The Paradox of Choice
Photo by Iulia Buta on Unsplash
Most of your day consists of set routines. When you wake up in the morning, you don't have to think about what is coming next. You get up and brush your teeth, or grab your cup of coffee, or whatever it is you do every day. Our work is the same way. The employee who has been sending emails for their weekly updates, doesn't have to think about it. They know where to go, they have their distribution list to send it to, and they know how to attach the PDF. The entire process is on autopilot which means it requires very little mental energy. That is, until the technology changes.
Enter, the modern workplace.
Part of my job over the last several years has been consulting organizations through the change management side of a technology migration. As new tools roll out, old ways of working are disrupted. That same employee who used to exert next to no energy to do that one task, now they have lost their routine and in its place is left a decision. Do I send the update via a private chat? Group chat? A channel? Or do I still stick with email?
Having too many options, or not knowing what those options are at all, leads to Decision Paralysis. In Barry Schwartz’s Ted Talk on The Paradox of Choice, he described it as such:
"We become overloaded. Choice no longer liberates, it debilitates."
-Barry Schwartz
This is not just a theory: a study by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper showed that a display table selling just 6 types of Jams was 10 times more likely to make the sale than a table that had 24 Jam options. I see this all the time when I walk companies through all the choices they now have with their new Microsoft productivity tools. Just last week I had a user that recently moved to the cloud, which he confessed was far superior to the productivity and collaboration tools they had before, but he still felt stuck deciding which tool when.
Even when the new way of working is superior, the disruption to our routine is what keeps us from moving forward.
While many leaders wish to cast a vision, then sit back and let the details handle themselves, this approach has little chance of succeeding because, as they say, the devil is in the details.
"Big-picture, hands-off leadership isn't likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change - the paralyzing part - is precisely in the details."
- Chip & Dan Heath, Switch
In the case of the 24 jams, more people were attracted to the sample table and yet less people made a purchase. People want choices, but too many choices is debilitating which means change that brings new choices requires guidance. Discovery-type sessions like Focus Groups and Interviews help uncover those details for specific job functions. It is here where we learn the why that will motivate this group to change, the best way to teach them how to change and the direct actions they can take. The action is the crucial final step that directs the change so instead of losing a routine and gaining a decision, they immediately gain a new routine. This small act decreases the chance of Decision Paralysis and increases the chance of successful adoption. We are essentially figuring out which types of jams would suit them best and then taking the decision from 24 down to 6.
Knowing this should not only impact how we deploy changes in our organizations, but it should also help us focus our personal goals. If we have too much jam, if we disrupt too many routines at the same time and leave too many decisions to be made, we will take the path of least resistance and default to our old behaviors. Options seem great at first, they even bring more people to the sampling table, but if you want to make that sale, if you want your adoption efforts to succeed, get rid of some of that Jam.
