Unlocking Why Smart People Still Make Bad Decisions With Dr. Ricardo Valerdi

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Chapters:
00:00:01 – Cold Start & Intro
00:03:30 – Why Brilliant People Still Get It Wrong
00:05:01 – The Me vs. We Tug of War
00:06:34 – Good Decision, Bad Outcome
00:10:20 – Why Hall of Famers Fail 70% of the Time
00:12:30 – When Your Gut Should Beat the Data
00:15:29 – The Costanza Effect
00:20:19 – The Most Dangerous Word in a Meeting
00:22:16 – Dissent Is Healthy Until It Isn’t
00:29:01 – One-Way Doors vs. Two-Way Doors

Ricardo Valerdi (00:02)
If you make a good decision, there could be a bad outcome.

Doing the counterintuitive thing is actually the best decision.

The two-way door decisions, they don’t deserve as much energy as we put.

How successful the best hitters in baseball are? They’re successful 30% of the time.

Skot Waldron (00:23)
When I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the world. I’m helping leaders and I’m helping teams communicate better. I’m helping them build trust faster and actually enjoy working together. I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot. I’ve spoken at national architectural firms. I’ve spoken for pharmaceutical company offsites. I’ve spoken at associations, you name it.

With 99% of attendees of all those events, over 1800 people have reviewed me at this point. 99% of them saying they got some value. That’s pretty awesome. Even the caterers have thanked me. And if they are thanking me and they’ve heard a lot of talks and they’re busy doing their jobs, that’s saying something. If you’re an event planner looking for a speaker who’s really easy to work with, trust me, I want to be the last thing you’re worried about on event day. I’m going to take care of you. And who actually delivers value for your audience that they are going to use on Monday morning when they return to the office, then let’s talk.

Bad decisions exist all the time. Everybody makes them. Even the brilliant people. Brilliant people make bad decisions. We’re human, and this is part of life. Somebody that I’m going to have on the show, yes, my next guest. His name is Ricardo Valerdi. Ricardo has studied this a little bit. He’s fascinated with this idea. He’s worked with some pretty big organizations, and yet some of them still make bad decisions. Well, I’m going to say all of them make bad decisions because that’s what we do is make bad decisions.

What we talk about in this interview is fascinating about this the idea behind bad decision making and how can we navigate that better? And why do we do that? And how do we judge decision making and outcomes and all the things that are happening in the world of work? He has a new book out called The Five-Tool Team. And we’re going to talk about that a little bit as well here at the end in the framework that is built around that idea.

Dr. Ricardo Valerdi is an engineer, a social entrepreneur, a sports scientist, and engineering professor at the University of Arizona. Through his work developing teams that think clearly and decide confidently. He has helped a variety of organizations make better decisions including SpaceX, yes, that SpaceX. The US Army, yes, that US Army. Major League Baseball, yes that Major League Baseball. And the National Collegiate Athletics Association, yes, the NCAA, has helped all of them. He is also a passionate advocate for STEM education for young learners. He founded the nonprofit Science of Sport, which has impacted over 700,000 students by reframing math and science through the lens of sport. That’s pretty cool. Ricardo’s a great guy and we have a great interview. So here we go.

Ricardo, welcome to the show. It’s good to have you, man.

Ricardo Valerdi (03:27)
Thanks for having me, Skot. Appreciate it.

Skot Waldron (03:30)
Hey, you’ve worked with some interesting companies. Some of them I mentioned in the intros, you know, SpaceX, the Army, Major League Baseball, NCAA. Like you’ve worked with some pretty prominent organizations here. These seem like some pretty smart people. I mean, I’m just guessing, you know, people trying to like launch satellites and Mars missions, they’re probably some pretty smart people. But I’m guessing that they still make bad decisions. Is this true?

Ricardo Valerdi (04:04)
Absolutely. And that’s what makes this whole topic super interesting is we’re not in a vacuum here. We’re not in isolation. These decisions that are made affect a lot of people and they’re often very complex and have a lot of information, whether it’s hard data or opinions. And that’s why I wrote this book because I thought it was interesting that even people with PhDs or people who want to go to Mars need to get this done. We’re not perfect.

Skot Waldron (04:39)
We’re not. I mean, why is it though? Like not why aren’t we perfect? I know why we’re not perfect. But why in the world, I mean, do they still make these bad decisions? I mean, I’m sure that’s like we would all love to know the answer to that. But in your research and your work that you did, your interviews, what were you digging out there? What what’s part of the problem there?

Ricardo Valerdi (05:03)
Well, at the most fundamental level, there’s always this this tug of war between the me and the we, right? So fundamentally we’re trying to optimize our own preferences, right? And sometimes that’s in conflict with what the group who wants to accomplish, or what your shareholders want to accomplish, or what your fans want to accomplish. So that that’s the first place of tension.

But I think also even without trying to sabotage the situation, things are just so complex because we don’t control the outcome. So even when everybody agrees, yes, this is the best decision, let’s all go forward with this, a lot of things are outside of our control. What the stock market is going to do, or whether the price of a barrel of oil is going to go up or down, or whether traffic on the highway is going to get fans to the game late or on time. And so even when we all agree this is the best decision, we don’t control the outcome.

Skot Waldron (06:14)
But we make a lot of decisions based on outcomes, right? About a desired outcome. We want to be able to, I guess, control as much of the outcome as possible when we’re making these decisions. But I will honestly argue, and I see that you talk about this in your book a lot, that and people will defend their bad decisions sometimes by saying, “well, I got a good outcome, you know,” and you’re like, well, I get it but really, man, like it wasn’t a good decision, you know, but they’ll still defend it all day. But vice versa happens too. Bad decisions lead to good outcomes, but good decisions also lead to bad outcomes. And people use that as like weaponizing, hey, you made that decision and look what happened, you know? Like how do we judge better despite the outcome focus that we have?

Ricardo Valerdi (07:11)
Yeah. And this is one of my messages in the book is if you only judge the quality of the decision based on the outcome, then you’re focused on the wrong thing. What I’m preaching is control what you can control, which is the quality of the decision. I mean, you’re absolutely right. If you make a good decision, there could be a bad outcome. Right. Absolutely. And the reason is because we don’t control what happens.

But we have to own both the decision, and we have to own the outcome. That’s the really tricky part, is even though we don’t control it, we have to own what happened because we made the decision. We made a certain choice, we put you know, the chest pieces in certain places, and we try to do the best possible, but we didn’t have perfect information. And that’s probably the other reason why there’s like not a perfect correlation between decision and outcome is because we often operate with imperfect information. And that’s just the wonder of the world. It’s why we do analysis, why we interview people, why we run models and simulations, as we try to de-risk it as much as possible, but there’s still a little bit of risk in every decision we make.

Skot Waldron (08:35)
I mean, isn’t that what business is? I mean, isn’t that almost a little bit of what life is? Are we trying to just minimize the risk all the time with every single thing we do, whether it’s wearing a seat belt or reading the expiration date on the milk in the fridge?

Ricardo Valerdi (08:54)
Absolutely. And I think business and life is about knowing when to take smart risks. Cause risks never goes away. You just do it in a way that you’re going in with both eyes open. Okay, this is a smart risk. I’m going to take a gamble here and hopefully things play out because I’m making an investment in my time and my money and in resources that I’m not going to get back. Because that’s what a decision is, is putting something at stake and making a move. Hopefully things work out. But if they don’t, it doesn’t mean that the decision was bad. It just means that we just didn’t control the outcome and it was sort of based on external factors that were random sometimes, right?

Skot Waldron (09:41)
Okay, so it doesn’t mean the decision is bad, but everybody else will say the decision was bad because the outcome was bad. So, what are we doing in that situation? How do we as leaders end up talking about that or even “defending” it without looking defensive or egotistical or whatever?

Ricardo Valerdi (10:02)
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think the key for leaders to tolerate bad outcomes is in having confidence that the person that made that decision made the best decision they could with the information they had at the time. And again, like baseball is the perfect metaphor here. You know how successful the best hitters in baseball are? They’re successful 30% of the time. Right. And that’ll get you into the Hall of Fame. That means you failed 70% of the time. You know, tell me what industry and what business would be okay with 70% failure rate.

Skot Waldron (10:49)
Baseball.

Ricardo Valerdi (10:50)
Baseball. That’s about it, right.

Skot Waldron (10:53)
That’s about it, huh?

Ricardo Valerdi (10:54)
That’s about it. But let’s get real. If you’re a baseball team, let’s say, and you’re a manager, you definitely want to be winning more than you are losing. So, any record over 500 is considered, okay, that that’s decent, but you want to be maybe winning 60% of the time or winning 70% of the time to be considered successful, right?

But that also means you’re not perfect. Because the other team might had a better day or the wind or an injury or maybe the umpire tilted the game in one direction or the other. Whether it’s a robotic umpire or human umpire, who knows nowadays. But you see what I mean? Like even in the most competitive environments, if you’re winning 60%-70% of the time, that’s really good.

Skot Waldron (11:46)
It’s really good. When we’re gathering information to make a good decision, because we want to make good decisions. I’m guessing that that’s the name of the game, right? Make better informed decisions. We have to rely on two different things, I’m guessing, unless there’s more from what you’ve studied and your work. But looking at data, we got to gather data.

But it’s then some point we have to just make a decision and go with our gut. The data is not going to make the decision for us. At some point we have to go with our gut and understand what that is. How do we know when we can trust our gut and when our gut’s lying to us? Have you looked at that at all?

Ricardo Valerdi (12:36)
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a key point. Before I get into the gut, let me just say something about the data. There’s an important point to make there because oftentimes we trust the data too much. And there’s limitations to that data because if you really, really think about it, any data that you have is about the past. And you’re trying to use that data, that information, to make a forecast about something that will happen in the future, right?

So, there already is like you’re stretching things, you’re extrapolating outside of the data set. So, there’s already some danger there, right? But also, there’s information that’s not in the data that you know as an experienced person or having intuition that you can correct for, which is what is unique about this new situation that I’m trying to make a decision about. And that’s where the gut really is important, right? And you’re right. I mean, in terms of having gigabytes and terabytes of data, at the end of the day, it’s a human being making a judgment call. Right? Because we’ll never say, “well, the AI told me to do it, so I did it.” Right? That’s never going to go well, especially nowadays.

So, I think it’s important to listen to both your gut and the data, but there’s situations where they actually is agreement between what the data say and what your intuition tells you. That’s a great situation to be in. But to your question, what happens when they point in different directions? And I would say in most of those situations, you got to listen to your gut.

Skot Waldron (14:29)
Really? You’re a gut guy, huh?

Ricardo Valerdi (14:31)
I’m a gut guy and here’s why. You have to own the decision, and you have to own the outcome. So, if you have to explain to your customers or to your supervisor why you made that decision, that better come from your gut. Because if your answer to that question, how did I make that choice, is well, I just trusted the data. You’re probably going to get fired. You know, that’s not a good answer.

Now I wouldn’t say shut off the data. That helps inform something. So, this is not a 1 or 0 situation. It’s more of like a blend. Like is it 60/40? Is it 70/30? But I would say the higher number should be your gut.

Skot Waldron (15:17)
Hmm. Okay. When I mean you call this the Costanza Effect. Can you can you tell us why you call it that?

Ricardo Valerdi (15:28)
Yeah, so the Costanza Effect is related here in the sense that in the Seinfeld episode that I mentioned in my book, George Costanza decides that nothing in his life is going well. And as a result, Jerry Seinfeld suggests to him if you start doing the opposite of everything you’ve been doing, I think you’ll have good outcomes. Because you just keep doing the same thing, George, and you’re having bad outcomes. And I mean it’s a show about nothing, right? And so, we laugh at George’s misery, but it turns out the moment he decides to do the counterintuitive thing, which is the opposite, everything starts to click for him.

And I think it’s a cool lesson because it does point to real-world examples where actually doing the counterintuitive thing is actually the best decision. And sometimes that comes from listening to our gut. That may not come from the data. It never comes from the data, actually, because the data just tells you just keep doing what you’re doing. You know, this is just keep the trend going, keep follow the trend line, right? So, I was fascinated by that Seinfeld episode. It opened up a whole new point to make in decision making, which is, hey, our tendency as managers or as leaders sometimes is to put resources towards something that is running late or too slow for us. That’s actually the worst thing you could do in some cases. The best decision is to do the opposite, which is don’t add more people to a project. Instead, renegotiate the deadline. Or descope the project, right? So that’s a huge and a fun topic for me is the counterintuitive part of decision making.

Skot Waldron (17:32)
Hmm. All right. I’m going to have to do that now. Go into every decision and do the opposite of what I would normally do. And see what happens. I’m going to say Ricardo told me to, you know.

Ricardo Valerdi (17:45)
Yeah, absolutely. And just point, just blame Seinfeld, you know, blame George Costanza.

Skot Waldron (17:51)
Well that then I’m not owning my decision though, Ricardo. That’s the number one thing you told me. I have to own my decision.

Ricardo Valerdi (17:57)
That’s right. You should.

Skot Waldron (17:59)
I’ve even learned. I’ve learned from this episode already.

Ricardo Valerdi (18:00)
I love it. You’re coaching.

Skot Waldron (18:02)
So good. This is funny. I mean Seinfeld’s taught me some things too. I gosh, I want to say it was Jerry, but there was like an Even Steven episode where you know you would lose $20 and then find $20. Was it him or was it George?

Ricardo Valerdi (18:19)
Yeah. It was him. Yeah, there was always like something bad happened to George and something good would happen to somebody else in the show, like Kramer. And it just everything evened out.

Skot Waldron (18:32)
Everything was even. Like lose a girlfriend, get a girlfriend. And then I was like, gosh, you’re telling me there’s so many leadership lessons inside of Seinfeld. And now I’m thinking to myself, you’re right, Ricardo. I just thought about the fact that, you know, things just work out. Homeo, what is it? Homeostasis is like the idea that we’re all just trying to balance out the universe. Our bodies are balancing themselves out. The universe balances out. Y’all, it’s not that bad.

Like things are going to work out, things are going to suck, things are going to be great, but we’re all still here. You know, we’ve been on this planet for millions of years in some form. We’re doing okay. Not saying we’re doing great. I’m just saying we’re doing okay. Like, let’s calm down.

Ricardo Valerdi (19:21)
That’s right. I love that viewpoint. There is a global equilibrium that tends to work out really nicely.

Skot Waldron (19:30)
Yeah, and I know that’s easy for me to say and my, you know, mid-income suburban household that I live in and the plush comforts that I live in. I get it. I get that I’m privileged to live where I live and do what I do. But I’m saying life works out. You know, it works out. So, okay we got off we’ll on a tangent here. We could do a whole episode on like Seinfeld leadership lessons. Okay. We’re not going to do that though.

I want to, you talked about a little bit more and this goes off the whole gut thing a little bit too. But I mean, when I think about some of the, and I’m wondering if you think about this too, some of the most dangerous phrases that people use in leadership meetings of like, you know, around certainty. We already know this kind of that verbiage, right? Is that kind of what you’re talking about, though? It’s kind of like the belief that I can control an outcome. The belief that I know what’s going to happen in the future because I know what happened in the past. That whole thing, you see some danger there?

Ricardo Valerdi (20:38)
Yeah, I cringe when I hear people say that because if we could control outcomes, Skot, like we would be on the next plane to Las Vegas or to Atlantic City, right? And it would make a lot of money. So, I think when people present themselves or pitch an idea with complete certainty, it comes off as naive. To me, a more complete pitch would be, here’s what we want to do. Here are the risks that we’ve thought about. Here’s how we are mitigating those risks. Uh-huh. That person is going into it with both eyes wide open. They know what they’re in for. I’d rather support that idea than somebody getting up there and saying, this is a sure thing. Like, this is a slam dunk. Just let’s go with it, because it’s guaranteed.

Skot Waldron (21:40)
Ugh. And every skeptic in the room is like, all of a sudden, they lost all credibility.

Ricardo Valerdi (21:46)
Yeah. That’s right.

Skot Waldron (21:48)
You know, and I’m not getting on board, but that’s crazy. That’s reckless. Just to have that belief is just seems reckless. But there’s always, you know, we talk about that one person in the room who tends to disagree. And you talk about team collaboration as well as something that that you believe in, but you also believe that there should be some dissent. There should be some dysfunction, right? I mean, shouldn’t there be a little bit of that?

Ricardo Valerdi (22:16)
Absolutely. So, I think creating room for disagreement is important when making big decisions because you don’t want group think to occur. You don’t want everybody to just say, okay, let’s just go with it because you know everybody seems to agree here and I don’t want to create any problems, let’s just support, right? So, I mentioned some techniques in the book where the leader really as they’re creating an environment for dissent, to empower people to bring up reasons why we might be wrong here or what are the questions we’re not asking here. And so that dissent should be fostered, should be welcomed and rewarded.

But once a decision is made, this is the key Skot, once a decision is made, people then need to align for the implementation and execution of the decision and not be like skeptical supporters. We don’t need skeptical supporters. We need supporters. We need people who are all in, right? So, there’s like a clear ending to that dissent and skepticism. It’s healthy up to a certain point. But then when it’s time to implement, we need alignment. We got to go.

Skot Waldron (23:37)
Yeah. I hear a lot of teams will come to me and they’ll say, Skot, we have a capacity problem. We need more time, money, and people. And I’m like, well, let’s look at how you’re executing and look how efficient you are in your execution strategies. Oh, your execution isn’t very good. That’s because there’s a misalignment issue. You have some people not fully bought in. You have some people going this direction. Some people go in this direction and people not fully bought into your whole idea, but you think you have a capacity problem. When you really have an alignment problem, which is probably built off of a trust problem. Right.

Ricardo Valerdi (24:10)
Bingo. Yeah. I mean the four key parts are vision, alignment, trust, and talent. Right? And so, the vision, yeah, I mean that’s almost the, I wouldn’t say the easiest, but it’s the one that takes less time, right? The alignment though, that’s the hard work. And then the trust is hard because it’s not automatic. You got to earn it, you got to give it. And then the talent, you got to get the right people in the room. Right. So, if you’re missing one of those four things, then it’s like a car trying to drive a hundred miles an hour with only three wheels. It’s not going to work.

Skot Waldron (24:54)
Tell me about you, let’s jump to your watch checking story. This is very interesting to me. I am very interested in hearing about this based on some of the work I’m doing right now in my book and my research. So, tell me a little bit about your watch checking story.

Ricardo Valerdi (25:15)
Absolutely. So, the message that I was trying to convey in that story was that we often arrive at conclusions based on data that we select to pay attention to. And oftentimes that data is incomplete or inaccurate or just not a fair representation of what’s going on. And then that leads us to an incorrect conclusion.

So, there’s this concept from systems thinking, Peter Senge, in the Fifth Discipline, wrote about the ladder of inference. And so, it basically starts the story starts with me being in a meeting and I’m sitting across from a colleague, and this guy keeps checking his watch during the meeting. And I’m thinking, like, does he have to be somewhere else? Like, why is he checking his watch? You know, what’s this guy doing? And I just made the conclusion that this guy doesn’t want to be there, is not really in collaboration mode. He’s just sort of there, his mind somewhere else. He’s checking his watch. And so, I just kind of ha get a bad impression, I get a bad vibe from him, I start thinking kind of poorly about this guy. And I just kind of give him a nasty look. You know, like what’s going on.

And I walked away from that meeting thinking like I don’t like that person. They were disengaged; they were rude. Keep checking their watch, right? But I realized later that I made the incorrect assumption that this motion of checking the watch is rude, but I didn’t know he may have been checking his text messages from like an urgent customer project, or maybe his pregnant wife was headed to the hospital and he was getting texts from her on the status of the delivery. All of those things could have happened, but I didn’t consider any of that. I didn’t have that insight. And so, I made my conclusion about whether I like this person or not, only based on what I was observing. But I was only observing the tip of the iceberg. I really didn’t know the complete story.

So that’s just a reminder that sometimes when we only pay attention to some things, to a subset of the information, it may lead us to the wrong conclusion.

Skot Waldron (27:54)
And apply that to the decision-making criteria that you’re talking about.

Ricardo Valerdi (27:58)
Right. So, if we decide to only look at a subset of the data, or even worse, we only choose to look at subset of the data and we choose to intentionally ignore everything else because it may contradict us. So, we only like the data that supports our view, then we’re going to go to a conclusion that may be incorrect or just misinformed, right?

And the tricky part is we do that sometimes subconsciously, like in my example of making a judgment about this guy across the table. But sometimes we make it completely conscious, which is, you know what, I don’t want to talk to anybody else. I have the information that I need to support the decision that I wanted to make anyway. Let’s go forward. And that’s a horrible trap to fall into, you know.

Skot Waldron (28:55)
And you do you call that the one-way door decision? Is that what you’re talking about in that?

Ricardo Valerdi (29:01)
So, what one-way and two-way door decisions are related, they’re just classifications of whether our decision can be reversed or not. And so that’s more of a point about when we struggle with making decisions and we overanalyze something, we treat something as if it’s like the end of the world, right? And that that leads us to another trap, which is the paralysis by analysis trap. Because we pretend that this decision is so critical. So, we have to put so much energy into it. That’s the one-way door. By walking through that door, you’re making that decision and the door shuts behind you, right?

But the point I make is that most decisions in life are two-way door decisions. That they’re reversible. You walk through that door, which is the metaphor for making the decision, if things don’t work out, you can come right back out. No issue, right? They’re reversible. And what I think people get wrong often is they miscategorized the decision that’s in front of them. They assume that it’s a one-way door. But in reality, it’s probably a two-way door. You can undo it, right? And that doesn’t take away from the one-way door decisions. They are definitely there, and they deserve all the rigor and analysis and energy, and you know, they keep you up at night, and they should, because they’re one-way door decisions.

But at the same time, the two-way door decisions, they don’t deserve as much energy as we put onto them, right? So Skot, if I’m trying to decide, you know, am I going to drink iced coffee or hot coffee today, like that should literally take me 5 seconds to make that decision. Not 5 minutes, right? That’s the best example people can relate to, I think.

Skot Waldron (31:06)
Ok. That makes a lot of sense. A lot of sense. So, The Five-Tool Team that, you know, the book that you’ve written here, what’s the idea behind it? Who’s this for?

Ricardo Valerdi (31:21)
This book is for people who are in leadership positions and leadership is broadly defined here. People who have to make important decisions in a business or in the government or at a university, whatever the context might be, it’s people who want to analyze that part of their world is how can I be a better decision maker because you’re calling balls and strikes every day. And how do you know you’re any good? And what the book does is it challenges people and it says, well, think about some of the decisions you’ve made. Are you a good decision maker or not?

And what the five tools really help you hone in on is that I found in my research working with all these companies and with the government that good decision makers possess the five tools that I talk about in the book: focus, look, analyze, scrutinize, and humanize. And if you can get better at those five things, you’re going to make better decisions.

Skot Waldron (32:34)
Okay, say those off to me one more time.

Ricardo Valerdi (32:38)
Focus and that’s focus on the right questions.

Look, look at the data from multiple perspectives.

Analyze, analyze the consequences of your decisions.

Scrutinize, scrutinize the options.

And humanize the decision.

And that spells out F.L.A.S.H.

Skot Waldron (33:08)
Of course it does. Nice job, Ricardo. That’s awesome, man. Really cool. And I love the thinking, and I love that the last one is humanize. I mean, and you know, just hitting on the AI stuff a little bit and don’t make it all about AI, but it’s something you got to think about and what we’re doing with the age of AI and how we’re going to incorporate the AI into our work and into our lives and how we do things is really interesting to think about.

So, what if people want to get in touch with you, want to find out more about the book, want to find out more and talk to you, what do they do?

Ricardo Valerdi (33:42)
My website is ricardovalerdi.com and you can find The Five-Tool Team on your favorite online retailer. This is if you like sports, if you like tech, if you have any interest in what we can learn from the military and making better decisions, this book is for you. It will challenge you, it will have you some and give you some interesting twists and turns, and most importantly, Skot, it will have plenty of dad jokes in it. And so, I mean what better deal can you ask for here?

Skot Waldron (34:15)
Oh my gosh, I can’t wait. I’m sure your kids rolled their eyes through every single one of them, didn’t they.

Ricardo Valerdi (34:19)
They’re the most critical readers that I’ve ever met. They’re brutal. I mean they had their red pen out. It was really humbling.

Skot Waldron (34:28)
I know. You cried a little bit, didn’t you? You got a little sad. Like why y’all so mean? You know. I know. Geez.

Ricardo Valerdi (34:40)
That was a bad decision.

Skot Waldron (34:41)
The bad decision. Bad gut decision. Well, hey, thanks for being on the show, man. This is really cool. Good luck with the book and the journey. It’s a long one. And you put in some work and hope you reap the rewards of that.

Ricardo Valerdi (34:56)
Thank you, Skot, I appreciate you.

Skot Waldron (35:02)
So, how many of you are gut people and how many of you are data people? There’s a mix of you, and I believe that we all do both. But ultimately, there are some of you out there that are like, you know, there’s some science and research done on this where it’s like, you will not change, you will not do anything unless you have the data. All the data to back up your decision, all the data to inform you, to understand what’s going on. You’ll research, research, research, gather, gather, gather, and that’s the data that you will use to ultimately make your decision.

Some of you get 70%, 80%, 90% data before you’ll make a decision. Some of you are gut people. You’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, the data’s fine. I get it. The data’s there. And I really just need about like 20%, maybe, 30% of the data, and then I’m going to make a gut decision. Or 50% of the data, gut decision. Like it’s all a mix, a ratio of those things. And we all do a little bit of both. Ultimately, it is going to be that gut though. The gut that I think tips us one way or another. The thing that says, yes, I get the data. With my gut, though, I think we need to go this or we need to do that. And that’s really important for all of us to recognize.

There is some element here of owning your decision that I think is really important. Owning what you say, owning what you decide breeds ownership on all sides. So, whether we make a good decision that leads to a good outcome or a good decision makes lead to a bad outcome, how can we own that? And give each other the grace of owning those things in our culture and society of making sure that it’s okay and that we know that we’re human. But at least that we’re trying, right? That I see you trying. That phrase, I see you trying, is really great.

There’s a couple things I looked at in his book, the idea of focus, focus on the right questions, looking at the right data, analyzing the consequences, scrutinizing often, and humanizing. Humanizing the things you do there. So good. And looking at what we do in those five steps, I think it really helps us make better decisions as these giant organizations have that he’s worked with. So, let’s continue working on that and keep moving forward. Thanks, Ricardo.

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