A632.2.3.RB_TAYLORHEATHER

In Sheena Iyengar’s Ted Talk, How  to make choosing easier, she sites four methods to help a customer in the decision-making process.  (2011)  These  four choices are as follows:

“Cut”: Removing any unnecessary options

“Concretize”- Allow  customer to experience the option (i.e. pictures, videos, feeling textures, etc.)

“Categorize”- Break down choices into chunks or categories

“Condition for complexity”- Move customer from low level choices gradually up to high level choices.

Two of these methods are often used in my daily work and in my daily life.  They are the methods of cut and categorize.  Knowing myself, I have to have a certain degree of standardization in my life to be functional.  Can I manage without that degree of standardization?  Sure.  However, the choosing process takes much longer to complete as compared  to when I employ these two techniques. 

For example, in my personal life I wake up each morning and ask myself what I am going to wear.  In the past, when in a healthier physical state, I had my closet organized in a way where all of my seasonal clothes were together and then broken down by color and length.  This means that all of my winter attire would be in one section of my closet.  Then all of the items would go from darks to light much like the light spectrum.  Within each category (i.e. pink), I would categorize further to start with long sleeve, then ¾ sleeve, then T-shirt.  You get the jest.  Here is where the cut part comes in.  I would then go through my closet at the end of the season and look at what items I like to wear and which items I never chose to wear.  Those that did not get worn were then donated.  This made it nice for the recipient of the rarely worn clothing item, but also made it easier for me to get dressed each day.

Professionally, it is much the same.  As a project manager that was able to manage 13 large projects simultaneously, I had to come up with ways to break down choices into chunks.  My mentor and boss, George Epstein, worked with me and the project management team to fundamentally change the way we approached project management methodology.  We then looked at our system of project delivery and categorized them into sections (i.e. Project Initiation, Clinical Configuration, Revenue Configuration, etc.).  From these chunks we then placed in each item that must be covered during that stage of project management.  In doing so, we were able to cut down the number of steps to a project from over 300 steps to only 65 steps.  This was a huge victory and one that allowed us to create a standard approach the customer was willing to follow.  Many customers previously would look at their project plan and would just get overwhelmed.  Many projects failed because the customer felt they would never complete all 300+ steps.  Through this process, we are able to ensure each critical element is completed and manage choice making into bite size chunks.

Listening to the points made by Iyengar (2011), I feel the next step in this process would be to then order the choices and steps of the project plan from a lower level of complexity to a higher level of complexity.  This is a point that I would like to discuss further with the managers at The Echo Group to determine if they could see the benefit in making such changes. The ability to make choices feel concrete is currently underway by creating images /videos for each choice.  The idea is to have the customer review the video and images which lead them through their choice options and then they can reference these as they move on to higher level choices.

Iyengar, S. (2011). Shenna Iyengar: How to make choosing easier. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose?language=en