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most excited about, from AI to sustainability and power. Listen to IF THEN wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. At this stage in your career, whether you realize it or not, you probably lean on the same framework to make decisions. Call it a habit or a pattern, whether it's unconscious or deliberate. Like it or not, you have developed your own tried and true decision making style. But
is it really the best way? Often the model that you turn to to solve problems and make decisions is the one you've grown comfortable with, but it's not necessarily the most effective one for that situation. Even the best leaders sometimes need to refresh and that's especially true when your default doesn't seem to be working in a new scenario. Our guest today studies the behaviors and psychology behind making decisions. In fact, she has identified five different archetypes.
She says that the key to solving the latest challenge you face might be an understanding your own style and knowing when to switch up your approach. Cheryl Strauss-Einhorn is the founder and CEO of decisive a decision sciences consultancy. She also wrote the book Problem Solver and the HBR article when you go to problem solving approach fails. Cheryl, thanks for joining. Cheryl Strauss-Einhorn Thank you so much for having me.
So we're going to talk about the main kinds of decision makers that you've identified in a bit. But I want to start by asking why do we tend to fall back on certain patterns or behaviors around decision making? Where does that come from? Cheryl Strauss-Einhorn Well, there's really two reasons. First, we have comfortable ways of being. If you think about it, most of us are as people who are right-handed, more comfortable doing things
with our right hand or if we're left-handed, left-hand. And our dominant ways of being as decision makers are similar. It's a comfortable way that we work in the world. And then the second point is that the way that we present ourselves, those habits and patterns that are comfortable, they speak to an underlying set of values. And those are the values that underpin how we make our decisions. Cheryl Strauss-Einhorn And is this any different for business leaders that are thrust into new
situations? It's almost like maybe you're forced to use your left hand where normally you wouldn't? Cheryl Strauss-Einhorn I think for somebody who's very experienced, they have habits and patterns of behaving that have really worked well for them. And I think they then, therefore, may tend to have a stronger bias to do those things that have worked well. And so it is in really trying to pry open that cognitive space to allow for new information and new thinking that can really give
them the opportunity, therefore, to do something different. So it almost sounds like it might actually be harder for a business leader because they're thinking to themselves, the way I do things has been successful. It's gotten me to this point. And because of that, you might have a little bit of a failure of imagination. Cheryl Strauss-Einhorn And also a real comfort that you have this data set behind you of success. And so I think that that's right.
Cheryl Strauss-Einhorn So before we get into trying to solve a problem when your standard approach just isn't working, we should talk about the different kinds of problem solvers that you've identified through your work and research. These are adventurers, detectives, listeners, thinkers, and visionaries. Can you quickly run through each of those and just give us the main attributes? Cheryl Strauss-Einhorn So I gave them each fun names because we think in language. The
adventurer is somebody who makes decisions easily. They tend to go with their gut, but therefore they may downplay the evidence and input from others, especially if it contradicts their gut reaction. For detectives and omid detective, we're people who like to follow the data, and a downside of that may be that we overvalue facts and we undervalue people. Cheryl Strauss-Einhorn So I think that's a great example of the fact that we have a
very important goal. Listeners are our most collaborative and cooperative decision-makers. They generally want to solicit the input of others, but sometimes they have difficulty accessing their own inner voice. Thinkers are people who have the action in between their ears. They want to understand the why, they thrive on identifying multiple pathways and outcome, they tend to end up in a frame blindness, looking at one option against the other,
which may miss the bigger picture. Then we have our visionaries. They pride themselves on seeing pathways that others don't, but therefore they may have a scarcity bias or want to avoid the ordinary even when it can be effective. I hope what you can see here is that each of these approaches brings a different underlying value structure and therefore they're optimizing for different things in the way that they solve problems.
I just thought to myself what style I probably am and I met a lot of listeners did the same thing. Let me give you an example of something you might have to do as a manager. Catering for a business meeting, you've got a bunch of people in, maybe people from different teams and you have to decide how to feed everybody for lunch. How would each of those archetypes or personality styles choose that differently? Well, I think that this is something that many people can relate to, right?
So in the catering example, the adventurer might look at the menu of things that she could be offering and she's going to immediately pick one and say that looks good because she's going to feel a natural instinct and she can get the decision over pretty quickly because she feels confident. The detective is going to look at the different ingredients and think about what would be a really good option that everybody might be able to eat and she's going to be anchored in that detail,
for instance. Oh, I can see that this would be something that would be acceptable to a lot of people and she'll make the choice based on those facts. For the listener, she might really want to be taking into account the different eating needs that everybody has and how hot the room might be and she might be thinking about what would be comfortable if it had to sit out, for example, and how to really make sure that everybody feels welcome in that moment because she's focused on the people.
Does she actually go out and ask people what they want or do a poll? Absolutely. She might go out and ask people. She might say, hey, I'd like to ask everybody, are there any food allergies? Because she absolutely is focused on making sure that the people feel included and that she's doing this in a collaborative, cooperative way. For the thinker, she may look
at the different options and way one against another. This meal might make everybody feel really full, but this meal might be more well balanced and so on and really spend time thinking about how can she mitigate the downside? Because the thinker has a loss of version. They would rather make sure that the decision doesn't fail than optimize for the best possible outcome or the best outcome
possible. Then the visionary might look at the choices and say, well, I like this dish, but I like the sauce from something else and might ask if she can create something that's not even exactly on the menu. That's fascinating. I think that helps each of us listening, better identify what type we might have. When does this normally come up where you realize that your style doesn't always work? Well, there are times where we have something that I call situationality that can get
in the way. Situationality is the culmination of many factors. Within context, it includes our location, our life stage, our decision ownership, and our team dynamics. Sometimes that can be a very
good thing. If you're an adventurer, for example, and you normally have a gut inclination that tells you how you'd like to proceed, if you're in a brand new environment, maybe you're starting a new job to show up as a listener and take time to hear maybe the pathway that this organization wants you to follow, that can help you to build a relationship and to also take a temperature was my
gut inclination aligned with how this organization actually wants to make this decision. The key lesson there is that that style got you to get that job, but it doesn't always mean that that style is going to be the most successful in that job. Or it might not be successful right at the outset when you're just initially meeting the people and learning about the job responsibilities itself
for that particular organization. At other times, situationality can get in our way. We might have a dominant way of being and then something happens and all of a sudden we end up in a situation with a lot of friction. I'll give you an example. I was working with a visionary CEO of a geospatial technology company. As a visionary, he really is focused on this big picture vision of the good that he can bring to the world with his new technology and it gives him a lot of flexibility for
how to get to that vision. But at one point when he was accepted into a prestigious national science foundation program, he ended up hearing information that really caused him concern. He acted as a detective, shrinking his worldview to really focus and zero in on these details that he didn't like and got so stuck in the weeds that he had a lot of problems with the leadership of the program. In working together, we were able to examine that all of a sudden the detective had intruded in
this situation to override his visionary. And once we were able to look at that, he was able to realign that in being the visionary and holding on to this picture of the good that he could be bringing to the world, he was better able to lift himself out of those details to get back on board that the leadership of this program was actually trying to help him all along to bring his beautiful vision to the world. And that decreased the friction and enabled him to succeed.
I definitely see a strong case here for changing your style depending on the situation. What do you do first as you kind of realize you're hitting your head against the wall on a problem or something that you can't seem to figure out? What's the first question you ask yourself in that situation? I think the first thing you want to do is to define the problem. What's the negative experience that you're having in the workplace that requires a decision?
And then ask yourself to assess the location in TM Dynamics. Where are you working? Are you in an office or remote? Are you part of a team? Are you independent? And so on. And then from there, I think you can consider your own career stage. Are you starting? Are you at the peak? Might you be counting your days until retirement? And then you can think about the other people's perspective that you're working with. Who are those stakeholders? How are they trying to make the situation work
or not work? And then you can look at your own level of decision ownership. Right? Is it your decision to make or how much will you be impacted by the decision outcome? And then you can connect this situationality back to your problem-solver profile. And you can look at whether or not you're
showing up in one of the other profiles. And then you can return to look at your own problem-solver profile because it's usually returning back to what that dominant profile is that you can lean into the strengths of that approach to help you write the ship and make more effective decisions with others. So what else can you do to try to overcome the blind spots or the patterns behavior that you typically fall back on? I think the first thing is to gain awareness. So for instance,
for an adventurer, she has an optimism bias. She knows that if she makes a decision and it goes awry, guess what? The next decision is always ahead. And so she might tend to gloss over facts or important details. And so recognizing that there is that optimism bias can really be very
useful to help you check and challenge it. Similarly, for the detective who likes evidence, she's often somebody who feels very comfortable doing research and therefore she can have an underlying confirmation bias where she can go and identify how a specific piece of information favors the hypothesis that she has. But that's not as good or as rigorous as looking for disconfirming
data. And so again, knowing your problem-solver profile, the strengths and the related cognitive biases is the first step to being able to really build your awareness so that you can have an opportunity to check and challenge what you normally do. 37,025, one. These are the three numbers to remember to get the visibility and control you need to make the right business decisions instantly.
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I thought it was interesting what you said earlier about somebody close to retirement, how that might change the decision they make or how they approach it. How else can this change depending on the stage of your career? Well, I think in the stage of your career, we were talking about before that you might have somebody who's very experienced. So they have a way of thinking about how a decision should be made that provides them knowledge. But it also may mean that they have more biases
associated with the way that it's been done. Right? If you're a seasoned professional, you may be able to speak to a problem that you've solved before with expertise. And that might make it more difficult to reconsider how you approach the problem. That's not always true. But certainly that experience can tend to narrow what we think the actual answer should be
instead of expanding it. Yeah, I wonder if sometimes you realize that the decision that you're struggling with is actually not your decision or maybe you have claimed too much of it than you realize how much does decision ownership play into this process? I think decision ownership is something that's underappreciated. Right? Thinking about is it your decision to make? How much will you or your organization be impacted? And how important is the decision to you or your organization?
Right? Impact and importance are obviously not the same thing because impact is the effect on someone or something and importance is the significance or the value. So you can have a decision
that can have a significant impact but be of little importance and vice versa. So thinking about whether or not it's your decision to actually make and how much it requires input and sign off from others can really help you to see whether or not you have worked well enough to include the voices of the other stakeholders because holistic problem solving occurs when you are actively including the other people who are going to be impacted by the decision that's being
made. Is somebody who is a listener? Are they just by default more successful in these situations? Is it basically just trying to change your style so that you are more of a listener or is decision ownership more than that? That's a very interesting point you're making because for a listener they would actively want to be including people to make a decision. For a detective they may or
may not include other people because they naturally want to go and find the data. For an adventurer they'd want to make the decision pretty quickly because they have a pretty strong instinct on what that decision should be and so on. So each of the different problem solver profiles might view decision ownership differently. Yeah. Yeah. Listener could make the mistake of
listening to the wrong people. Well, a listener usually has a trusted group of advisors and therefore they can have an underlying liking bias where they overweight information that comes from people that they have an affinity for and that may make it more difficult for them to bring in outside voices beyond that and it also may make it difficult
at times for them to really identify their own inner voice. Once you've learned your style, understand its shortcomings and have gotten better about switching up your approach you know to fit the scenario that you're in. Does this become a new habit or do you really have to kind of keep working on it deliberately all the time as you go along? I think the problem solver
profiles give you a beautiful opportunity to be a more active listener. If you recognize for example that your problem solver profile is one that may have friction with another problem solver profile really listening for clues as to how somebody else is approaching the decision can help you use the skills of the other problem solver profiles to work better together and at the same time once you really have this opportunity to learn all the profiles you can actively try them on.
If you're a detective you could go to the supermarket as a visionary or you might take a vacation as an adventurer and so on and so by using the different profiles that are not yours you can have an opportunity to see where the discomfort is and then to try to work through that discomfort so that you can become more dynamic and over time it will become easier as you begin to lean into trying on the different profiles for yourself and decisions where you feel comfortable
stepping out of that natural habit and pattern of making decisions. The other thing I'm kind of realizing is that part of the situationality is the organization that you're in and it may also you know we talk about organizations as being very data driven or analytical right and it may actually favor certain kinds of decision making and undervalue other kinds and so seeing how you fit in in that organization can really make a big difference. That can definitely make a big
difference. I've been doing a program lately with the federal government and each of these organizations whether it's the treasury or the IRS and so on they each have a real process for how things take place. So in one of our recent workshops we had a discussion about where's the place for the adventurer. How does this person actually fit into an organization like this and one of the things that we talked about is that the adventurer is such a nice person to have at the table
because they really can help the trains to move on time and build a momentum. The other thing that they can do for example in an organization that seems maybe slower, more aligned with thinkers
and detectives is that they also don't get anchored on a particular pathway forward. They have a beautiful flexibility to be able to hear a lot of ideas instinctively be able to switch between them and to identify why it is that they feel like a specific pathway forward might be the best way to go and so recognizing that the organization can seem to favor certain types of profiles and then recognizing how the intellectual diversity can still work to augment how the organization works
I think is something that is really beautiful. How does this factor when you're working in a team? You have your own decision making style but if you're working on a team that's putting different styles together and has a different dynamic and I'm just curious how that how that plays out. So if you have a team that's been together for a long time and you have a variety of profiles let's say that your CEO is an adventurer but you have a team that's on that senior leadership
group that's primarily thinkers, detectives, listeners. These have very different speeds of decision making. So with a group like that you may as the CEO want to send out G in advance here's an email framing the situation the goal that we're working on and it gives people a little bit of time to go at their own speed to do their own investigative process. The thinker to look at the options the listener to make sure that they've canvassed the stakeholders the detectives to gather their
evidence. So by the time they're gathered around that conference room table everybody's actually ready for the decision making instead of having to sit in the problem solving. If you have a team that's never worked together you're coming in the room you don't really know who people are in terms of their problem solver profile. You might be able to ask people what is it that you need in order to make a decision and then you can hear do they talk about facts? Do they talk about
including stakeholders? Do they talk about understanding the options at the table? Again that active listening can help you then go into a situation with somebody who you've never worked with before being able to better sync up on how your different problem solver profiles can work well together. Cheryl you coach individuals you also work in organizations. I'm just curious what the biggest misunderstanding is that people have about making decisions that you think can be
corrected or cleared up. I think one of the biggest things is people don't understand why there's friction between people when solving problems and they sort of throw their hands up initially and they can think about I'm uncomfortable with this personality. Well decision making is actually a part of personality that by knowing the problem solver profiles can help you unblock your
relationships to make better decisions together. As soon as people recognize themselves in the profiles they have this light bulb go on this is why I'm behaving this way this is what I value in my decisions and it's not personal that in understanding that your way is just one of five ways it gives you an opening for how to understand what is somebody else's incentive structure what is their motivation for why they're approaching the decision the way that they are and that gives you a way to find
this intersection of how to work well with them so that you can strengthen that relationship and make better decisions together. Well Cheryl I think you've given listeners a little better sense of who they are and why they approach decisions and problems the way they do thanks for coming on the show to talk about it. Thank you so much for having me today. That's Cheryl Strauss-Einhorn
founder and CEO of Decisive. She wrote the book Problem Solver and the HBR article when you go to problem solving approach fails and we have nearly 1000 episodes plus more podcasts to help you manage your team your organization and your career find them at hbr.org slash podcasts or search hbr
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