How I make choosing easier

In Sheena Iyengar’s TEDx video (2011), she describes four techniques you can use to improve choosing or decision-making. These techniques included cut, concretize, categorize and condition. Each technique is unique, and I have used these at one point or another in my life. As Iyengar describes it, she says to “be choosy about choosing” (Iyengar, 2011) which is a brilliant statement that summarizes her video about making choices. Whether you’re a child or an adult, everyone goes through each day having to make many decisions. All too often, we over complicate scenarios in which we could have used these techniques to improve our decision-making. The two techniques I’d like to discuss are cut and categorize.

Cut or cutting, involves reducing or outright eliminating choices from the decision matrix. In order to make choosing easier, we must reduce the number of choices. Iyengar (2011) points out the choice overload problem, where as consumers, we are overloaded with far too many choices and that can make a simple decision much harder to make. My experience with cutting has been a positive one, as it allows me to focus on a smaller number of solutions. This has given me the opportunity to be more efficient in my decision-making, mainly because I’m not spending more time debating a choice. I recently used this technique when I was evaluating how to place an airport tenant in the terminal. Instead of using all our terminals to decide where to put them, I cut our largest terminal out of the decision and focused on the smaller terminal. As a member of an organization, I used the cut technique when designing a training program for our customer service agents. An airport is naturally a very big and complex place and there are a lot of topics we must train our staff, so they understand how to assist passengers. By categorizing all the training into sections of the airport, it made the training much simpler to provide to the agents and easier for them to understand. Cutting has allowed me to avoid the choice overload problem in both examples.

Categorizing is a way to take many choices and put them into smaller groups known as categories. Iyengar (2011) provided another great example of how the average financial planning process involves far too many options. As she puts it, “more choices mean less diversification of money” (Iyengar, 2011), which can lead to fewer actual retirement options and that may lead to a poor retirement plan. By using categorizing, I’m able to take multiple options and combine them into categories that are simpler to understand. Rather than individual choices, I can now see that these options are segmented into specific categories. This gives me the chance to understand fewer options because all the many choices I had to make are now in an easy to understand format. I used categorizing technique last winter when I needed to give a presentation on development opportunities to our business development group. Rather than list all the developments separately, I put them into categories so the group would only see two categories of topics, rather than 10 topics. This gave me a chance to give more categories with fewer choices and resulted in quicker decision-making by the group. As a member of an organization, I used the categorizing technique in a similar fashion when I was responding to a survey for selecting our retirement accounts. As the previous example states, more choices may mean less savings for my retirement. I opted to categorize many of the retirement options into just a few groups, which allowed the organization to ask more direct questions, select accounts faster and resulted in simple and solid retirement plan choices.

Spending time thinking about the process of decision making can have significant payoffs, however, because it can help you improve the quality an effectiveness of your subsequent choices (Hoch, Kunreuther, & Gunther, 2001, p. 14). By taking the time to cut or categorize choices, we can give back to ourselves in ways we didn’t see the first time. The other two techniques Iyengar (2011) describes, concretize and condition, can also make it easier to decide, however, I find each of these options used much less frequently in my everyday life.

References

Hoch, S., Kunreuther, H., & Gunther, R. (2001). Wharton on making decisions. New York: Wiley.

Iyengar, S. (2011, November). How to make choosing easier. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_how_to_make_choosing_easier#t-915761