judgment errors that this decimate so many careers and businesses he lives in and travels from Columbus, Ohio. In his free time. He enjoys tennis, hiking and playing with his two cats. And, and most importantly, he makes sure to spend abundant quality time with his wife to avoid disasters in his personal life who have Zipursky. Are you ready to help us get over the hump?
Gleb Tsipursky: (03:37)
Absolutely. Very happy to do session.
Jim Rembach: (03:40)
Well, I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ve given my Legion a little bit about you, but can you share what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?
Gleb Tsipursky: (03:47)
Sure. So right now I’m really passionate about the topics. We’ve talked about how to help leaders avoid decision disasters. And the reason I’m passionate about this showed a little bit of this earlier, Jim, thank you for sharing that is because of my background, I’ve seen so many leaders make terrible, terrible choices and then their followers suffered so much, lost, so much money, lost so much morale. And it’s just devastating for me. I mean, I care a lot about people. My value such as utilitarian, so desiring the most good for the most number and when I see people make unnecessary bad choices is just, you know, heartbreaking for me. So that’s why I’m passionate about doing what I do. Helping leaders make much better decisions and avoid disasters.
Jim Rembach: (04:32)
Well, and I’m sure too, and I’m glad that you all even shared the experience as far as your family was concerned because you know, I always used to tell my mom that, you know, she’s a great role model and a lot of times it’s for things that I should not do.
Gleb Tsipursky: (04:49)
Yeah. That’s my dad’s like that for me. Yup, exactly.
Jim Rembach: (04:52)
It’s just the way that it is. We are a role model for our children. It’s just the way that it goes. So, but when you, when you start talking about, you know, some of the common, I mean, they seem irrational, but yet they’re common mistakes that people make you, you know, in the book you start talking about different frameworks and decision making models and questionnaires and we’re going to hit on some of these things. But the first thing you talk about is five questions that, um, we need to ask in order to be able to avoid these decision disasters. Let’s walk through those five questions real quick.
Gleb Tsipursky: (05:26)
Sure. And just to so folks know about the frameworks, my passion is solving problems. There are a lot of people who talk about, Hey, here’s how you’re screwed up, and the point is don’t Pat that right. Here’s how our brain is screwed up. There’s a lot of work out there for that. My book and my work is the, this book is the first one that actually focuses on business leadership and helps leaders actually solve these problems. And the five questions that Jim mentioned is a solution, one of the primary solutions to these problems. It’s something that you take just less than five to ask yourself before any decision that you don’t want to screw up. I need daily decision. We have more major decisions. There’s a more intense thing, but this is for daily decisions, writing emails, having meetings and are making decisions on investments that don’t matter as super much.
Gleb Tsipursky: (06:12)
But it’s those. It’s the only ones. So first question, what important information did I not yet fully considered again? What important information did they not get fully considered? Now you want to look at imperfection. That’s only important. So decide what’s important. You don’t want to get stuck in Alice paralysis looking at all the fun stuff. Now you also want to look at information that you didn’t consider. That’s the other component of this question. And what we typically don’t consider is information that goes against what’s comfortable for us and information that goes against our gut reactions. Now, as you can tell from the title, never go with your gut. I talk a lot about how we should not go. Simply go with our gut. We should check with our head. And that’s because our gut leads us to making some really bad choices because we mistake the feeling of comfort when we’re comfortable with for the feeling of what’s true and what’s right for us at our careers in our businesses.
Gleb Tsipursky: (07:09)
So you want to look at information that you’d been considered that goes against your intuition. So that’s the first question. Second, what dangerous judgment errors have we not considered? And these are cognitive biases and cognitive biases are the typical mistakes we as human beings make because of how the brain is wired, which we’ll talk about later in the show. And they talk about the 30 most common dangerous judgment errors in the book. Never go with your gut. How pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters. Third, what would a trusted and objective advisor tell you to do? So imagine a little gym on your shoulder. What would he tell you to do as you’re making your decisions? Think about that image or other trusts and objective advice. Now those first few questions are about actually making the decision. The last two questions are about implementing the decision.
Gleb Tsipursky: (07:57)
So the first of those, or the fourth question on the questionnaire is how could I considered all the ways this could fail? Now, one of the typical cognitive biases we run into is called the planning fallacy. Where we make plans that are based on the assumptions that everything will go fine. That’s our intuitions. We are very comfortable with that assumption, but everything will go well. But how often have your plants survive contact with the enemy? The way to address that in advance is to think about all the ways that your plan can fail. Address all the problems that you can in advance by preventing them, addressing them, and also building in more resources for things you can’t visit. So that’s the forefront. And finally what would cause me to revisit what new information caused me to revisit this decision. You want to really think about this in advance before you’re actually in the heat of the moment and implementing the decision.
Gleb Tsipursky: (08:51)
Because when you’re implementing the decision, you are committed to the decision, you’re, you’re much more likely to follow through with whatever plan you made even when you shouldn’t. Even when you should. We’ll talk later about some judgment errors as we make when we should not follow through with a decision. So you want to decide in advance what could cause you to revisit the decision, especially if it’s part of a team decision making process. Because there are always going to be some people who may not agree with a decision and then you don’t want to run into the situation where they’ll say, Oh I told you so. You know this is what’s a change of minds. You will not agree as a group what would cause you to revisit that decision and then revisit it only if that situation arises. So those are the five simple, clear questions you can ask. Take less than five minutes do so. And if one the answers doesn’t make you happy and it takes more than five minutes, believe me, it’ll be very much worth it to explore it in more depth from the perspective of not losing time and money down the road.
Jim Rembach: (09:46)
You know, and as you’re talking glove, I start thinking about, you know, say an, you know, an artisan or a mechanic. It’s, you know, using the right tool, you know, for the problem that’s in front of them. And the fact is that we’re using tools all day long. Um, it’s whether or not we’re using, you know, the using the right tool and then using that tool correctly. And so your book, you know, gives us a lot of these frameworks including the questionnaire to talk about that we’re going to go over, you know, in order to help people to make sure that they are pulling the right thing at the right time and using it in the right way. And one of the things that you have is the eight step decision making model a. And cause you even mentioned it’s you’re like, okay, well everybody has some model they use. It’s whether or not you have one that works well, you know and that you know how to use it. So they go through the eight step decision making model so that we can hopefully make better decisions.
Gleb Tsipursky: (10:35)
Sure. So this is a model unlike the questionnaire which you should ask forever for daily decision making for all the little things that you don’t want to screw up when your daily life. This eight step decision making model is for more significant decisions and Jim, right? We all have some kind of intuitive decision making model in their head, but the vast majority of us haven’t threatened it out. We don’t have a formal process. I mean the best we do is a pro con list and there’s many reasons for why pro con list doesn’t work, which we can talk about, you know, if that comes up. But there’s a lot of things that don’t work. And only recently have we been discovered in Houston, cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics, what is called evidence-based business. Now, evidence based medicine has actually arisen up in the last couple of decades. We’ve really been making a lot of mistakes medicine because we haven’t been testing it.
Gleb Tsipursky: (11:27)
We haven’t been testing what’s actually working and what’s not. Now with testing what’s working business and what’s not, and this is a decision making model that has been shown to work effectively as opposed to the large majority of models. Intuitive models that don’t. So the first step, you identify the need for decisions to be made. Now that seems simple. You know, what’s the needs, right? Well, unfortunately we as human beings tend to go a long way too often not making a decision. When would it really should make a decision? It feels often uncomfortable to make a decision. We much prefer to leave it in the hands of other people, you know, Oh, let somebody else make the decision, not not me. I shouldn’t be the responsible one. Let somebody else do go ahead and take the responsibility. Well, I mean if you don’t take responsibility, who will?
Gleb Tsipursky: (12:16)
Right though this responsibility may never be taken and then you’ll, the whole situation will be quite problematic. If you don’t identify the need for decisions to be made. So the first step is scan your environment, but it constantly for the need for decision to be made. That is your environment. Shifting is S is a situation becoming more problematic in some way? And then what kind of decisions did you want to make? So that’s the risk. Also opportunity. Are there opportunities that you may be missing because you’re not making decisions? So scan your environment for opportunities as well. That’s first. Then gather relevant information from a variety of perspectives. A variety is critical here. We tend to, when we gather information, ask only the people who agree with us already and we go to them because we both feel good about them. Our gut intuitions, our gut, we’ll feel good about the responses.
Gleb Tsipursky: (13:08)
You know it’s the yes men and women. You don’t want to only hear these people. You want to go to people who you know, whole perspectives, contrary to what to your decision to your perspective and get their ideas. You don’t need to follow them, but you need to share them out. So that’s really important. Then you want to decide on the goals. It’s the third step. Paint a clear vision of the outcome. So often we go ahead with a decision not knowing what the actual goal should be. We don’t have a clear vision of what we want to reach. We just think, Oh, we should make a decision. Like let’s say you know, we should make a new model car model and we don’t think about what is the goal, what does the outcome of a car model of want to make or do, we should launch a new product and we don’t think about the goal, the outcome of this new product.
Gleb Tsipursky: (13:53)
So these are serious problems that people tend to find and then develop a clear decision making criteria to evaluate the options with the options of the decisions that you’re choosing. And that’s a big problem. People often look at the options, you know, I have these five options. What does really, what you should start with is develop the criteria before you look at the options before. Because if you look at the options in advance, you will have prejudice yourself and you will intuitively tend to prefer one of the options and you won’t think about the right criteria. So if you’re hiring somebody, decide is the salary that they are requesting the most important thing or is there a fit for the job, the most important thing? Or are there technical skills? The most important thing and how would you weigh these? So it’s not that example.
Gleb Tsipursky: (14:39)
Then generate viable options to achieve your goals. So that’s the options that we’re talking about. So look at all the options. Now, a mistake that extensive research has shown is that we don’t generate nearly enough options for important decisions. We tend to lead those, tend to make fast decisions. And that’s a big problem. You know, we’re in the fast leader podcast. The leaders tend to make decisions way too quickly because they settle on the first option that comes along that seems good enough and they don’t maximize, you know, they can take 15 more minutes, half an hour and get a decision that will be 50% more good. That’s, that’s so often the case and they make the mistake of not taking the time to make a wise decision.
Jim Rembach: (15:21)
Great segue. Hold on. I’ve got to stop right there. Go ahead. Because that’s exactly why we call it the fast leader show so that we can learn these systems and frameworks because that ultimately in the wrong long run from the longterm view we do, we do actually just, I mean from a velocity perspective we go significantly faster because if we don’t do these things correctly, as I’m sure you deal with every single day, I mean people just tell they’re doing the same thing over and over. It’s just insane decision making process. And do you think you’re moving faster? You know, fast leader, I mean you’re a boat anchor and you’re weighing everyone down. So I you setting me up for that. Sure.
Gleb Tsipursky: (15:57)
Happy to do so. Jim, I was wondering if you’d comment on that. I was a little bit provocative, right? But in my experience, it’s not that people tend to go faster when they make these decisions. It’s that they tend to not go into the ditch because you know that’s when you really are going to be in trouble and really not going anywhere fast. So that’s the fifth one. Next, weigh the options. So again, I told you earlier about thinking about which of these credit decision making criteria is more important. The salary demand of someone they’re fit for, the job, their technical skills, whatever way their criteria according to the options that you have available next, implement the option that you chose. So and finally evaluate the implementation process. You don’t want to just say, okay I’m implementing, that’s great. We’re finished. You want to measure, you want to measure how well the decision is doing so that you’re able to devout to revise it as nude in the process. So that’s a really important last step. But people often tend to miss and they should not miss. So that’s the eight step process for significant major decisions.
Jim Rembach: (17:05)
Yeah. And the reason we have to have that and then you’ve kind of hit it on it here and there. As you tired of talking about biases and things associated with that. I mean you’re studying through behavioral economics and neuroscience and all of these other things, uh, you know, brain, all the brain activity and thing that we’ve learned about just within the past couple of years, you know, and why all this occurs. So if you can just kinda hit on some of those core major biases that oftentimes are, are being used, uh, on us and upon us and we’re being victimized too, that we’re just not aware of.
Gleb Tsipursky: (17:38)
Sure. So we have a lot of cognitive biases that, so several of them will, or you talked about in the program, one is the planning fallacy that they might mention that we tend to assume everything will go according to plan. Now the planning fallacy comes up most often when people think, Oh, you know, planning to fail, a failing to plan is planning to fail. So people think that I need to make a plan because otherwise I’m going to fail. Unfortunately, that’s often a bad idea. And here’s why. We tend to make plans as STO, they will come true. We tend to plan for the best case outcomes and that is going to be a problem when we invest our resources and make a commitment based on these plans. In reality, we don’t tend to plan for all the problems that will come along. There’ll be many problems with calm that will screw up your plans.
Gleb Tsipursky: (18:27)
You know, plans never survive contact with the enemy, but we tend to make plans as still they do so much better. Strategy is thinking to yourself. Failing to plan for problems is planning to fail. So again, failing to plan for problems is planning to fail. That’s a much better way of thinking about this planning fallacy or another one that I like to talk to folks about is the illusion of transparency and this is especially relevant since we’re talking here in a podcast and you’re listening to me. The illusion of transparency is the solution that we are communicating much more effectively than we actually are communicating. We tend to think that whatever we say, whatever we convey, the other person understands a hundred percent accurately and 100% effectively and we don’t tend to check for their understandings. Now, if I’m, when I’m doing a presentation, I do a lot of training as consulting and coaching.
Gleb Tsipursky: (19:19)
What I do is I make sure to check the audience sexually understanding what I’m saying. Are they actually getting the information? I’m not just lecturing at them. I’m having a two way communication can do it on the podcast, unfortunately, but that’s something that you need to think about when you’re communicating with others. Are you falling for the illusion of transparency when you’re thinking that whatever you’re saying is a hub being a hundred percent understood by the other party. Another one that plugs into the illusion of transparency, the planning policy and so many others. It’s called the overconfidence bias. Now, that’s what it sounds like. We as human beings tend to be much more confident that we are accurate and we’re correct than we actually are. It’s especially a big problem for leaders. Leaders tend to be more overconfident than most people. And so I’ll give you an interesting example when studies have shown that when people say that 100% confident about something, you know that they’d bet the house on it that are actually right about 80% of the time.
Gleb Tsipursky: (20:19)
Now think about this. If you have to make a bet, the company move, you’re very confident that this is going to be right. If you’re making a bet that Cuttery or move bet your career move, you’re only likely to be a right 80% of the time, 80% of the time. No wonder that so many companies go bankrupt in a surprising manner. So many people that are covering years are brought down in a surprising manner because of these sorts of problems. So those are just free out of the 30 dangerous judgment editors that I talk about in my book and I can talk about more, but I’ll stop there and let Jim have a chance. Well that’s, well, that’s why we have to get the book right. I mean 30 but what you do is you talk about 12 techniques that you can actually use in order to be able to address these dangerous judgment errors.
Gleb Tsipursky: (21:05)
So if we could, maybe we should just run through those. Sure. Happy to talk about them. And like I said, a lot of folks talk about what are the dangerous judgment centers. My focus isn’t on how you actually can address them, can fix them. And so the techniques I’ll go through and follow as opposed to the 30th most dangerous judgment enters, which are can check out my book. So the first one you want just to make, be very clear about these are these are mental habits that you can develop. Unlike the questionnaire or the eight step decision making model. The questionnaire for casual everyday decisions. The question, the eight step model for major significant ones, these are mental habits that you develop and integrate into yourself. It takes a while to learn to develop these mental habits. It takes a long time to develop new mental habits.
Gleb Tsipursky: (21:49)
I mean, remember when you learn to drive a car, it took a while to do that. Now you can do it on autopilot. That’s automatic. It’s comfortable for you. But it took a while to learn how to do that. And the same thing applies to the mental habits itself. Talk about right now, first you want to identify and make a plan to address dangerous judgment debtors. So that involves identifying which dangerous judgment earners you as an individual are most prone to. I’ll give a example about myself. I tend to be prone to the optimism bias. So the optimism bias is kind of what it sounds like. It’s the tendency to be too optimistic. You know, I tend to think that the grass is green on the other side of the Hill and the glass is half full. My wife on the other hand is much more pessimistic.
Gleb Tsipursky: (22:32)
She suffers from a pessimism bias, unrealistically negative evaluation of the future. She thinks the glass half empty and the grass is yellow and the other side of the Hill. So we can sometimes have tensions, but we can, we can correct for each other’s deficiencies. So you want to know which of the 30 most dangerous judgment errors you’re most prone to and make a plan to adjust. Second delay your decision making before making any decision. You want to delay it to check whether to check with your head about your intuitive gut decision making. We tend to approach any decisions with our gut. Now, research has shown that about that in our decision making, about 80 to 90% of our decision making is driven by the gut intuitions. So you want to step back from your gut intuition and check whether it’s counting to 10 for very small casual decisions, asking the five questions for any decision they lead decision you don’t want to get it wrong or using the eight core steps for major decision making.
Gleb Tsipursky: (23:30)
Then mindfulness meditation. Now you might be surprised by this and I’m talking to you’re very clearly very specifically about not about Hulu stuff, but about meditation, sitting down and doing breathing exercises like talk about that in the book and meditation techniques that have been shown by research to be effective. Why is that important? Because it builds up your focus and your focus is what you need to do. Your willpower is what you need to use to resist your gut intuition and make wiser decisions. Then make predictions about the future. Why is that important? Because we tend to be much more optimistic and confident about the quality of our decision making than we are than we actually are. And you probably see other folks who around you who think that they’re much better decision makers than they actually are. So how you can square the circle is when you look at your own decision making, make predictions about how well your decisions all turn out and have other people with whom you collaborate.
Gleb Tsipursky: (24:28)
Make predictions about how well their decisions will turn out. And that’s way you can calibrate yourself and you can adjust yourself for more accurate decision making and help other people do so. Next, consider that an alternative explanations and options. So consider alternative explanations and options for various decisions that you want to go into. Now you want to be careful not you. Again you we w we tend to be very inclined to go with our intuitive comfortable decision making and we don’t consider other ways we can go other options for making choices and other explanations for phenomena around us. You know, if somebody, let’s say makes a remark that we see as offensive to us or is short tempered with us, we tend to attribute hostile intent to this person, whereas really it’s most likely someone who was being careless or unthoughtful and you want to consider all of these alternative explanations for the, for the free market.
Gleb Tsipursky: (25:28)
Another one is probabilistic thinking ties into making predictions about the future. Probabilistic thinking is estimating the likelihoods of certain situations happening now. How many percent is that like we know this is very intuitive to us. We tend to be very black and white thinkers. We tend to think something either will happen or will not happen or the other option that some people will say is me now that’s a very fuzzy option. Those are very fuzzy options. Sense. What about saying, you know, this is 10% likely to happen. This is 30% likely to happen. This a 70% likely to happen. You want to be able to train yourself to make these evaluations because then you can make much better decisions. If you have those estimates in your head, then could send the past experiences. This is a very good fix for the planning fallacy. You know, I’ve worked with clients who tell me that, you know, Oh, this project has taken every time we have a situation where we make a bid on a project, we say it’s 2 million and then it takes us 3 million to do this.
Gleb Tsipursky: (26:26)
Have manufacturing companies in Pittsburgh for example. That’s what client I worked with and they asked them, well, if he know that in the past that has always taken you a million more, 50% more, why don’t you bid more? Why don’t you actually invest that amount of money, make a plan for that amount of money. And the guy who was saying not sure why, and that’s the, that’s one very effective way of addressing the planning fallacy and number of other problems. Look what happened in the past and use that to inform the future and then consider the longterm future repeating scenarios. We tend to be very short term oriented as human beings and that’s a phenomenon related to a cognitive bias called loss aversion. We want to not lose things, we want to go and we tend to think about losing things as a really bad thing.
Gleb Tsipursky: (27:18)
What is in the theology making short term losses for much bigger longterm gains is a very effective strategy for the future and we tend to fall for the danger of reaping short term profits at the expense of much bigger longterm gains. Then consider other people’s perspectives. We are very, so when you look at a people and you say for a team member, when I work with teams and I ask them, how much have you contributed to so leadership team, the C suite of a corporation, how much have you contributed to the overall success of the leadership team? How many percent would you say is your contribution? I don’t remember the last time when the total sum, when everyone has added up, their contribution has been lower than 150% so we have that really serious problem where people tend to overestimate their contributions. They tend to overestimate.
Gleb Tsipursky: (28:13)
It’s very intuitive. It’s very natural for us to be inwardly oriented. But with then, if we don’t think about other people’s perspectives, we get into serious trouble down the road when we get into clashes and conflicts. Next set up policy to set up policy or use an outside view to get an external perspective. So I mentioned about that. That’s number question three. What would a trusted and objective advisor suggest you do you know? What would Jim suggest you do? Somebody who you trust, somebody who has an objective advice. Then question a point 11 mental habits. 11 set up policy to graduate future self and your organization. This is going to be especially important once you have understood that our gut intuitions tend to cause us to make bad decisions. So something that I work with a lot of clients. I have the mics short to commit to using the five questions before making any medium term and you everyday decision and the eight questions.
Gleb Tsipursky: (29:09)
So eight step model for major decisions. So they set a policy for themselves and for their organizations and that helps them really address a lot of problems down the road when they make a commitment in the moment to making much better choices, protests, choices down the road, finally make a pretty commitment. That refers to making a public commitment that other people know about quota relevant to certain policies and certain decisions. That’s especially helpful. I’ll give you the one example where that’s helpful. That’s really helpful when you want to change your internal culture of an organization to make it acceptable to criticize the leadership or pass negative information up the ranks, you know, otherwise you get into the problem of whistle blowers who don’t want to share their information. I mean, you know, that’s, that’s a really big problem. It’s a really big issue when negative information is not passed up the ranks and then suddenly the company’s in big, big trouble.
Gleb Tsipursky: (30:05)
Everybody knew that was about it except the leadership team. So you make a precommitment by saying, Hey, we’ll give praise, will give raises, we’ll give promotions, whatever to people who pass negative information up the ranks. And that’s a one way of making you pick another one can be, you know, make a Facebook post telling all your friends, I will lose 20 pounds in the next three months or I will make a donation to this charity that I really hate. That’s another way of making a public commitment in your personal life. So those are 12 mental habits that you can develop that would make it much easier for you to untrust the dangerous judgment editors that causes so much trouble.
Jim Rembach: (30:45)
Hi, I think they are. Last suggestion is a really good one. I want to do this, otherwise I’m going to donate to something I hate. Now that’s a good preventative maintenance tool. Okay. So I think what you went through right there, people could actually sit there and say, Oh my gosh, this is daunting. The fact is is that it’s more daunting to make bad decisions and have to do things all over again. And it also, you know, tarnish any type of, you know, trust or credibility or you know, anything that’s associated with that. And in all due respect, like you said, which is so important is people need to know that, okay, this is what I do. Or simple, shorter, you know, types of decisions, midterm, you know, types of decisions and all of that. But I think it’s really important for everybody to know at all different levels of an organization that we need to have structure to our ability to decide better. Because if we do fall back on our intuition, and one thing I say is, you only know what’s been put in. And in today’s world of rapid, you know, change and extensive, you know, diversity and complexity, it’s impossible. And you said it, you said it yourself, you look, you can’t know it all.
Speaker 4: (32:02)
[inaudible]
Jim Rembach: (32:03)
even if you gathered all the perspectives of all the people who work in your organization, regardless of the size of it, you still aren’t going to know it all. Yeah. So if I start thinking about, you know, weirdly where to start in all of this, um, I need a starting point because if, like I said, if not, I look at all this, I’ll be like, this is just way too daunting, right? So where do I start, cliff?
Gleb Tsipursky: (32:27)
Well, I like to remind people that of something that a lot of their members, mothers probably said, you know, when you’re angry, count to 10 and that’s the essence of number two, delaying decision. You know, do you, when you’re angry, count to 10 or do you just kind of mild fall off and shut off that rapid email? Now just hopefully you do count the 10 like your mom said. Now just apply that to all of your decisions first. Start by delaying decision-making, count to 10 and then use the five questions. That’s a very, very easy start. It’s a very easy way to get into it. So Delaney decision making by 10 seconds and that should give you time to check with your head as opposed to going with your gut and for any decision that you don’t want to screw up in your daily life.
Gleb Tsipursky: (33:12)
You know there’s some decisions that don’t matter right now. Where do you go to get your sushi? Probably not that bad unless you know there’s a, you know there’s a disreputable place and you have sickness, then you don’t want to do that. But in your reputable place you should be okay. But if you want to make a more serious decision, you know, how do you write a complex email to your supervisor about a problem that’s happening? That’s definitely where you want to use the five questions. So what I have is I have all my clients have the five questions setting in front of them on this handout or the decision aid handout. And that’s very easy. They have it them, they have it all the time in front of them. So that’s a very, very easy to wait to get into the process. Just use those five questions to make any daily decision. And after that, if you find them useful, which I can pretty much guarantee you will, you can start doing the more complex things like the eight steps or the 12 mental habits. So that’s what I advise people to do.
Jim Rembach: (34:12)
Well that’s very helpful. Okay, so, and it’s funny that you said that. I mean I think just about growing, growing up almost every day, my mother’s response to anything I brought to her was, okay, count to 10 Sharon. Okay. So knowing that when I start thinking about all those, so you know, we need tools, we need frameworks, we need inspiration. And one of the things that we look for on the show are quotes to help inspire us. Is there a quote or two that you liked that you can share?
Gleb Tsipursky: (34:41)
So something that I mentioned, I like to challenge quotes, but the quote that I really like that is from Ben Franklin is an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So that’s probably the most powerful quote that I like. The ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It’s something that we don’t think about nearly enough, but announced that preventing disaster is worth a pound of cure. So that’s one quote I love. I like to tell people you should go with it. The quest, the quotes that I challenge is go with your gut, which you shouldn’t do. That’s a powerful quote. Many people say you shouldn’t do it. Another one that I challenged and that you already know about this failing, failing to plan is planning to fail. I challenged that. Failing to plan for problems is planning to fail. So those are things that people should think about. Those are chow, those are quotes that challenged. But the first quote, I fully support. Yeah.
Jim Rembach: (35:33)
Thank you for sharing all of those. Okay. So there are times, however, where we haven’t done a good job following these frameworks and not all that, you know, and we’ve made mistakes and we learn them hopefully. And then next time when we approach them, you know, we don’t get fall into some of those biases. Right? Uh, so, uh, we talk about getting over the hump on the show because there’s a lot of, you know, lessons that can be learned from that so that hopefully we make the corrections, uh, going forward. But we need people to share those stories. Is there a time where you’ve gotten over the hump that you can share?
Gleb Tsipursky: (36:04)
So one of the biggest challenges I’ve had was a situation about five months ago, I’m sorry, five years ago when in 2014 and I’ve been married to my wife since 2003 by that time. But that, but that 11 years after our marriage was probably the most challenging period in our met in our marriage. Yet we had many more conflicts, many more stresses than we ever had before. And that was because I was doing my separate consulting. She was doing her separate consulting. At that point we decided to create a nonprofit organization devoted to popularizing the research on cognitive neuroscience and being able to economics and decision making called intentional insights. And what we learned and what we were doing. We were creating this organization, planning it out and you know, and that was coming up with all of these ideas about, Hey, this is great, this is going to be great.
Gleb Tsipursky: (36:53)
And she was like, no, that’s not going to work. What are you talking about now that’s a bad idea. And so we had a lot of conflicts, a lot of tensions, a lot of stresses and we talk things out. We kind of eventually went on a higher level of like how do we collaborate together? Why, why, why is this happening? That’s when I discovered that I’m an optimist. I tend to see the grace, the grass is greener on the other side of the Hill and she’s a pessimist. She tends to see the grass as yellow on the other side of the Hill. So that was a big problem and a big revelation. We haven’t really thought about that before because we never collaborated with any serious matter before. I had my own worksheets for homework. Right? So what we figured out that really helped me with teams, team leadership later on the board.
Gleb Tsipursky: (37:34)
And team coaching later onward was that there is a much more effective way for optimists like myself to collaborate with pessimist like her. I take the step of creating communities. So here are 20 ideas that I generate, LA, LA, LA, LA LA, and she sees them and I pass them on to her as half-baked ideas. And then she chooses, you know, a couple of those ideas and says, okay, you know, all of the rest of the ideas, let’s, let’s put them aside these two ideas, you know, there may be worth finishing baking. And then she improves them and goes on to kind of perfecting them. And that’s her strength. She, she’s very bad at generating ideas. She’s much better than me at perfecting them, getting them into good shape. And so that’s when we really got over the hump once we learned this method of collaborating together and we were able to really flow at that point because I was generating ideas, she wasn’t proving, generating, improving generation per week. And so that’s really helped us work together going forward. And that’s how about, so two years ago when we created a disaster avoidance experts were combined her consulting business nonprofits and my consulting business and businesses to enter together to work on a joint. The consultant coach can training firm is what I’ve never been possible if we hadn’t discovered that about ourselves and learned how to collaborate better going forward.
Jim Rembach: (38:51)
Well thanks for sharing that. I mean cause even that you started talking about, you know, the different viewpoints and different perspectives, but still moving beyond that and doing the collaboration component because I think so many times people just stop there. It’s like, Hey, there’s too much work that needs to be done, but, but the reality is if you can actually get through that work, the outcome is significantly greater because the synergies, it’s the typical one plus one actually equaling equaling three totally is when I start thinking though. I mean yeah, you and I had the discussion prior to even recording when I looked at this book and I’m like, Oh my gosh, there’s just, there’s so much information and insight and in depth all of these things. I said glove. I said, well, the way I look at this, you actually have created a the foundation for your next six volumes. I mean, cause you can easily split all this out and go into greater depth. But you know, so when I started looking at that and you know, talking about, you know, you were in academia and you’re working now on the private, you know, private sector having your own business and doing consulting. I started thinking about some of the goals that you have. So with all this that you’re doing, what’s one of your goals?
Gleb Tsipursky: (39:52)
Well, my personal passion is to really seriously change the way that people think about decision making for leaders everywhere to be aware that they are decision making, intuitive decision making process is far from perfect, let’s say to euphemistically and then use effective strategic techniques to address their decision making problems. So my goal is to, for my work to make a really large contribution to this year. And you’re right, you know, this is a first book. It’s a framework book and I hope to write many more books. This book really talks about the problems and solving them in an overarching 30,000 foot perspective. My next books plan to dive deep into various specific aspects of decision making and how we can improve them. So I hope to have a career writing about this, talking about this consulting and coaching about this when I can really make a significant difference to reducing suffering in the world for improving leadership decision making
Jim Rembach: (40:49)
and the fast leader Legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on, let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.
Speaker 5: (40:55)
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Jim Rembach: (41:15)
better. Alright, here we go. Fast leader Legion.
Speaker 5: (41:17)
I’m from the home. Oh bow. Okay, glad the hump. Hold on. As a part of our show where you get us good insights fast, ask you several questions and your job is to give us robust yet rapid responses that are helping us move onward and upward. But
Jim Rembach: (41:34)
it’s the Persky. Are you ready to hoedown?
Gleb Tsipursky: (41:36)
I’ll do my best. All right.
Jim Rembach: (41:38)
What is holding you back from being an even better?
Gleb Tsipursky: (41:42)
I think what’s holding me back is my desire to do things a little bit better than they should be done. I’m a little bit too much. I’m a perfectionist and I’m trying to work in that, but that’s difficult for me.
Jim Rembach: (41:54)
What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?
Gleb Tsipursky: (41:57)
Well, the best leadership advice actually was when I was learning about the decision making and for me to the advice to not trust my gut feelings. That’s the feeling of comfort is not necessarily at all the feeling that is right of right. What is true, what is right, what is best. That was incredibly helpful advice that I got from my mentor at graduate school when I was learning about the kind of screwed a brain that we have.
Jim Rembach: (42:21)
And what is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?
Gleb Tsipursky: (42:25)
I think one of my biggest secrets is my ability to effectively collaborate with others. Now the way I do that, my secret to doing that is to always think about myself as the adult in the room. So think of myself as the adult in the room. That means that if the other person is behaving in a problematic way, I should not stoop to their level. I’m always going to be kind of much emotionally mature and see what’s driving them to engage in this problematic behavior and try to accommodate them in a way that still enables me to achieve my goals.
Jim Rembach: (42:58)
And what do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?
Gleb Tsipursky: (43:02)
I think my, one of my best tools is my ability to take effective breaks from work occasionally. I used to be a person who worked very long stretches of time, period of self time, and they eventually had burned out at a certain point. I had to really take a lot of time back. Now I learned how to have much better work life balance and taking appropriate periods of breaks after, during long periods of work that has really helped me succeed going forward.
Jim Rembach: (43:29)
And what is one book that you’d recommend to our Legion? And it could be from any genre, of course, we’re going to put a link to never go with your gut on your show notes page as well.
Gleb Tsipursky: (43:39)
The one of the really good books in the topics that I talk about is thinking fast and slow by Daniel condom on. So here’s one of the four runners actually discovered all the ways that our brain is screwed up. And he wrote a really interesting complex book about these topics and that goes in depth into each of these cognitive biases. So for people who want to learn more about the topics that I talk about and specifically about all the ways that our Britain’s crewed up. Great.
Jim Rembach: (44:06)
Okay. Fast leader Legion, you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fast leader.net forward slash club super ski. Okay. And so Persky is actually uh, spelled T. S. P. U. R. S. K. Y. Okay. Glove. This is my last Humpday hold on question. Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25 and you can take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you, but you can’t take it all. You can only choose one. So what skill
Gleb Tsipursky: (44:32)
or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why? Hm. The most, the thing that I would take back is emotional awareness. I’m much more emotionally aware, much more in touch with my emotions. And this might sound weird, but it’s really not because emotions as I mentioned before, drive 90% of our 80 to 90% of our decision making. And there were a lot of dumb decisions I made when I was 25 and older. That came from me not being aware of how my emotions were driving me to make poor decisions. So being much more emotionally aware of my emotions and what’s causing me to make decisions would have been so helpful when I was 25 glad I’ve had fun with you today. How can the fast leader Legion connect with you? They can check out my book. Never go with your gut. How pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters and Amazon, Barnes, noble, any bookstore around you, so props to your bookstore especially. They can check out my website, disaster avoidance experts.com again, that’s disaster avoidance, expensive. Come and sign up for my wise decision maker guide list of resources there is disaster appointments, express.com/w DMG and they can always email me if they want to answer any questions about when you think they heard about in the podcast. That’s globe G L E B at disaster avoidance expert stuff. Calm, happy to answer your questions.
Jim Rembach: (45:54)
That’s a pesky. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom. The fast leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump.
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