The Thing About Choices (Part 1)

Photo by Brandon Lopez on Unsplash

There’s a perception many of us have that what we need is more choice. 

It’s a perception that has filtered its way into all aspects of our lives.

When we’re deciding which college to go to, we’ll stack the number we apply to, to give us more options. I personally applied to 8 schools when I was planning on Business School, even though a couple of them I wasn’t even sure I was interested in attending, even if I got in. Why did I do that?

Or if we’re looking for jobs, we’ll apply for a wide range of roles - as a safety net, to make sure “we get a job”. Many of my colleagues at B-School applied to a wide range of roles, many that had nothing to do with the others - from HR to Finance to Operations. Could they really have that diverse of a skillset, those range of interests?

Or when we’re recruiting for roles within our organizations, we like the idea of having many different candidates to choose from, because we get to compare, contrast and pick the exact right person for the job. We’ll often hear managers tell their recruiters, I need to have at least 7 or 8 people to choose from (even though we’re only hiring one). Does that really ensure a better choice?

Of course, we understand why. Our goal, in all of these situations, is to make the best decision possible, so that we maximize our chances of success and minimize our potential risks. 

So, by definition, more is better. That’s not an unreasonable expectation, is it? 

The thing is, though, often, it isn’t more choice that we’re looking for. What we really want is to have more confidence in our choice. 

There’s a difference. 

More confidence in our choice means doing the hard work of really thinking about what we want. It means setting out our standards for what we will and will not accept. It means thinking clearly about what success means for us in that specific context.

It also means having a better understanding of ourselves and what we want. (Ourselves in this context can be ‘us’ as individuals or ‘us’ as a department or corporation.) It means setting out our goals as best as we know them, about what will and will not move us forward. 

More confidence demands more guts.

And that’s exactly the challenge. Defining our standards can be a scary thing to do, particularly if we’re going to have to actually implement them. 

It’s easier to simply add more to the mix, more to choose from. Because ‘more’, in our view, reduces our risk. But does it really? 

Maybe sometimes. More often than not, though, it simply gives us the illusion of confidence. It gives us a safety net in terms of excuses in case things don’t work out. (Well, I had a number of choices, so this must be the best that I could possibly have gotten.)

More often than not, it gives us an ‘out’ from doing the work needed. Instead, perhaps we just need to do the work. 

So that, instead of focusing on more choices, we can ensure we have more confidence in our choice.