This book by Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, offers a terrific addition to the coach’s toolkit and is packed full with fascinating insights that will help you in your coaching engagements. It was first published in 2011, so many of you might already be familiar with it. The intention of this review is to analyse its potential worth as a coaching tool for practicing coaches.
The premise of the book is that we have two systems that act as agents within our minds, with their individual personalities, abilities and limitations.
System one operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
System two allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.
When we think of ourselves, we identify with System two, the conscious reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. However, as the book proves in great detail and across many spectrums, we regularly use automatic system one, particularly when “our confidence is determined by the coherence of the story one has constructed rather than by the quality and amount of information that actually supports it.”
The book details the capabilities of both systems and looks at the interactions between them. It shows that by better understanding the two systems, one is able to make more informed decisions and potentially enjoy richer and more sustainable outcomes more closely aligned to the original intention.
As coaches, we have studied many behavioural models and are aware that our emotional and executive brains are often in conflict with each other and that mastery and awareness of the relationship between the different hemispheres of the brain can lead to better outcomes. (See my review of ‘the Chimp Paradox ‘in my regular book review section if you would like more on this topic) If you can digest the theories of ‘Think, fast and slow’ and apply them to your coaching practices, I believe you will have a fabulous additional tool in your coaching armoury.
Ideally, complex decisions should be made by system two, but often system two is busy and depleted. Psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation; and there lies the kernel of truth. We cut corners and go for easier options because we can actually visualize them and we preserve mental energy by taking this option.
The book goes on to detail many cases of decision-making where the easier understood option that fits known patterns is chosen over the more complex option that on reflection, was more appropriate for the situation. “Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it”.
All complex decisions are a combination of Analysis and Intuition but finding the balance and making the right call often proves elusive for the reasons that are outlined in such detail in the book. “People typically ignore base rate information when it clashes with their personal impressions from experience”. And “People can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers.”
There is much to be recommended in the book on Cognitive Illusion and the mechanisms behind this.
I was fascinated by the chapters on Substitution Bias; where people are asked for a prediction where they substitute an evaluation of the evidence without noticing that the question they answer is not the one they were asked. (Sound familiar?)
There is also much on the psychology of Loss Aversion and on the Sunken Cost Fallacy. As Kahneman notes, “When a Venture Capitalist looks for the next big thing, the risk of missing the next Google or Facebook is far more important than the risk of making a modest investment in a start-up that ultimately fails”. As coaches, we need to be extremely mindful of these patterns as we work with our clients on their goals to help them see if they are inadvertently being sucked into the domain of “irrational perseverance” or “delusional optimism”.
There is some coverage around rumination which I particularly liked. We are all somewhat subject to Confirmation Bias where we adjust narratives of the past to make meaning around events or circumstances that have affected us. “Everything makes sense in hindsight. And we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday”.
As coaches, we know that the brain is a meaning -making machine and a sense- making organ and that we can therefore dupe ourselves around what actually happened in the past. We have to listen and really challenge our coachees around these beliefs if we sense that our coachees are deluding themselves. As Kahneman says’” The tendency to revise the history of one’s beliefs in light of what actually happened produces a robust cognitive illusion”.
Other highlights of the book of particular relevance to coaching are the chapters on:
- Planning Fallacy and that “in its grip, decisions are made on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses and probabilities.”
- Framing
- Risk
The book concludes with the chapters on our ‘Two Selves’; the experiencing self and the remembering self. From a coach’s perspective, I often wonder whether stretch goal setting is challenging for some of our coachees because they are being blocked by distorted memories of how difficult something related to their current challenge had been in the past. If we are to be truly accountable as coaches, I believe we must be prepared to really challenge our coachees to test if they are describing a self-limiting belief or a reality. “It appears that the remembering self is subject to a massive focusing illusion about the life that the experiencing self endures quite comfortably. The remembering self’s neglect of duration, its exaggerated emphasis on peaks and ends, and its susceptibility to hindsight combine to yield distorted reflections of or actual experience.”
