Everything Is Obvious

Everything Is Obvious shows you that common sense isn’t as reliable as you think it is, because it often fails us in helping to make predictions, and how you can change the way you or your company make decisions with more scientific, statistically grounded methods.

I’m an organ donor. I have this little paper card in my wallet, on which I’ve checked some boxes and signed my name. In the case of my (medically confirmed) death, doctors can take out my liver, lungs or heart and give them to someone else, if it helps them.

This little card makes me an exception, because here in Germany, only 12% of people agree to being an organ donor each year. Our Austrian neighbors, however, boast a staggering 99.9% organ donor rate. How the hell is that even possible?

Simple: In Austria, being an organ donor is the default. You don’t have to get a card and you don’t have to opt in. Only if you opt out are you not an organ donor, not the other way around.

Sticking with the default is one of the biases at play in our decision-making, which make relying on common sense unstable. Two other, but similar biases are priming and anchoring.

Priming means exposing you to certain stimuli to influence your later decisions. For example, if you read a long text about old people, including words like “slow”, “frail”, “lethargic”, “stagnant” and “sluggish”, you’re likely to walk a lot slower afterwards. It’s like that joke: Get a friend to say “milk” ten times in a row and then ask them what the cow drinks (the answer is water, btw).

Anchoring is similar to the default bias: When I tell you that the “suggested” donation to my charity is $50, you’ll likely settle for an amount close to that, no matter whether you originally intended to donate just $10 or you know the average is a lot higher.

As you can see, predicting human behavior is really tough, given there are not just the three above, but dozens of other biases at play. Therefore, relying on common sense is a bad strategy, especially when making important decisions, for example concerning business strategy. Have you ever considered abandoning predicting altogether and just living, deciding and reacting to the present, based on your own observations? Zara has. The Spanish clothing company uses an approach called “measure and react.” They look at what their customers are already wearing, create new styles based on that, and then test small samples of new items in various stores to get feedback. This allows them to quickly see what works and what doesn’t, after which they only have to remove the shelf warmers…