Scientific Definition
Spending disproportionate energy on trivial decisions.
Plain-English Definition
Spending disproportionate energy on trivial decisions.
Feynman Explanation
Boards debate the logo for an hour and the strategy for ten minutes.
Core Principle
Spending disproportionate energy on trivial decisions.
Mechanisms
Spending disproportionate energy on trivial decisions.
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Inputs (Triggers)
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Outputs (Behaviors)
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Behavioral Signature
Boards debate the logo for an hour and the strategy for ten minutes.
Examples
- Two days of debate on a font; thirty seconds on a $50M acquisition.
- Attention misallocated to where everyone has an opinion.
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Famous Experiments
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Design Principles
- Time-box trivial decisions. Force the consequential ones into longer windows.
Measurement Approaches
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Evidence
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The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Time-box trivial decisions. Force the consequential ones into longer windows.
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Interactive Mini Network
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Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
We overweight whoever has the bigger title in the room.
Adopting beliefs because the room already did.
Diffused responsibility means nothing happens.
Once we say it publicly, we'll defend it past the data.
Forgetting what it's like not to know what you know.
Assuming everyone secretly agrees with us.
Their failure: character. Our failure: situation.
Low expectations produce low performance.
One strong trait colors judgment of unrelated traits.
We extend more trust, benefit of the doubt, and rope to 'our people.'
We're more persuaded by people we like.
We see 'them' as more uniform than 'us.'