#490 Ask the Expert: How To Make Better Decisions with Andrew Likierman

0:00Hi, my name's Sarah and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast. This week is one of our Ask the Expert episodes and you'll hear me in conversation with Sir Andrew Likierman talking about judgment. I always think judgment is a fascinating topic. Is it a skill? Is it a quality? How do we get better at it? It can sometimes feel a bit elusive. How do you get better at reading the room, the Zoom, the Teams meeting, whatever it might be. and I think Andrew has some really practical reflections and ideas that I hope you're all going to find useful. So I hope you enjoy listening and be back at the end to say bye.

0:38Andrew, thank you so much for joining us on the Squiggly Careers podcast. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. Well, thanks so much for inviting me. And we're going to dive straight into this idea of judgment because I think it is an elusive behaviour. So from all of the work and the research you've done, is it a quality? Is it a skill? What's our starting point when we think about judgment? Well, it's a combination of a quality and a skill, if I can put it that way. It's not easily categorisable. And that's exactly why I wrote this book. Because I thought to myself, here's something that's really important, and people value and they say they want.

1:15And yet, we don't quite know what it is. So that's the basis of the work. So to answer your question, is it a quality or a skill? It's a bit of both. It's a quality because it's something which we as individuals have, which combine a number of factors within ourselves that we have to use when exercising it. And so is it a skill as well? The answer is it's a skill as well because it's something we can develop. And we can develop it in order to bring out the qualities that we've got in ourselves. One of the things that I got to very quickly when I was reading your book, but also just thinking about this for myself, was the connection between judgment and then choices and decision-making.

2:00Because if I think about the why, you know, we often kind of connect more to whys than what. Like, well, why do I want to improve my judgment? Typically, or certainly my go-to was because I want to make better decisions. I want to make good choices, maybe for my career. like where do I want to go next, what roles do I want to do, or just in my day-to-day, should I invest more in project A or in project B? So could you talk to us a bit about the relationship between judgment and choices or decision making? Decisions are things we make every day, all the time, big and small. We don't think much about them.

2:35Not much goes into them necessarily in terms of thought and reflection. So decisions can be quite straightforward based on sets of variables we already know about. Judgements tend to be more complicated precisely because they bring in, as I said before, these qualities that we have in ourselves. And we bring them in because it's more complicated than simply deciding, are we going to Starbucks or Costa today? We need to understand what it is that lies behind what we're about to make a judgment about. So we talk, for example, about having judgment, but we don't talk about having decision-making.

3:15That indicates that it is equality. But also we know that complex areas of decision-making go into judgment. So there is a link between the two, but judgment takes it to a different kind of level than we talk about in terms of decisions. so it might be people spotting those moments where you know there's more complexity there's perhaps more factors involved um I once worked in a corporate affairs team and those people often have very good judgment or certainly that was that was my experience and what I always thought they were so good at is they could see all the shades of grey and they would recognize when you almost needed to press pause so that you could almost like factor in judgment rather than well let's make a decision too fast, let's make a choice, because maybe there's lots of people involved, maybe it's something that you've not done before, maybe there are more unknowns.

4:07So those are some of the things that people could perhaps look out for, where it's like, actually, I'm just going to think a bit more about my own judgment in this moment. Yes. So look, the more complex something is, the less you've done it before, the more it matters, the more we need judgment. So judgment comes for those things which are really significant, either in the world of work or at home, because this isn't something which we just use, of course, in terms of our working lives. We also need it at home for health, for finances, for our relationships and so on. So this quality is something which is really significant in terms of the big things that matter to us in our lives.

4:56And you do describe in the book improving our judgment as a process, so as a process to follow. And I think when something's quite potentially complicated, that's always reassuring. I always like freedom within a framework. A bit of a framework gives you a sense of where to start, where you might go next. And though your framework has lots of different aspects in it, the point that you make is it's always better to at least have done part of the process than to have done none of the process. So if people were starting out on judgment, perhaps it's something they've not really thought about before or they are just trying to get better at for the first time, where would you recommend they start in that process?

5:34All right. Now, you mentioned that it's a process and that I think is a great start because if one simply approaches something saying, well, I've got to make this difficult choice, how am I going to go about it? well, I don't know, there's all these factors swimming around in my mind. So I would argue if it's going to be so important, you actually do need to go through some kind of process here. You said also it's better perhaps to do any of these than none of them. So I'm not suggesting that you have to go through all this process every time systematically, but I am suggesting that any kind of attempt to pin things down is going to be better than simply hoping for the best.

6:15What I've described in my book is a process which has a number of stages. The first is starting off with what you know already about something. And it has to be relevant. So not just knowing a lot of stuff. It's also about being relevant to what you're going to make a judgment about. Number two is the question of who and what you trust. because you've got information coming in from people, from the web, from other sources and so on. And the question here is, okay, so do you trust these sources because you may simply otherwise find the stuff is misleading? Number three is how aware you are of what's going on.

6:58When you make a choice, there's all sorts of issues surrounding that. I mean, for example, are you aware of your emotions at that time? Are you aware of the vibe in the room of what's going on at that time in making a difficult choice? So awareness is number three. Number four is our feelings and our beliefs. This is what we feel about something. You know, we all approach things with feelings. We're biased in some cases. You know, we have emotions. We have all sorts of things which act as filters to the information that's coming in. Now, we need to be aware of those and to make sure that we understand our feelings and beliefs in order to make sure we're in a good position to make a choice.

7:42I mean, being angry, being afraid, these are not good moments, as it were, to make a choice, carefully considered. Then we come to the choice itself. Now, that actually is a process too. That's an essential part of actually deciding, do we do this or do we do that? and we've all sat in meetings where one person has dominated and other people didn't have a voice, perhaps having been told you've either do this or this when actually there are perhaps more choices. The process of choice is itself important. Then finally there's a question of can you actually deliver it because it's great having an idea in theory but you've got to deliver it in practice.

8:23So there are the elements of the judgment process that I'm suggesting we should consider. And especially if we have time to consider it and it's a big decision in our lives, I would argue actually what you want to do is stack the cards in your favour. And that's what this process would do. You know your point around people you can trust? Because I found that really interesting. How do we know whether we can trust somebody or not? Because often in work, now people are in big cross-functional teams, you might not know somebody that well, How do people go about kind of navigating that? If you meet somebody new and you're going to rely on them, you don't automatically assume, presumably, that it's going to be great and you can definitely trust them.

9:10What you do is you perhaps look at them and observe what they do, observe the way they say things. You know, you begin to understand a bit about who they are as a person. and then you perhaps look at their track record and say, well, can you give evidence that you've done it in the nicest way, of course. You say, well, what have you done before? And you kind of get a feel about whether that fits. You might then go and ask other people about them if it's really important and you need a kind of reference, informal, formal, whatever it is, to see how other people have interacted with them. So there's quite a lot of ways in which before you put your trust in somebody, you can check it out.

9:56Now, nothing is guaranteed, but simply assuming you can trust people we know is often not a good idea. And you describe this process of reading the room, or as it often will be for lots of people now, reading the Teams meeting or the Zoom meeting. and I personally do find it harder at a distance to kind of read how people are feeling you perhaps see lots less of people's body language people might have cameras turned off how can you start practicing kind of doing that almost like I would describe as like situational awareness and understanding different people particularly sometimes maybe what's not being said in a way when everybody might be virtual?

10:42And you might actually have never met that person. Well, look, we know that being remote is more difficult in terms of reading people, in terms of understanding them, in really getting a feel for who they are as individuals. I mean, being together in a room with someone is a very different kind of experience, exactly as you said. So it's a challenge. There's no question about that. And yet, again, once you're aware of the fact that you need to understand more about them, particularly if you're going to have any kind of relationship with them of dependence, some kind or other, you need to actually work at that.

11:22So on camera, you know, you need to look at them, look at their expressions, look at the way they respond, but also listen very carefully to what they say and how they say it. because those are going to give you the clues. What are they not saying? Are they moving too swiftly across something? Are they focusing too much on one aspect of what you've asked? Now, in some cases, this is no different to being in the room because let's say, for example, somebody's selling a project to you and they want to tell you it's a great project and you ought to support it and so on. And on screen, just like in person, you think to yourself, wait a minute, you know, this person's selling this really hard, you know, have they thought about the alternatives and so on.

12:10So not everything is necessarily difficult or different online. We can have certain areas in which we can make the same kind of, you know, we can do the same kinds of things to make sure we understand who they are and what's happening. I was almost thinking you could probably very practically ask some questions that would help with some of what you've just described. so you know if you've only heard somebody talk about the good stuff to do with a project like what's going well I would think well there's no way there's only things that are going well in any project so you could ask in an encouraging and in a supportive way you know well what's on your worry list at the moment or what do you think might get in the way of the delivery of this project to try and sort of encourage people to sort of share that other side if you've kind of not heard it.

13:00Look, you're absolutely right. And if it's a one to one, you can do that more difficult when you're in a meeting, you can't start having an agenda of your own starting to ask other kinds of questions. And it's maybe a bit late by the time you get to the end, as it were, when you won't any longer have the chance to have those follow up questions. I also think you can learn a bit from looking at the people across your organisation who you do think role model good judgment back to your point about track record I think one of the ways that I improved my judgment was from working with people who had very good judgment and almost the nature of their roles meant that actually it was a really kind of critical part of what they did and they really prioritized building relationships almost before they need them you know so that they were sort of very good at mapping well who might I need to know so that when the time comes to make a judgment which I might need to make quickly if it's sort of a bit more of a crisis mode actually I don't want to be building the relationship in that moment I want to be building the relationship before the moment and initially I remember seeing that and thinking oh that's a bit inefficient we don't I don't need to go and talk to that person because you know it's not on the agenda it's not going to help me deliver what's on my to-do list today and then you start to realize it's actually really strategically done because then something big would go wrong or we'd have a big issue or something was going to be in the papers and suddenly you can phone that person up and so that was one of the other things that I think I learned was the kind of building relationships before the moment you need them perhaps any others that really stand out for you from talking to lots of different people and then summarising them as part of the book well the key thing here is not that there's one which is more important than another one but you get the right ones for you and this starts then with understanding your relative strengths and weaknesses.

14:54What are you really good at? What are you not so good at? And perhaps then focusing on the things you're not so good at and saying, what can I do specifically to help me get better at those things? But also, I think one should build on one's strengths because these are things that help one make really good judgments and those are the things one should develop. Perhaps identifying your own personal weaknesses, the things that you feel, I'm not so good at this. I'm not so good at perhaps being aware of what's going on. Perhaps I tend to get carried away by emotions when I do something. Now, if that's so, then these are perhaps the things you should address yourself.

15:36So I don't think there's anything in general here. It's all very personal. I think what's really nice about that, though, is you're almost starting to kind of create your own playbook for good judgment. in describing the different parts of your framework. There were parts where I was thinking, oh, okay, well, I naturally do that. That's a kind of natural talent I've got. But then you also look at those areas where you think, oh, okay, well, I'm naturally optimistic. Now, that's a good thing a lot of the time, but then that might mean that you are less open to kind of bad news, that you don't want to see when numbers are going in the wrong direction for a few months in a row.

16:10And so I think kind of almost taking that self-awareness and then thinking, well, how could that then get in the way of good judgment? And even practically, I was sort of starting to think you could almost map those two areas and sort of go, well, this is where I'll be at my best. These are sort of my watchouts. Definitely. And, you know, you can look at yourself and say, look, I'm naturally optimistic or I'm naturally pessimistic. And as long as you understand that, you don't have to change yourself. No. But you have to be aware of that when you go in to make a choice. And we can't necessarily do everything ourselves.

16:41That's why we work with other people. and finding other people who perhaps have got the strengths that we haven't got in certain areas is another important way to improve the judgment that you make. And so reading the book, there are some quite famous, some of the examples are quite famous that people will have heard of before, of bad judgment, where things have gone wrong. Can we learn from those people or do we just sort of think, well, thank goodness that wasn't me? Very often in the press, we see some famous figure, And there are many of them who say it was an error of judgment if they've been found out to be in the wrong position or having done the wrong thing.

17:22And looking at that, I mean, one of the things that very often comes up is overconfidence. Overconfidence, especially for famous people who say it was an error of judgment as they resign, is the cause often of their problems. because they then think, well, I'm terrific. I don't need to listen to anybody anymore. You know, I'm really good at what I do. And that's the sign that judgment starts to go down. So if we think, you know, that actually we kind of know it all and we don't need to learn any more and we don't need to listen to people, I would say that's a really bad signal. Yeah, Satya Nadella, who's the CEO of Microsoft, he talks about the learn it all will always do better than the know it all.

18:09And just it's interesting, the kind of topics that have come up today. We've actually talked about listening a lot. And I think leaders that listen are always the ones that you want to work with and work for. And actually, there's an interesting article we'll share as part of the show notes that listening is often a skill that leaders overestimate their own capability in. Because we think we're listening, but actually we're waiting to speak. We think we already know the answer. We're worried about the next meeting that we've got. So that sort of humility and that listening, that feels like that goes kind of side by side with judgments.

18:43Well, look, all of us surely like to work for somebody who listens to what we say. You know, it's something we really appreciate. And similarly, if we're in charge of other people, they're going to appreciate the fact that we're listening. Now, listening is one part of this, but you're right to identify it as an important part. And it's something all of us can do. So thinking about yourself now and your own experiences, you do share a couple of examples in the book. Maybe you could share with our listeners a bit about you, maybe an example of a good judgment or a bad judgment or a bit of both and kind of what you what you learned from it as a result.

19:22OK, well, look, let me give you. If you don't mind. No, no. On the contrary. I mean, one of the things I've I've learned is that I can learn, you know, that actually it's about learning. And as one of the huge benefits of having done, I've been fortunate to do a number of different things in my life, is that I hope I've learned from each of them. Years before Amazon started up, indeed before the internet, I started a business to provide books quickly to organizations who needed them quickly. And I thought to myself, here's a gap in the market. But at that stage, Amazon didn't exist. The internet didn't exist.

20:03it took three or four weeks often for books to arrive. And so I thought, look, I can get things to people in a couple of days, and this will be a fantastic idea. Well, it wasn't because it turned out that companies didn't want to pay for this speed. And I thought it was a great idea, and I still think it was a great idea. And I don't regret starting it. But then, after it was cleared it wouldn't work, I kept on for much too long trying to make it work. So, if you like, I thought it was a good judgment, a risk worth taking to try this out. The bad judgment was not seeing quite quickly this wasn't going to work, shutting it down and moving on.

20:48What do you think stopped you? Do you think it's because you just loved the idea and you wanted it to work? Absolutely. There's a great example of poor judgment based on my feelings and beliefs. The answer is I felt I wanted to make it work. I had to make it work. I couldn't. My pride wouldn't allow me to say, actually, this was a terrible idea. Now, look, I learned from that. You know, it's not in every case. But, you know, if you've decided that something is not going to work, you know, you have then to look at yourself and say, is this simply my feelings here that's keeping this thing going?

21:24You know, you take a wrong route. You know, you go down the road and you think, I think I should have turned left there, not right. But nevertheless, you keep on going. There you are. You see, there's another example from everyday life. You could be mistaken for thinking, well, there's lots of sunk cost there. You know, I put loads of time and effort and I kind of got that wrong. And it doesn't feel great, but you will have always learned something for next time. So I do feel like you kind of iterate over time. And even when you make those judgments, which, in hindsight, you do wish you'd done something different or you trusted the wrong person, you can at least then think, well, what did I learn from that?

22:02How can I be that bit smarter, that bit better for next time? Well, you've given an example of a sunk cost bias and I think we're all liable to have that, aren't we? We think to ourselves, well, we've put so much effort in, you know, we've got to keep going. But as I say, you know, all these things potentially are learnable and that, I hope, is a cheerful sign of what one can do with judgment, that one is not simply born with it or not. You know, this is something that one can develop all the way through one's life. And are there any other watchouts or mistakes that you see people commonly make around judgment?

22:38I think feelings is one. We've talked a bit about just watch out for your feelings kind of getting in your way. Anything else for people to look out for? I come back to my original comment saying it's all very personal. So I think one's got to look out for things for oneself. Let's say you just don't have the experience. You can get the experience. You can find out about things and so on. If you're not very aware of what's going on, you can learn about that. You can check with other people about what's going on. If you feel that the choices you're being offered are not quite right, you can check on that.

23:15You can ask other people. So I think it's, again, being aware of what's possible here that gives one the power, as it were, to make better judgments. It's always an interesting one when you talk about instinct and kind of gut feeling, because we know that that can be notoriously inaccurate. But I do also feel that if you notice you are feeling uncomfortable or unsure, that that might also be a signal or a sign to, you know, go and have another conversation or find out a bit more or slow down by 24 hours. Because, you know, we know we need to think fast and slow. But often I think people are like, oh, I'm not sure about this.

23:59Oh, but I'm not as senior as that person. So that person must be right just because they're at a different level in the organization or they've got a kind of big job title. But often in my experience, when people do spot something or see something that they just doesn't feel quite right, actually just sitting with that and perhaps having the confidence to just explore more, maybe get a few data points, have a few conversations, even if you do that and then you think, oh, no, actually, it's fine. It's sort of better to do that due diligence than to not because I haven't done it a couple of times and always really regretted it.

24:33Intuition is something we all kind of recognise is important. We have intuition, we use our intuition. Authorities differ hugely on this. We've got Danny Kahneman. You mentioned thinking fast, thinking slow. He actually thinks intuition is not a very good guide. Other people, Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, think it's a great idea. All right. So I would argue that intuition is actually important to us, but we have to be careful because intuition is actually the accumulated knowledge that we've got. You know, all the things we know and we also are influenced by how we feel. So for intuition, my guidance would be your intuition is a great guide as long as you've done something a number of times before.

25:22Because actually intuition is then informed by that experience. If intuition is simply out of the blue, comes from nowhere, you've never done something before, then I would be quite cautious about using intuition. yeah that's a really good filter also a really practical filter for people how much of a beginner are you have you done this lots of times before if I think about a difficult situation we had over the past couple of years I had done something a few times we were managing a risk I'd done something a few times but not enough actually to feel really confident in my own judgment and that is where I did phone an old boss who I knew would have would have done the thing that I was kind of grappling with four or five times more than I had and then actually it was really interesting to hear her perspective because then I think that really helped me to develop my own judgment so that was just that kind of filter of like back to where we kind of started today's conversation that was also how much does it matter that judgment in that moment actually really mattered to me and so if it hadn't mattered as much I probably could have been like I've got enough intuition here and those experiences are helpful I was like oh no actually this is really reputationally important.

26:29I do actually want to go and seek some from somebody I trust, an extra perspective. And I think we got to a better judgment because of that. Well, you rightly point to the question, does it matter? Because of course, if it doesn't matter, then really, so what? But if it really does matter, then you ought to be quite careful about intuition. The other thing is you mentioned risk and you're right to mention risk, because the answer is we need to know how much risk we're taking. We may decide we want to take risk and that's fine as long as we're aware of the fact that we're prepared to take a certain risk.

27:03Now risk comes all the way through judgment and understanding risk is an important part of that. So risk is an element in intuition in very much the way you described. And from all of the work that you've done, the conversations you've had, what surprised you the most about judgment from everything that, like from your own experiences but also from the research that you've done? Well, what surprised me most is how some people are prepared to make really important choices for themselves at work and at home with almost no judgment, as it were, applied. In other words, they simply say, I just think this is the right thing to do without actually exploring it, without testing it, without at least finding some way to make it a more systematic basis.

27:57Now, when there's a lot at stake, you know, frankly, it's not very wise. I mean, people, for example, get duped out of their savings, you know, by people who look plausible, who they trust for all the wrong reasons, without thinking through, well, you know, should I be putting all my money with this person? You know, people make choices about their health, you know what I mean? Often on the basis of no information at all, not enough information, not understanding what's going on and so on. So I would say, actually, folks, the stakes here are really high, you know, and it's worth doing a little bit of work here just to try and stack the cards in your favour.

28:37And as well as your book, Judgment at Work, Making Better Choices, where else could people go to find out more about you and your work? Well, it's very kind of you to ask. I've got a course online run by the London Business School. If somebody wants to go into that in more detail, they might find that useful. But I hope the book also covers a lot of the questions that people might want to ask about judgment. And also, I hope, give some practical tips. Angie thank you so much for joining us today you've demystified judgment for me and also made me take it that little bit more seriously than I think I did sort of a month ago before I discovered you and your work so thank you so much thanks so much for having me thank you for listening to today's episode of the Squiggly Careers podcast I hope you found it useful and if you do have other ideas of experts that you'd love to hear from you can always email us your suggestions we're helenandsarahatsquigglycareers.com but that's everything for this week thank you so much for listening and we're back with you again soon bye for now