Making use of indecisiveness
by Miki Saxon
Whether you’re an executive, manager or worker, you’re constantly presenting choices to those around you that require them to agree or disagree with ideas and actions; do this or do that; support or not support an initiative.
From design reviews and marketing campaigns to ordering lunch people constantly argue for their side.
Do those arguments matter? Are they really influencing those who aren’t adamantly on one side or the other?
In a New York Times Op-Ed Sam Wang, an associate professor of neuroscience at Princeton, and Joshua Gold, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, discuss new research of whether people who say they’re undecided, in fact, really are.
Although the discussion is focused voter claims to being “undecided” in the upcoming election, the research applies equally well to any situation.
“Neuroscientists have begun to tease out the brain systems that make decisions. Even when it takes no more than a second, decision-making is thought to involve two parts, gathering evidence and committing to a choice… brain activity in the parietal cortex rises as evidence is gathered, eventually reaching a tipping point (though it’s not yet known which brain regions drive the final choice).
Inherent to this process is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Commit early and you can get on with your life. Take more time and you might make a wiser or more accurate decision.”
How often has someone asked you if you’re seeing a movie Friday and you respond that you haven’t decided yet? Is that true or are you just unaware that you’ve already made an internal decision, but that you’re not yet ready to share it?
In business you need a balance between speed and accuracy that isn’t always easy to achieve, so it makes sense to take advantage of your undecideds by learning enough to recognize what is holding them back in a given situation.
Then, when they’re undecided on the direction for the new multi-million dollar marketing campaign or won’t commit themselves to the architecture of a new product you’ll know both the weight to give their indecisiveness, as well as how to get past it.
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