Bartleby

巴托比

When to trust your instincts as a manager

管理者何時該信自己的直覺？

Deliberation does not always makes sense

深思熟慮并不總是可取

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1 HUMANS HAVE been honed over millions of years of evolution to respond to certain situations without thinking too hard. If your ancestors spotted movement in the undergrowth, they would run first and grunt questions later. At the same time, the capacity to analyse and to plan is part of what distinguishes people from other animals. The question of when to trust your gut and when to test your assumptions—whether to think fast or slow, in the language of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist—matters in the office as much as in the savannah.

經(jīng)過數(shù)百萬年的進化，人類已經(jīng)被打磨得無需多想就能對某些情境做出反應(yīng)。如果你的祖先發(fā)覺灌木叢中有動靜，他們會先撒腿跑，過后才咕噥著問發(fā)生了啥。與此同時，分析和計劃的能力是人區(qū)別于其他動物的特征之一。什么時候該相信直覺，什么時候該檢驗假設(shè)——用心理學(xué)家丹尼爾·卡尼曼（Daniel Kahneman）的話說就是該快思還是慢想——這個問題在辦公室里和在大草原上一樣重要。

2 Deliberative thinking is the hallmark of a well-managed workplace. Strategic overhauls and budget discussions are built on rounds of meetings, memos, formulas and presentations. Processes are increasingly designed to stamp out instinctive responses. From blind screening of job applicants to using “red-teaming” techniques to pick apart a firm’s plans, rigour trumps reflex.

深思熟慮是一個工作場所管理得當(dāng)?shù)臉?biāo)志。戰(zhàn)略改革和預(yù)算討論是建立在一輪又一輪會議、備忘錄、方案和報告的基礎(chǔ)之上。流程的設(shè)計初衷越來越傾向于壓制人的本能反應(yīng)。從盲選求職者演變到使用“紅隊”研判法給公司計劃挑刺，縝密打敗了條件反射。

3Yet instinct also has its place. Some decisions are more connected to emotional responses and inherently less tractable to analysis. Does a marketing campaign capture the essence of your company, say, or would this person work well with other people in a team? In sticky customer-service situations, intuition is often a better guide to how to behave than a script.

然而本能也有用武之地。有些決策與情緒反應(yīng)關(guān)聯(lián)更大，本質(zhì)上就不那么容易分析。比方說，一輪營銷活動是否展現(xiàn)出了公司的精髓？這個人會不會和團隊中的其他人合作無間？在棘手的客戶服務(wù)情形中，直覺往往是比腳本更好的行為指南。

4 Gut instincts can also be improved (call it “probiotic management”). Plenty of research has shown that intuition becomes more unerring with experience. In one well-known experiment, conducted in 2012, volunteers were asked to assess whether a selection of designer handbags were counterfeit or real. Some were instructed to operate on instinct and others to deliberate over their decision. Intuition worked better for those who owned at least three designer handbags; indeed, it outperformed analysis. The more expert you become, the better your instincts tend to be.

源自肺腑的直覺也可以被改進（可以稱之為“益生菌管理”）。大量研究表明，隨著經(jīng)驗的積累，直覺會變得更加準(zhǔn)確。在2012年進行的一項著名實驗中，志愿者被要求評估一些名牌手袋是真是假。研究人員請一些人憑直覺做判斷，另一些人斟酌著做選擇。直覺對那些擁有至少三個名牌包的人更有效，甚至比分析還管用。你越駕輕就熟，直覺就越準(zhǔn)。

5 However, the real reason to embrace fast thinking is that it is, well, fast. Instinctive decision-making is often the only way to get through the day. Researchers at Cornell University once estimated that people make over 200 decisions a day about food alone. The workplace is nothing but a succession of choices, a few big and many small: what to prioritise, when to intervene, whom to avoid in the lifts and, now, where to work each day.

然而，接受快速思考的真正原因是，嗯，它是快速的。本能的決策往往是熬過一天的唯一方法?？的螤柎髮W(xué)的研究人員曾估計，僅關(guān)于食物，人們每天就會做出200多個決定。職場就是一連串的選擇，有大有?。簝?yōu)先選擇什么，什么時候干預(yù)，在電梯里避開誰，以及現(xiàn)在，每天在哪里工作。

6 To take one example, when your inbox brims with new emails at the start of a new day, there is absolutely no way to read them all carefully. Intuition is what helps you decide which ones to answer and which to delete or leave unopened. Emails that are part of existing threads: open. Messages from people directly above and below you: open. Reminders from the chief information officer that cyber-security really, really matters: delete.?

舉個例子，當(dāng)你的收件箱在新的一天開始時充滿了新郵件，你絕對沒有辦法都仔細閱讀它們。直覺能幫助你決定回復(fù)哪些郵件，刪除或不打開哪些郵件。屬于現(xiàn)有線程的一部分的郵件：打開。直接來自你的上級和下級的郵件：打開。首席信息官提醒說，網(wǎng)絡(luò)安全真的、真的很重要:刪除。

7 Instinct is also at work on those occasions when people have completely zoned out. They might be working on something else during a Zoom call, or playing chess on their phones, or simply admiring the ceiling pattern. Suddenly they are aware of a silence, and realise that they have been asked something or are expected to make a contribution. This is the office equivalent of coming face to face with a lion. Those who are fit to survive will say something plausible like “I’d like to understand how we are measuring success,” prompting murmurs of agreement from everyone else who hasn’t been paying attention but senses this might be a good answer.?

當(dāng)人們完全走神的時候，直覺也在起作用。他們可能在Zoom通話的時候在做別的事情，或者在手機上下棋，或者只是在欣賞天花板的圖案。突然，他們察覺到一陣沉默，并意識到他們被問及了什么，或被期望做出貢獻。這就相當(dāng)于在辦公室里與一頭獅子面對面。那些適合生存的人會說一些貌似有理的話，比如“我想知道我們是如何衡量成功的”，這促使其他一直沒有集中注意的人紛紛表示贊同，他們沒有注意到這可能是一個好的答案。

8 Fast thinking is not just about self-preservation. It can help the entire organisation. The value of many managerial decisions lies in the simple fact that they have been made at all. Yet as data gushes from every pore of the modern organisation, the temptation to ask for one more bit of analysis has become much harder to resist. A well-established psychological phenomenon known as “verbal overshadowing” captures the danger of overthinking things: people are more likely to misidentify someone in a line-up if they have spent time writing a description of their faces. Managers often suffer from analytical overshadowing, mulling a simple problem until it turns into a complex one.?

重新講述會讓敘述的準(zhǔn)確度會下降。也就是說，復(fù)述的過程會干擾最初以知覺的形式編碼的記憶快速思考不僅僅是為了自我保護。它可以幫助整個組織。許多管理決策的價值就在于這樣一個簡單的事實：它們已經(jīng)做成過。然而，隨著數(shù)據(jù)從現(xiàn)代組織中噴涌而出，要求再多做一點分析的誘惑變得越來越難以抗拒。一種被稱為“語言遮蔽效應(yīng)”的公認的心理現(xiàn)象揭示了過度思考的危險：如果人們花時間描述一組人的臉，他們更有可能認錯他們。經(jīng)理們經(jīng)常遭受分析上的“遮蔽”，把一個簡單的問題琢磨成一個復(fù)雜的問題。

9 When to use intuition in the workplace rests on its own form of pattern recognition. Does the decision-maker have real expertise in this area? Is this a domain in which emotion matters more than reasoning? Above all, is it worth delaying the decision? Slow thinking is needed to get the big calls right. But fast thinking is the way to stop deliberation turning to dither.

什么時候在工作場所使用直覺取決于其自身的模式識別形式。決策者是否在該領(lǐng)域擁有真正的專業(yè)知識？在這個領(lǐng)域，情感是否比理性更重要？最重要的是，推遲做決定是否值得？要做出正確的重大決定，需要緩慢的思考。但快速思考是阻止深思熟慮變成猶豫不決的方法。