When Time isn’t Enough: Decision Making, Creativity, & Practice
What if giving ourselves less time to decide led to more creativity in action?
SDL is on Summer Rest Break for July! We are soaking up time with our communities and we hope you have a chance to do the same.
TL;DR // We often think more time will lead to better decisions, but time alone isn’t the answer. In our work at SDL, we’ve found that naming values, exploring possibilities, inviting diverse perspectives, and tracking decisions as a practice fosters more creativity, clarity, and adaptability. Constraints, it turns out, can unlock our most generative thinking—when we’re intentional about how we use them.
When we talk to folks who are trying to innovate or (re)design their systems to better serve their communities, time is often the most-cited barrier to acting on their aspirations for creative problem solving, iterative testing, and deep collaboration. There’s a shared and felt wisdom that when we’re in a state of constant urgency, of never-ending execution, of responding to multiple (sometimes conflicting) priorities, we are simply not cognitively set up for creative thinking.
Like many folks who have worked in the systems change space, at SDL we try to actively counter this time scarcity: we give people time, we don’t rush, we offer grace and flexibility. But during one of our quarterly reflections, we noticed that extra time didn’t always result in more creative thinking. In particular, we noticed that when we extended the time for decision-making, it just led to more rushing, urgency, and stress in the back-end. That is, our efforts to foster expansiveness and exploration in one phase of the project restricted our ability to tap into these states later in the process. This led us to consider whether, in fact, affording folks more time actually led to better decisions.
As we thought about it, we identified a number of cases in which the decision we’d ultimately come to seemed to be the result of cognitive exhaustion rather than generative thinking. Taking inspiration from the idea that constraints breed creativity, we started thinking about how we could bound decision-making in intentional ways, relying less on time alone and more on active strategies to foster exploration, creativity, and collaboration.
Naming the Values, Articulating & Exploring Possibilities
Often, when we’re struggling to finalize a decision, there’s a prickly feeling that something’s not quite right, a hesitation in the back of our mind that pulls us back from committing. Identifying what exactly this is, though, can be deceivingly hard. In her book How to Decide, former poker player and cognitive psychologist Annie Duke argues that in order to make good decisions, we need to articulate our preferences. Meaning, we need to make explicit what it is that we value, since that will ultimately determine how we assess our options.
For example, if there’s something that feels off about how we’re designing a session, can we name the values and outcomes that are influencing our reticence? Is it that we care about clarity and it doesn’t seem like we’re giving sufficient scaffolding or background for people to understand what we’re talking about? Is it that we prioritize participant interaction and there’s not enough space for free-flowing conversation? Is it that we want to create specific outputs and the activities don’t seem conducive to them?
Depending on what we hold dear, any number of design choices could be effective.
According to Duke, stating our preferences allow us to lay out and evaluate all the possible outcomes of our decision. That is, after naming the blinders that we’re inherently using, we can open up our field of vision to what Duke calls the “decision multiverse.” Thinking up the range of possible scenarios brings our creative, playful brains back online. Rather than getting stuck on binaries (either we fail or we succeed), we can brainstorm a list of varied, complex, even silly ways that things could turn out. Some of these possible outcomes may feel more “real” to us than others, but this exercise also helps us see that, ultimately, any decision we make is a prediction—a guess about the future. It’s an educated guess, but a guess nonetheless.
Once we’ve laid out these possibilities, Duke then encourages us to put a number to our prediction. This may feel unfamiliar and even uncomfortable. While we may be used to discussing what we hope may happen, or what we’re afraid could happen, not many of us attach a percentage to that hunch. Are we 90% sure that we won’t have enough time in this session or 50% sure? Naming that percentage not only lets us see the relative (predicted) likelihood of positive vs negative outcomes, but also lets us see where our uncertainties lie, where we need to gather more information, and where we can actively plan for contingencies. We can therefore move away from ruminating and into more creative stances: inquiry (quickly gathering information to make a more educated guess) or design (identifying where we might falter and making space for us to pivot, adapt, quit).
Encouraging Divergence
Now, while all of these steps can be done alone, they are most effective when we bring in other people. In her podcast Choiceology, behavior scientist Katie Milkman interviewed psychology professor Barbara Mellers and former CIA director Leon Panetta on tools that can improve our confidence in our decision-making. Like Annie Duke, they both suggested having folks individually state their degree of confidence numerically. Their advice draws on the concept of the “wisdom of crowds.” The most famous experiment associated to this concept took place in 1906, when statistician Francis Galton asked 800 people in a county fair to estimate the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Although individual estimates varied significantly, he was surprised to find that the median guess was within 1% of the ox’s weight. Mellers’ own research has also found that teams of people make better predictions than individuals, even when these individuals are experts.
Tapping into a diversity of perspectives both allows for a better shared assessment and, in my experience, for a richer view of the situation as whole. During a recent design session, for example, Ke and I differed in our relative confidence surrounding a facilitation decision. When we unpacked the reasons behind our disagreement, we realized that (1) Ke and I were more heavily weighing different risks, (2) we each brought different information to bear on our predictions surrounding the likelihood of certain outcomes, and (3) we could each identify multiple strategies to mitigate potential downfalls. Exploring the gaps in our predictions allowed us to key into a design that better addressed our (now more comprehensive) understanding and, when the time came to facilitate, we were able to more easily pivot when some of the (now anticipated) obstacles arose. By engaging with the root of our hesitations head-on, we built a more expansive risk and information landscape, one that will serve as a foundation for future collaboration.
Now, the idea that leveraging diverse perspectives improves collective work is certainly not revolutionary. In practice, though, we can struggle to disrupt the pull of “groupthink.” It may not always feel safe to be the lone detractor, particularly when power dynamics are at play. We’ve written about how at SDL we try to actively encourage divergence by leaning into our personal SDI motive profiles (e.g., asking Emma to voice process considerations, asking Ke to loop us back to outcomes). Doing this in itself releases us from trying to hold every angle at once. Other creative strategies to surface divergence include doing pre-mortems, which activates our imagination, or identifying someone to play devil’s advocate, which moves disagreement from the exception to the norm.
Tracking & Iterating
While engaging in the prior two strategies strengthen our decisions, it certainly doesn’t ensure success. Ultimately, decision-making is a practice. And, like any other practice, we are bound to make mistakes. Our assessment of risk may be off, we may identify previously hidden preferences, we may find that there’s other information that would’ve been more helpful ahead of time. The good thing is, if we think of decisions as tests, these realizations can strengthen our decision-making ability in the future. In order to do this, experts like Mellers and Duke suggest tracking our decisions not in terms of how they turned out (because, after all, we can never predict the future), but in terms of the process itself.
For example, did we leverage our perspectives effectively? Did we identify and pursue inquiries that would’ve given us a better knowledge foundation? Did we explore alternative paths and contingencies?
By looking back at our decisions not as one-time high stakes moments but as ongoing practices, we’re able to engage with them with greater curiosity. They become another opportunity to strengthen our understanding of our system and ourselves, ultimately equipping us to better navigate change in the long haul.
Creative Decisions + Creative Action
In 1991, John Cleese gave a speech about creativity that would probably resonate with anyone who’s ever tried to maintain a creative practice, establish a reflective routine, or test new ways of doing things. He talked about how creativity requires us to be in an “open mode,” a state characterized by expansiveness, curiosity, humor, and contemplation. According to Cleese, “you can’t become playful and creative if you’re under your usual pressures” (the state he calls the “closed mode”). Interestingly, though, his suggestions for becoming more creative didn’t revolve around a boundless expansion of open mode in our lives. Instead, he spoke of creating a sustainable but constrained window, recognizing that we all have a limited cognitive capacity (and therefore more time would only result in diminishing returns) and that shifting into execution is also necessary to give our creative ideas the best chance for success.
In our work, we also think of constraining decision-making as an enabler for more creative action. After all, we’re all familiar with long, drawn-out planning processes whose designs quickly fall apart when it comes time for implementation, leaving little time or space for folks to learn and adapt in intentional ways. In continuous improvement, we talk about this as getting stuck in “Plan-Do” mode, skipping over the “Study” and “Act” steps that make for true learning cycles. Since time will always be limited, we’re thinking about how becoming more agile in our decisions enables us to create more opportunities to be in “open mode” once we shift into action. Doing this naturalizes that our predictions will not be perfect, that there will be surprises and insights along the way, that creativity and implementation feed off one another.
» Every Sunday, writer Suleika Jaouad’s “Isolation Journals” offers thoughtfully crafted journaling prompts. This one from July 6 is about finding, exploring, and rejoicing in the little windows of “open mode” we have in our lives.
» Jenny Odell’s books How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock are provocative invitations to reconsider our relationship to time scarcity, productivity, and the pull of “doing” in order to be more grounded, connected, and engaged with what matters most.
» Writing this piece made me revisit Rubén Blades’ legendary song “Decisiones” (Decisions), a cornerstone of my childhood. This New Yorker profile gives a solid overview of Blades’s career, his narratively-rich and politically-forward lyrics, and his place in the Latin American music canon.
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