Multitracking (AND not OR)

2.

Not all choices are created equal. If the simultaneous designers in the banner-ad study had created ads that differed only in the size of the font—Do you like the 11-point or the 12-point version better?—that’s not really multitracking. It’s more like multitweaking. To get the benefits of multitracking, we need to produce options that are meaningfully distinct.

We must be careful, too, to avoid sham options, which exist only to make the “real” option look better. More than a few real estate agents, for instance, have admitted to taking their clients to lousy properties first to make the subsequent visits more appealing.

This sham-option technique is used frequently in politics, where bosses demand choices but aren’t always careful to assess the quality of the options. For insight on this subject, we turn to a formidable practitioner of the art of manipulation, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

In his memoir White House Years, he discusses a classic bureaucratic trick that was played on President Richard Nixon, who was considering what policy to adopt on a particular issue in Europe. The State Department presented a memo to Nixon with three “options.” Kissinger noted that two options were obvious losers, leaving only one plausible choice:

Here was the standard bureaucratic device of leaving the decision-maker with only one real option, which for easy identification is placed in the middle. The classic case, I joked, would be to confront the policymaker with the choices of nuclear war, present policy, or surrender.

Nixon may have thought he had options, but they were illusory. He was stuck in a narrow frame the whole time.

If the president can fall for it, so can you. Managers need to push for legitimate alternatives, not sham options. To diagnose whether your colleagues have created real or sham options, poll them for their preferences. If there’s disagreement, that’s a great sign that you have real options. An easy consensus may be a red flag.

Granted, it can sometimes be difficult to produce distinct options. The spotlight effect is partly to blame. If we’re thinking about installing wood floors in our house, for example, it will be natural to consider different types of wood flooring. If we’re really thinking out of the box, we might consider doing another home-improvement project instead. But truly distinct options—Use more rugs? Stain the existing floor and go to Hawaii on the savings? Forget the floors and buy a car?—are less likely to emerge, because they require greater swings of the spotlight.

Generating distinct options is even more difficult when our minds settle into certain well-worn grooves. Two of those grooves are common states of mind, studied widely by researchers, that play a role in almost every decision we make. One is triggered when we think about avoiding bad things, and one is triggered when we think about pursuing good things. When we’re in one state, we tend to ignore the other.

To illustrate one of these states of mind, imagine a morning that goes as follows. Your teenage son talks to you about his duties as the president of a service-minded student club. You’re proud of him, but you also hope he understands the commitments he’s made. In your driveway, you bump into your next-door neighbor, who mentions that a home down the street recently sold, after six months, for far less than its asking price. On the way to work, you listen to a radio program about the potential dangers of a newly emerging technology.

Then, an hour after you arrive at the office, your boss pulls you aside and tells you about a new position that has opened up. It involves leading a small team in creating and launching a new product. It’s a pretty risky product concept, but your boss thinks there’s solid potential. He wonders if you’d be interested—it would involve a lateral move, with fewer direct reports than you currently have but potentially more glory if everything goes well.

What’s your gut reaction to the offer? You might feel a little cautious. It doesn’t really sound like a promotion, and you have a responsibility to get your team through its current project. And what happens if the new product is a flop? Will you have sabotaged your career prospects? You will definitely want to consider the position carefully. Better safe than sorry.

Now imagine a different morning. Your son tells you about his aspirations for a club he joined at school; you feel parental pride that he’s pursuing big goals. Your neighbor tells you about how much he loves his herb garden, which gets you thinking about some landscaping ideas for your own backyard. On the way to work, you listen to a radio program about the opportunities opened up by a newly emerging technology. An hour after you arrive at work—the same as before—your boss tells you about a new position …

Now what’s your gut reaction to the position? This time, you might feel a bit more open and enthusiastic. You’re being trusted to lead a new product with great potential! Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

How you react to the position, in short, depends a great deal on your mindset at the time it’s offered. Psychologists have identified two contrasting mindsets that affect our motivation and our receptiveness to new opportunities: a “prevention focus,” which orients us toward avoiding negative outcomes, and a “promotion focus,” which orients us toward pursuing positive outcomes.

In the first scenario above, you arrive at work with a prevention focus, which means that you are in a vigilant mood. You want to ensure that your son lives up to his duties. You’re worried about your home losing its value. You really hope policy makers will stave off the dangers of the new technology. So when you think about the new position, your spotlight tends to highlight what could go wrong, what you could lose. Whereas in the second scenario you have a promotion focus, meaning that you are eager rather than vigilant—you’re open to new ideas and new experiences.

Both are useful, and we shift between them as we consider different decisions in our lives. They don’t coexist easily, though. It’s hard to embrace both at once.

Yet the wisest decisions may combine the caution of the prevention mindset with the enthusiasm of the promotion mindset. Consider a study of the way 4,700 public companies navigated three global recessions (1980 to 1982, 1990 to 1991, and 2000 to 2002). Three Harvard researchers—Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria, and Franz Wohlgezogen—pored over the companies’ financial statements, analyzing the way they’d responded to the tough market conditions. The top-level findings were sobering: 17% of the companies didn’t survive the relevant recession, and another 40% of them, three years after the recession ended, hadn’t returned to their prerecession levels of sales and profits.

The researchers sorted the companies into categories based on how they reacted to the recession, and two of the categories were inspired by the promotion and prevention mindsets. Prevention-focused companies made primarily defensive moves—they tightened their belts and tried to reduce risks. Promotion-focused companies went on the offensive, continuing to make strategic bets and investments.

Both categories of companies tended to suffer because of their disproportionate focus on one set of tools. The researchers report that prevention-focused companies, with their focus on cost cutting, tended to adopt a “siege mentality.” Inside these companies, they write, “pessimism permeates the organization. Centralization, strict controls, and the constant threat of more cuts build a feeling of disempowerment. The focus becomes survival—both personal and organizational.”

The promotion-focused companies, on the other hand, tended to be naive and slow to react. The researchers said these companies developed “a culture of optimism that leads them to deny the gravity of a crisis for a long time.”

The most successful companies acted more like multitrackers, combining the best elements of promotion and prevention. During the 2000 recession, for instance, Staples closed some underperforming stores and contained its operating costs, but it also hired 10% more workers, using them to roll out some new high-end services. Meanwhile, Staples’ archrival, Office Depot, took a prevention-focused approach, cutting 6% of its workforce and failing to make comparable investments in new businesses. The difference in approach showed up on the companies’ bottom lines: In the three years after the recession, Staples was about 30% more profitable than Office Depot.

The best multitrackers, such as Staples, cut costs by becoming more efficient rather than by laying off employees, and they kept investing in R&D and new business opportunities. They were cautious and eager at once, and their ambidextrousness boosted their chance of thriving. The researchers measured success by looking for companies that rebounded strongly after the recession, beating their rivals by 10% or more on both sales growth and profit growth. Multitrackers were 42% more likely to be strong rebounders than companies that were solely promotion focused, and they were 76% more likely to be strong rebounders than companies that were solely prevention focused. Thinking “AND not OR” turns out to be good corporate strategy.

BLENDING THE TWO MINDSETS, in short, is a recipe for a wiser decision. That’s why we’ve got to be alert for any situation where one mindset prevails. In a budget-cutting environment, the prevention mindset will dominate: How can we do the minimum amount of harm given that we have to make these cuts? How can we protect ourselves from calamity? As a decision adviser in this situation, you can help your colleagues by nudging them toward the promotion focus: “We all know we need to cut 5%. But what if, instead, we could cut 8%, so that we could free up some money to invest in our most exciting opportunities? What’s our best chance to make a great leap forward?”

In contrast, consider an aspiring screenwriter who has just moved to LA, imagining infinite opportunity—exciting new stories, fascinating new friends, lucrative new deals, and great industry parties. A compassionate friend might invoke the prevention mindset: What can you do to make sure you don’t get pinched economically while you’re waiting for some of these wonderful opportunities to pan out?

This blending of mindsets is as vital for our personal decisions as it is for organizational decisions, but we don’t always manage to do it on our own. Consider the case of Doreen and Frank, as recounted in a book by University of Michigan psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema. Doreen, a caseworker for the Los Angeles County welfare department, was deeply committed to her work. But it wasn’t easy for her emotionally. She felt angry about her apathetic clients who didn’t seem motivated to help themselves, and it broke her heart when needy clients were kicked off the welfare rolls.

The emotional roller coaster left Doreen increasingly stressed out, and the stress was interfering with her family relationships. Nolen-Hoeksema wrote, “On several evenings, Doreen has either exploded at one of her kids for something minor, like not turning off the television when she called him for dinner, or has secluded herself in the den all evening, trying not to blow up at the million things she found annoying around the house.”

At the end of her rope, Doreen visited a mentor at her church, who encouraged her to be proactive about managing her stress. Later she wrote out a list of possible solutions:

1. Quit my job.

2. Go to half-time.

3. Get my kids to be less irritating.

4. Ask Frank to control the kids more.

5. Find a less stressful job.

6. Find some way to release the stress before I get home.

Notice that Doreen did a great job of generating multiple options. It will always be tempting, in situations like hers, to slip into a narrow frame, reducing the situation to a single choice, such as whether or not to quit (or whether or not to put muzzles on your children).

Unfortunately, though, many of her options were infeasible. Because her family needed the income she earned, the first two choices were out. Nor were options 3 and 4 possible: Her children were unlikely to transform suddenly into mute, compliant beings, and shifting more of the parental burden onto Frank (who was already pulling his weight) did not feel right. The fundamental problem, she realized, was not with her kids or her husband but with her overheated response to life’s normal irritations.

That led her to focus on option 5, finding a less stressful job. Finding a job that was less emotionally taxing would provide instant stress relief. However, it also felt like a betrayal of one of her core religious beliefs, the imperative to serve the less fortunate.

Feeling stuck, she talked with her husband, Frank, about the last option—releasing stress before coming home. He threw out a few ideas: Why not listen to soothing music on the way home? (Doreen typically tuned in to a news show; hearing about the world’s various problems and corruptions tended to further inflame her mood.) Frank also suggested that she leave work early and work out at the YMCA before heading home.

These are simple ideas, and many of us might have come up with similar ones. What we want to highlight is the everyday wisdom in Doreen’s instinct to talk over her options with Frank (and her church mentor), as well as in Frank’s subtle shift in focus. While Doreen was dwelling on ways to prevent or minimize stress (quitting her job, cutting back parental responsibilities), Frank pushed her to think about ways she could increase her happiness (by working out or listening to good music). He added the promotion mindset to her prevention mindset.

Encouraging our loved ones and colleagues to blend the two mindsets can help them escape from an emotional cul-de-sac.

WHEN LIFE OFFERS US a “this or that” choice, we should have the gall to ask whether the right answer might be “both.”

In the last chapter, we saw the value of evading a narrow frame by seeking out more options. This chapter added a new wrinkle: It’s worth cultivating multiple options at the same time. As we saw at the German technology firm, decisions with a couple of alternatives turned out dramatically better than decisions with one.

In our experience, some managers will try to excuse single-tracking by arguing, “Even though we’re only considering one option right now, it’s not really a ‘whether or not’ decision, because we’ve considered many other options over the last few years.” Unfortunately, as we saw with the banner-ad study, exploring ideas sequentially—even though it yields multiple options over time—is not as powerful as exploring them simultaneously. Multitracking improves our understanding of the situations we’re facing. It lets us cobble together the best features of our options. It helps us keep our egos in check.

Developing multiple alternatives will sometimes be difficult because our minds don’t always think, “This and that.” Often, for example, we’ll get stuck in a mindset of prevention OR promotion. If we can do both, seeking out options that minimize harm AND maximize opportunity, we are more likely to uncover our full spectrum of choices.