Advice That Sticks - Moira Somers

Скачать книгу

investigated: I think this repair is covered by the warranty. Can you verify that for me?

      Or it could have been that you were looking for solutions to a longstanding dilemma: How can I get my dog to stop jumping on people?

      Or perhaps you were stuck with a number of complex options that were all emotionally wrenching: What would you do if it were YOUR dad showing signs of dementia?

      Or maybe you just needed a perspective that you couldn’t get on your own: Does my butt look big in this muumuu?

      Whatever the particulars, you asked for advice because you wanted help in solving a problem. The help you were seeking may have come in one of many forms: information, guidance, reassurance, etc. If that advice met your needs, you left the encounter with a better knowledge of what action to take, what decision to make. If the encounter was helpful, you would have been left with greater confidence and calm. But if that advice did not help you solve your problem, you would have left the encounter feeling just as dissatisfied or unsettled as when you started – or even, unhappily, more so.

      Having an unsolved problem creates a state of mental tension; solving the problem allows the individual to return to a state of psychological equilibrium or homeostasis. Returning to a settled state just feels better, plain and simple. Such quietening or settling can occur even when people are asking for help that seemingly has no emotional import whatsoever, and even when they end up rejecting the advice they’ve been given. (We’ll delve into this paradox in a subsequent chapter.) But remember this: All decisions have an emotional component to them. People seek advice to solve a problem so that they can feel more settled.

      The wisdom of the collective

      Reflect again on your own recent experiences of advice-seeking. Chances are you reached out for advice because you believed it would lead to a quicker, better, more satisfactory outcome than you could achieve on your own. And chances are you would have been correct in that belief. The quality of people’s decision-making is often demonstrably better when they consult with other people.

      One of the highest-rated game shows in television history is the international phenomenon, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The game requires contestants to answer a series of multiple-choice questions of varying difficulty. Any wrong answer results in immediate ejection from the show. When they’re stumped by a question, contestants on that game show have a one-time option of polling the studio audience, and then deciding whether to go with the majority answer or strike out on their own.

      I’ve often wondered how much help could be offered to contestants by an audience made up of people from all walks of life. The questions run the gamut from science to history to entertainment and beyond – it’s like a high-stakes version of Trivial Pursuit. So how useful are the collective guesses of a non-expert audience? In their fascinating book, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behaviour, authors Ori and Rom Brafman were able to put an end to my wondering. According to the Brafmans, the audience is correct 90% of the time. That’s far better than the odds the befuddled contestants start out with.

      Asking for guidance from a relatively random group of non-expert strangers makes sense if you’re in a time-pressured, do-or-die situation on national television.* Blessedly, that is a rare event. Most of the time, we’re able to be more discerning about the people we reach out to. That’s a good thing, because the decisions we face are usually a good deal more complex. The answers we seek are not so much cut-and-dried factual ones; they tend to be more nuanced and personalized than that. Nevertheless, the take-home message remains: If we’re looking to make the best possible decisions for our lives, other people are often our best and most important resource.

      The common ground of financial experts and tattoo artists

      Why do people seek your advice? What is it that people are hoping to get from you, the expert? Until quite recently, the answer would have included access to a product or a body of knowledge not available elsewhere.

      There was a time when financial experts had unique and privileged access to the tools and expertise of their trade. If folks wanted to buy insurance, stocks, bonds, or mutual funds, they needed someone to do it for them. This was true of pretty much every profession and trade prior to the mid-1990s. Training and credentials gave experts an exclusive ‘lock’ on such things as procedural training, trade publications, and purchasing and sales rights. Regulatory guidelines helped ensure that knowledge was protected within each profession’s particular guild. It was all proprietary – for tattoo artists and stockbrokers, for welders and insurance salespeople.

      Technology has changed all that. With every day that passes, the amount of secret or proprietary information shrinks, and what is considered ‘public domain’ grows. Access to knowledge and products or supplies is steadily being democratized. Want to know the brand of knickers favoured by the Queen? Keen to discover how to get slugs off your lettuce plants? Need access to a trading platform so you can buy some penny mining stocks? It’s all available in seconds with some clicks of a mouse.

      I’m not meaning to be indelicate here, but given the above-mentioned changes, the question needs to be asked: What good are you, anyway? Well, a lot of good, as it turns out. Let’s turn to the reasons consumers give when asked why they turn to experts – financial and otherwise.

      Why consumers turn to the experts

      As you read through the following aims that consumers have in seeking help, give some thought to how you might integrate this knowledge into both your marketing and promotion efforts as well as your service delivery.

      To reduce complexity

      Because of an inherent belief that more knowledge = better decision making, many people now make a point of gathering copious amounts of information on the problem they’re trying to solve. It is not uncommon for customers and clients to show up with tomes of research they’ve gathered, eager to discuss their findings. But the gathering of information does not automatically turn consumers into experts, particularly when the domain is highly technical and complex. (Just ask any physician who has had to tangle with a patient armed with WebMD diagnoses and treatment possibilities.)

      What true experts are able to do is judge the credibility and utility of the available information in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. It takes expertise to accurately classify material as Meaningful versus Irrelevant versus Unmitigated Rubbish. The non-expert does not know how to weigh the relative merits of the information he or she possesses. The loudest voices or the websites with the highest rankings are given too much weight and awarded too much credibility. As a result, material that is useless or plain wrong often has too much influence on the consumer.

      Experts help to cut through the noise and locate the signal. This is especially valuable to people who are faced with options that are difficult to compare. Such difficulty can come about because the choices are so similar (e.g. this socially responsible mutual fund versus that other socially responsible mutual fund), or because the choices are so dissimilar (e.g. whether to use monies to launch a new business venture or to enter retirement). The more emotionally impactful the decisions, the more the expert’s value lies in reducing the volume of information and its associated complexity.

      To take action

      ‘Keep your options open’ is a piece of advice we frequently give to teenagers as they consider which courses to take or which opportunities to pursue. It bespeaks our belief that more options = greater happiness.

      People like options, it’s true, but they frequently freeze up or bow out when faced with too many of them. One of the cleverest illustrations of that tendency comes from a now-famous supermarket study conducted by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper in 2000.5 Grocery store shoppers came upon a display that contained at different times either 6 or 24 different varieties of jams that they could sample. More variety led to a greater volume of jam sampling, but when the researchers looked at which display led to the greatest volume of jam sales, they found it was the one that offered less choice. The difference, in fact, was startling. Only 3% of customers bought jam after being exposed to 24 options,

Скачать книгу