decision making

214: Cheryl Strauss Einhorn: Where I am may not be where somebody else is

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader podcast, where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

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Okay Fast Leader Legion, today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who’s going to help us make big decisions significantly better. Sheryl Strauss Einhorn was born in Baltimore, Maryland but mostly lived in a suburb outside of Boston along with her sister who is 14 months younger. Both of her parents are doctors and her mother was one of the first women in her medical school. Her dad was, then in new field of medicine called nuclear medicine and developed several new medical tests that are today commonplace. As a result he spent a lot of time working both in and out of the house, this led Cheryl to try to find a new way to draw him out. She began by asking him one question that would lead to another and so on. She taught herself how to interview him to find what he was thinking about. It was so successful that she not only has a close relationship with her father but is also like it also likely led her to pursue investigative journalism. 

Cheryl has worked as a journalist for two decades now writing for publications including Barrons, The New York Times, Foreign Policy Magazine and more. She was live on air for many years as an analyst for CNBC and worked and worked as an associate TV producer at Inside Edition. It was during her early journalism work that Sheryl developed an area method to help her and now others to solve complex problems. She was searching for a way to make big decisions better with greater empathy and understanding for the other stakeholders involved in her stories and her decisions. A.R.E.A. which is an acronym for Cheryl’s decision-making steps is the only system to uniquely control and counteract bias focus on the incentives of others and expand knowledge while improving judgment. After years of successful implementation of A.R.E.A. Sheryl distilled her system into her best-selling book, Problem Solved: A Powerful System for Making Complex Decisions with Confidence and Conviction. 

With a foreword by Tony Blair, who is no stranger to complex problem solving as the former UK Prime Minister, A.R.E.A.’s currently being used successfully across broad domains ranging from low-income schools to multinational companies like, Goldman Sachs to government agencies including the State Department and graduate schools such as Columbia Business School. Sheryl Straus Einhorn, are you ready to help us get over the hump? 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:        Absolutely. Thanks for having me here today Jim.

Jim Rembach:       I’m glad you’re here. I’ve given my Legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better. 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:          Certainly.  I’ve been just so fortunate for the work that I’ve been able to do with A.R.E.A. that I would say my passion really has been to see how A.R.E.A. is able to help individuals, nonprofits, schools and more to be able to have greater confidence and conviction in not only their own problem solving but also use a system that can really strengthen the important relationships in their life by focusing on the other stakeholders involved in their decisions. 

Jim Rembach:    When you start talking about decision making and within the book you talk about, there are really only a few absolutes and there’s tons of gray area, and the A.R.E.A. method is a way to navigate the gray areas and avoid those mental shortcuts that enable us to make small decisions easily but may impair our judgment when making big decisions. And so when I started thinking about the decisions that we have to go through making and how many times we stumble, it’s almost like gosh, I wonder if we get such an—like cruise control or in a systematic way that we’re just taking information making decisions that we don’t really recognize what it’s a big decision that we need to use something different to be able to solve for. 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     Well, I think that’s a good insight. Researchers tell us that we make about 40,000 decisions in any given day. So, that’s everything from what side of the bed to get up on in the morning to what kind of a late night snack how big a late-night snack and how close to bedtime should we have that. And so our brains have set up these mental shortcuts simply because otherwise we’d have decision fatigue. Picture yourself walking into your local supermarket standing in the cereal aisle if you didn’t know what color box or roughly where it was in the store you’d be overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices because the average supermarket also has about 35,000 different items in it. So what happens is we need these well-worn pathways these assumptions judgments these biases but they don’t go away when we’re solving for complex problems. And so what happens is we end up using well-worn pathways that may not serve us when we’re solving for complex problems. And so what A.R.E.A. tries to do is to find a way to pry open some cognitive space to really allow for new information and new insight when we want to solve big decisions. 

Jim Rembach:    It’s really interesting that you say that because a while back I was looking at some things associated with brain research and oftentimes researchers try to categorize certain parts of our brain for certain activities. One of the things they were talking about is like decision making where our brain gets accessed and some research has just come out not too long ago that basically says our entire brain lights up when it tries searching—our archives on how to go about making a particular decision. For me I kind of see you saying that, well if our brain is lighting up and not able to find a particular pathway that we need something like A.R.E.A. in order to help move forward otherwise we just are going to be stuck and frozen. 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     I think that it’s not only that our brain looks for what have we done in the past regardless of whether or not it has necessarily worked out for us, which is problematic. But the other thing is that in today’s world we all have information overflow. And so when we’re faced with a complex problem one of the most off-putting and frustrating parts of the process is, where do you start? How do you decide where you’re going to look for information?  Are those kinds of information sources credible? And so on. And so A.R.E.A. tackles that as well. What A.R.E.A. says is instead of how are you going to solve your complex problem, it says don’t worry about that. Invert the question and instead ask yourself something that many people find far more empowering. Which is, what do you have to have happen in the outcome of your decision to know that it has succeeded for you personally? So now without even knowing how you’re going to solve it you probably are able to identify what needs to happen in the outcome for you to know that it has succeeded and from there you can derive what I call your critical concepts which are the one two or three things that need to happen in that outcome for you to solve for that vision of success. So now you no longer have an open-ended research problem instead you have something that is targeted and focused on what you deem needs to happen for the decision to have a successful outcome for you.

Jim Rembach:    Well, I think it probably fair at this point before we go further to talk about what the A.R.E.A.  method actually stands for and throughout the book you have something called cheetah sheets and cheetah notes and messages and we’ll talk about that in a second because I think that in itself is a powerful mental model, but you talk about you know as far as A.R.E.A  being the theory and the idea and what the acronym oh it stands for is absolute understanding your target relative research related sources, exploration broaden your perspective, and there’s also another e in there which is exploitation which is challenged, assumptions and then an analysis which is reduce uncertainty and make your decision. Now you talked about being able to create and evolve this method over the course of time. What kind of started you down this path in order to figure about, oh wait a minute, I needed to cheat a moment maybe this is the time for you to explain cheat a moment and then we need to do something different here.

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     My background as you pointed out as an investigative journalism, and I spent a decade as an editor and columnist at the business magazine Barrons and while I was there I ended up specializing in what you might consider calling the, bearish company’s story. Those are stories that take a skeptical look at a company’s finances or at their strategy. Now when these stories would come out a lot of times there’d be a big share price reaction. Sometimes the stock exchanges would halt the stock sometimes regulators would get involved. One time a CEO went to jail for 10 years, a couple of companies went out of business, and as this happened the story really weighed heavily on me and what I realized is it’s not just somebody as investment portfolio it could be their retirement account it could be your ability if you work at one of these companies to show up in the morning or if you are a customer of the products and services that these kind of companies have that also would be impacted. And so I just started to think about how could I have greater confidence and conviction in my own decision making and given that I had a very nice middle middle-class background outside of Boston, as you also mentioned that’s also a limited background, and so how could I better confront my own mental shortcuts. At the time new research was coming out how we all had these heuristic these sort of shortcuts that tend to impede our ability to see new information as we were talking about. And so I just thought this idea of the beginner’s mind that’s hubris, I can’t look at a data set and just say I’m going to be objective now and be objective. And so instead I thought, you know what, given my background in research what about the idea of putting together a research process. Could I basically invert that and instead of saying I’m going to be objective just acknowledge I’m a flawed thinker and set up a construct that would allow me to work with and works through ambiguity so that I could better focus on the incentives and motives of the sources who are giving me their stories and have an opportunity to control for and counteract some of my own mental shortcuts so that I could, as you explained before expand my knowledge while improving my judgment. And so that’s really how I came up with A.R.E A.R.E.A it was an attempt to do a more ethical job at Barron’s and have greater confidence and conviction than my own decision making. 

Jim Rembach:    When you started talking about being able to apply this I don’t suspect that you had a nice little system together and then Boom! you had success. How long did it take for you to actually know and refine and iterate and know that you had something that could be repeatable and leveraged by others? 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     For me the linchpin moment was recognizing that I wanted a perspective-taking system. The reason why perspective-taking is so powerful is it gives you a beautiful two-for-one. As you walk in somebody else’s footsteps you not only better understand their incentives and motives but you also push yourself out of your own perspective which gives you an ability to sort of better confront your own assumptions and judgments. And so the thing that I recognized that really was the game changer was this idea of separating out our sources and that’s why you have absolute and then the next concentric circle of information is relative and then the twin engines of creativity the E which is exploration and exploitation and then the final A, analysis. And so for me understanding that this separation of sources could allow me to better able to sass out incentives and motives and confront my biases, that was the moment that I realized that I was onto something that I wanted to continually refine, iterate. And then when I was invited to teach at Columbia University first at the Graduate School of Journalism and now the Business School where I’ve been for the last decade or so, I noticed it didn’t matter who tried the system it worked for students at the journalism school that have any business or financial background students at the business school who didn’t know anything about interviewing with this powerful combination of the perspective-taking and this ability to understand how to talk to other people to understand their frame of reference really seem to help people to better problem-solve and to strengthen their relationships. 

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so when I start thinking about the effect and impact—okay, you kind of had some a given lab sitting right there with all of the students, have you been able to leverage it back into the investigative journalism arena?

Cheryl Strauss:    I certainly use it in my own stories. Actually I talk about in the book in the exploration chapter one of the big investigative pieces that I did for foreign policy magazine and ProPublica which was a story about the World Bank. I go through how I think about applying those different steps when I discussed that story and of course I’ve now been very fortunate to use it at different companies and also with nonprofits and in some low-income schools. 

Jim Rembach:    I can think the whole perspective taking piece while we can recognize that that is important that we often have an issue with speed. Meaning that going through and trying to solve big problems it takes significantly more prep work and effort and all of that investigative piece you’re talking about, however, I need to move on this. So, how can people especially in a business environment make sure that they’re not shortchanging and shortcutting the framework and compromising themselves? 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     I would say two things, we are in an environment where we constantly feel this need for speed. Our technology works so quickly for us and we’ve sort of really learned that things should come rapidly to us. But in order to invest in an uncertain future that is valuable to you need to be able to have time for thoughtful reflection and you need to know when to slow down and what to do when you slow down and those pauses really refresh. So you end up getting your work to better work for you. If you come into complex problem-solving and you just assume that it should go very rapidly you’re not really making an investment in yourself and in the relationships that you’re engaging. I do think that while something like A.R.E.A.  is meant to be repeatable and flexible and you should be able to use it in the way that you want so you may apply all of it or you may only apply some steps at any one given time because we’re all resource bound this idea that you want to take the time to learn the system so it can be an operating system for you is an investment in your ability to do exactly that. And as you mentioned before I build in what I call cheetah pauses, so why the cheetah? The Cheetah’s prodigious hunting skill is not its ability to accelerate like a racecar it’s actually that it decelerates by up to nine miles an hour in a single stride. In hunting that’s far more valuable than the acceleration because that deceleration that is where you get agility flexibility and maneuverability those are all the things that you really want in a quality research and decision-making system for you. So as you’re going through the area mapping I continually have suggestions for where to take a cheetah pause and when I suggest that even more importantly I have a cheetah sheet which tells you, okay, so what? What do you want to do now? And it provides you with either where to look for sources of information that may be useful for where you are in the process or what kind of analysis might you want to apply to the information that you’ve gathered.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so when I’m thinking about the area method and who can best leverage this for me I started moving and gravitating towards people who are actually in that strategic planning, strategic decision-making part of an organization. I mean do you find that others and operations can actually leverage this as well? Or is it pretty much just in that strategic realm area?

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     The really nice thing is it can be for every type of person it doesn’t matter. One of the things that’s been so interesting since the book has come out is the different types of places that have asked me for instance to give talks to their employers or to their customers everything from meditation and wellness organizations to groups that are helping people re-enter the workforce to startup companies to Fortune 500 companies it doesn’t matter where you work or what you are doing the A.R.E.A. method is there to help you with both personal and professional decisions. Actually this week I launched a podcast for the first time where I am interviewing people who are using the A.R.E A method. What are you using it for? How are you using it? What works and what doesn’t? And the person who I interviewed for this first podcast he used it for his honeymoon. Who would ever think that you would take an analytic decision-making system and apply it to something as romantic as a honeymoon? And what was so fun about the interview and you can access it at my website which is areamethod.com is that he said it’s exactly the kind of problem you want to apply it to. 

Here you have a vacation that has much greater import than any vacation you’ve taken before. You’re starting a new family. You’re also probably likely to spend more than you’ve spent on other vacations. You’re also spending it at a time where you’re making a lot of other big money decisions because you’re planning a wedding at the same time. In addition while of course you just want to assume that it’s going to be relaxing and fun there’s actually the planning fallacy that gets in the way of this idea that the vacation should just be perfect on its own. And so putting in this up one time to think about, well, what kind of honeymoon did they want? How would they know it succeeded for them? Identifying their critical concepts was not only a fascinating interview but turned out to be something that for them was an incredibly successful usage for A.R.E.A. but of course, I never could have imagined.

Jim Rembach:    Well I can definitely see how that honeymoon decision was probably bigger than any business decision he could ever make that would actually affect your life forever and beyond wouldn’t it? When we start talking about making some of these decisions and really learning from them failing from them all those things that are important to us from that growth perspective is that oftentimes we have to look towards quotes in order to help direct us. And so is there a quote or two that you like that you can share?

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     Sure there’s a Voltaire quote that I love, which is, judge a man by his questions rather than his answers. I think that’s essentially showing up for other people and the perspective taking and the ability to ask other people where they are and why they are where they are and what evidence they’re using to formulate their stance or their reasoning is something that can really help to bring us together and to holistically solve our problems when we’re involving other stakeholders in our decisions. 

Jim Rembach:    One of the things I liked about the A.R.E.A.  method is that oftentimes with our decision making it’s iterative, we have that gray matter that we need to navigate. You actually talked about the steps actually building upon one another and radiating out and providing as a feedback loop. So, when you start looking at the area method and the speed and decision-making and we talked about speed being important does that feedback loop process actually assist with shortening? Have you proven that shortens the decision making timeline and cycle? 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     it certainly can but the idea is that not all investigations are linear nor should they be so at times you need to be driven back into **all of the process. That’s really part of the beauty of A.R.E.A.  is this concept of, can I make my mistakes before I make them? You can’t do that all the time but sometimes you can. The exercises that are in the area e part, exploitation, help you with that because it forces you to confront your own assumptions and judgments with evidence. I find for my students, for companies, or individuals, or nonprofits that I work with it’s often those exercises in exploitation their drive people back into **your parts of the process. Because you’d rather get to a decision that has a good outcome for you then get to a decision quickly. 

Jim Rembach:    That’s a good point. Now one of the things that we will look at is times where others have had mistakes, you talked about me making a mistake before I make it or avoiding one is also important, and so that’s why we share on the show. Is there a time where you’ve had to get over the hump something you’ve learned where we maybe not make that same mistake?

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     One of the things that you mentioned in my bio is just sort of critical to how I’ve developed as a person. That was this idea that—my father who was such an important person—we traveled around the world following him and sitting at some of his speeches that he gave and going into the hospital with him on vacations or on weekends many times trying to figure out who he was as a person and recognizing that when somebody’s busy up here doesn’t mean that you want to just let the situation be. The onus is on us to try to figure out how to create that safe space for other people to enter it so that we really can build relationships which is what gives us our quality of life. This idea that something so simple, this idea of the question was just a something that was transformational in my life. For a long time he would not make it home for dinner or not be available even when he was at home and figuring out that I didn’t want to give up and that relationships are integral to our quality of life. And this idea that how do you asks something so somebody can enter into it? This idea of open versus closed questions. The fact that there are knowledge questions versus information questions versus opinion questions versus feeling questions and that you want to use these at different times with different people because otherwise we come into a situation we assume we know what’s going on. I don’t know if this has happened to you but this has happened to me many times, I’ll come home from an evening or an event or an episode that has occurred and when I confer with the person who I was with we’ve had entirely different experiences. And so understanding that where I am may not be where somebody else is and constantly having that opportunity to check in because I can ask a question, that allows me hopefully to really not only prevent misunderstandings which can be very detrimental to us emotionally as well as in our work life and so on, is something that I think is just available to everybody who wants to give it a try and I think that’s really nice. 

Jim Rembach:    I think it is, I’m looking forward to you especially with two teenagers and soon to have a third I think I need to really step back and have more Cheetah moments for sure but then also have this framework so that I can actually remove some of the emotional aspects and the frustrations and stuff just dealing with those kids who don’t have a whole lot of prefrontal cortex development yet, within their judgement. 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     So somebody who has three kids and two of them have come through most of the teenage years and one who’s still there it’s not removing emotion it’s this idea of working with emotion. Because the emotion is often what sets up these mental biases too. We stopped being able to process and our brain goes to something that we’ve done before or gives us an example that may not work and the fascinating thing about teenagers is who they are one minute is not who they are the next minute. We’re not quite as frenetic as they are even though we’re all inconsistent decision-makers ourselves. But this idea about working with and working through the ambiguity and giving yourself the opportunity to really look at it from their perspective is something that I think can really help because parenting is the toughest job in the world.

Jim Rembach:    Most definitely. As the saying goes you really can’t understand it until you’ve actually done it. When I start looking at the things that you have associated with the book, the teaching, all the work that you’re doing I’m sure you have a goal or two that you’d like to accomplish. But when you start thinking about just one of them what would one of your goals be that you can share?

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     Well, one of the very exciting things that’s come out of the publication of this book was that a national nonprofit called the future project approached me and said I love this and the number one ask for help that we get from high school principals is how to help teenagers make these decisions better. And so he asked me if I would put together a boot camp and see what would it look like to teach decision-making to high school students? And so on a rainy Sunday about a year ago I put together a boot camp for high school students from Newark, Brooklyn and Manhattan to learn part of the A.R.E.A.  method. When I thought about how did teenagers learn? They spend a lot of time on their phone or on their electronic devices. And so I developed a digital module, think of it like a web-based app that they can use on their phone or on a computer or a tablet that can give them an opportunity to develop some of the skills for A.R.E.A. And so last year I developed then a couple digital modules because that boot camp was so successful and three hundred students in nine high schools in five states actually use the prototype modules and that was very successful so this year I’ve actually set it up as a company that I’m calling, Decisive, and I’ve been building more of these blended digital experiences that students can use but interestingly I’ve also been using the modules in the corporate world, in my talks at conferences and at companies. And so a big goal for me is to really try to see what’s going to happen as

I continue to develop the modules now that I’m doing an expanded pilot that will launch in early 2019 in high schools and I’m using it for some businesses, what is this tend to give people in terms of their own professional development in terms of their ability to build a better culture for where they work or where they are interacting? How is this really giving them some of the skills to have greater confidence and conviction in their own decision-making? 

And the Fast Leader legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor. 

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Jim Rembach:     Alright, here we go Fast Leader Legion it’s time to do the Hump day Hoedown. Okay, the Hump day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. We’ll ask you several questions but your job is to give us robust and rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, are you ready to hoedown? 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     I’m try. 

Jim Rembach:    Alright. What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today? 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     Using the cheetah pause even more. 

Jim Rembach:    What do you think is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life? 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     The art of the question. 

Jim Rembach:    What is the best leadership advice you have ever received? 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     I think it’s to be here now. This idea of really being present in the situation that you’re in so that you can have an opportunity to really connect with people. 

Jim Rembach:    What do you believe is one of your secrets that helps you lead in business or life? 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     I think it’s my general joy for the day. 

Jim Rembach:    What would be one book that you’d recommend to our legion, it could be from any genre of course we’ll put a link to your book on the show notes page as well. 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     One of my favorite books is, The art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin where he sort of breaks down this art of learning into what he calls smaller circles. I think this idea about taking a problem and breaking it down is something that I really like and I use an A.R.E.A.  I read the book not long ago and really recommend it. 

Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader Legion, you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/Cheryl Straus Einhorn. Okay, Cheryl, this is my last hump day hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25, and you’ve been given the chance to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. So what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why? 

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     I would take the cheetah pause. I think when you’re in your twenties it’s hard to recognize the moment that you’re in. You’re moving quickly and you’re also don’t ** what’s going on around you, say that for other people but certainly I feel that way myself. If I could go back in time and say Cheryl put things in context and don’t granulize that’s the environment that I would give myself. 

Jim Rembach:    Cheryl, it was an honor to spend time with you today can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you?

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn:     Certainly. First thank you so much for this opportunity I’ve really enjoyed it. I would hope that people will reach out to me at my website which is areamethod.com. And you can also contact me directly through that site and I look forward to hearing your feedback to help you make big decisions better. 

Jim Rembach:    Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast

Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today for recaps links from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

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