Unlocking the 37% Rule: Are you an Optimiser, a Maximiser or a Satisficer?

Intro music playing quietly behind for the first minute.

00:00:02 Áine Maguire

Welcome to the 37%.

00:00:05 Áine Maguire

This is a show that invites people to reflect on a significant career, leadership or life decision. My name is Áine Maguire

00:00:11 Susy Kenefick

and my name is Susy Kenefick.

00:00:14 Áine Maguire

On our show, we asked our guests about what led to a decision, why they made it, how it was made, and what happened next.

00:00:24 Áine Maguire

Hello and welcome to the first episode of the 37%.

00:00:29 Susy Kenefick

Hi Áine. How are you?

00:00:30 Áine Maguire

I'm great. I'm really looking forward to getting going on this podcast series we're doing.

00:00:35 Susy Kenefick

Yeah. So Áine before we explain to our listeners what the concept of the 37 percent is all about.

00:00:42 Susy Kenefick

Maybe you could just to talk us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

00:01:03 Áine Maguire

Ohh, this sounds like an interview question, so my name is Áine Maguire and I am a business owner. I own Persuasion, which is an organisation consulting firm.  My own work, I would describe myself as a sort of strategic advisor and an executive coach.

And, my work tends to be with leaders and their teams around organisations and achieving what they want to achieve from a strategic point of view.

And as you know, we are both coaches, so a good bit of my work is in the area of team and executive coaching. Susy, will you do the same?

00:01:22 Susy Kenefick

I can indeed. Well, I have what might be termed somewhat of a multi hyphenate or a portfolio of career.  I have a background in law and in addition to my day job, I'm also an executive coach.

And I would say that my journey towards coaching came about as a result of recognising some of the issues that there are in modern organisations and workplaces today, and from that recognition that there are a lot of people who are disenfranchised and disengaged by the work that they do. So when it comes to the coaching work that I do really feel quite passionate about, I work with clients to help them figure out what it is that they can do workwise that would engage them and that would motivate them and to help them figure out who they are. So, particularly with young professionals, for example, to guide them towards the career that's right for them and to take them out of situations where they are feeling disengaged and just, you know, bored and fed up with their with their lives and their jobs.

00:02:16 Áine Maguire

OK, well it sounds like we both have a lot in common in terms of thinking about decision making.

00:02:22 Susy Kenefick

Maybe we can start by talking about some significant decisions that you've made lately.

00:02:27 Áine Maguire

Oh my goodness, significant decisions. Well,  what kind of I've made, I think the decisions that I've made, I'm not sure they're ones that I really wanted to make, but I suppose I've made some recent decisions about the work I'm doing and that has had consequences. So

Projects that I'm doing and what it means I can't do and I think that this in this series we're going to see a lot of that, that it's not the decisions you make, it's what you leave behind. I think sometimes that's quite important.

And of course, it's the unintended consequences and sometimes the intended consequences of the decisions you do make.

00:03:07 Susy Kenefick

Yeah. Well, they do say that for every decision you make, there is another decision that you don't make. So I like that idea.

00:03:13 Áine Maguire

Yaa, I think so. I mean, I think one of the things I've learned from doing this series is that decision making is about deciding what things you're going to make decisions about, and that might be another way of saying, you know, upstairs is laughing at you when you make decisions because life isn't in your control. But I think we nowadays we all feel we've got a lot of agency over what we do in life and maybe some of that comes from more longevity in life, more resources. And so I think that you know for people in this era, there is a huge pressure on you know, making the most of life, getting decisions right. And uh, you know, living life to the fullest, living our best lives as we like to say now.

00:04:03 Susy Kenefick

Very social media. Yeah, living our best lives. Yeah.

00:04:05 Áine Maguire

Isn't it?

00:04:06 Áine Maguire

And I I think that's a horrible pressure to have. You know, when you think about, you know, 100 years ago, people were just trying to stay warm, you know, in their homes.

00:04:14 Susy Kenefick

Well, I suppose it's indicative of the reality of today's world. And is that we actually have too much choice. And there's a psychologist, Barry Schwartz, who talks about this. And I think he 

has, He has a book on this and he's got a quite an interesting Ted talk.

00:04:27 Susy Kenefick

Well, it's. It's the paradox of choice that we you kind of have too many options available. To you and it's about how we then, I suppose, approach our relationship with those choices and how we think about them and our, our, our mindset around them to avoid getting that sort of choice paralysis that comes from having too many options.

00:04:44 Áine Maguire

Yeah. So, so I think you know the good thing is that we often have a lot of options. The bad thing is that we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get the to go get the correct options. It's interesting. I was listening to a Canadian academic actually talking about the work that he had done with people who produced nuclear reactors and he has developed a system called decision analysis and he was talking about the role of preference in decision making and how preference really in the western world kind of distorts decision analysis. Because it is all we have lots of preferences and we may become to decision making, assuming that our preferences are deliverable and that our preferences are valid, whereas for example his example is you know if I say to you  want to go to the movie, do you want to go to the movies? and you say 'yes', you know, maybe you're satisfied with any movie whereas the next question usually I'll have is well.  What sort of movie do you like? Or you know what time would suit you rather than just being engaged by the idea of going to the movies? So I think we, we have a great habit of over complicating decisions.

00:06:00 Susy Kenefick

Because of course I might say no, depending on what film you wanted to go and see.

00:06:03 Áine Maguire

Yeah, I'd say you're quite particular about your film choice, are you?

00:06:07 Susy Kenefick

I think I probably am, yeah. Yeah. But. Yeah, but then.

00:06:10 Susy Kenefick

There probably are days where I just think it would be nice to go to the cinema and maybe I'm not overly fussed about what I see. It's just the experience. So yeah, they're different concepts there. It's more nuanced than just the decision to do something or not to do something.

00:06:24 Áine Maguire

What sort of decisions have you been making recently? Anything interesting?

00:06:27 Susy Kenefick

Nothing as  highbrow as your  career oriented decisions that the only decision that brings to mind that I made recently that I really grappled with for some unknown reason, was the decision to go on holiday for a few days.

00:06:40 Susy Kenefick

And I think it was just at the time the opportunity presented itself to me, I was very busy and I had a lot of different things going on and I had a little bit of choice paralysis about it. I just couldn't quite get my head around it and then ultimately, the decision to do it was quite spontaneous and spur of the moment and I just got online and booked it

00:07:01 Áine Maguire

And have you been? Not yet. No. No. So I often think the decisions about holidays are the best part. You know, you have it to look forward to.

00:07:08 Susy Kenefick

They're also no brainers. I think I would go back and reflect on that and say anyone thinking about going on holiday, the answer should always be yes.

00:07:14 Áine Maguire

I agree. Yeah. Yeah, that's. That's never a bad decision. Yes, OK.

00:07:17 Susy Kenefick

Well, I think it would be useful at this stage and we have talked a little bit about having lots of options and I think that really does feed into the whole concept of this podcast, which as we said is it's the 37% and it's based on this this concept. It's a mathematical concept. The 37% and Áine you might explain to our listeners, maybe just in simplistic terms what that means?

00:07:38 Áine Maguire

Yeah, it was. We were grappling for a name for the podcast. We wanted to talk about decision making and I think decision making is probably so ubiquitous. You know, you, you can't from the moment you wake up and you decide to get out of bed, you're making decisions all the time and we didn't want to call it something about decision making. I frankly wouldn't think would be that attractive because decision making sounds like a hard topic to talk about. So I came across a maths rule. I'm not known for my interest in maths, but in fact I'm definitely not interested in maths, but I did, I liked this.  And there's a maths rule about probabilities.  And decision making is about probabilities. I think at the end of the day

and the rule is that if you've looked at 37% of the potential outcomes, you have enough knowledge of the probabilities to make your decision. So I thought that was very interesting because I think in this decision filled world,  it suggests that we could be a bit more economical in how we make decisions.

00:08:38 Susy Kenefick

So maybe if we gave an example of how that might work in practise, if you had to, I don't know, hire a secretary and you were given 100 CV's. The question is, do you need to interview 100 people?

00:08:52 Áine Maguire

Well, I I think hiring hiring somebody to work with you is a very good example. That's kind of decision I'm often supporting people. Uh making so that that that's a good one. And I I think it's it's one where it's interesting. I was listening to a psychologist talking about this recently how people will often say you know so when you're when you're hiring for example, you're hiring them to be a PA. You you probably have 5 or 6 shortlisted people, all of whom are equally capable of doing the role. Which one do you pick? And often people will interview all the people and say, yeah, they're all capable of doing the job. However, I you know, my gut feeling is candidate three or they, you know, gut feeling starts to come into it when everybody is equally capable. And as they usually are. And there's a lot of uh data to suggest your gut is not as reliable as you think it is. And yet we often use it. And one of our guests in our podcast series, Doctor Sabina Brennan, is going to talk about that and what she talks about it as a neuroscientist, I think is very interesting that when you feel your gut, it's often actually your unconscious bias is talking to you.  And unconscious bias in a selection decision is is completely inappropriate, but I think that we we're often influenced unconsciously by things that are deep rooted in us, not necessarily biases about, you know, race or things like that, but all kinds of biases that we carry throughout life. So I think one of the things, one of the reasons why we wanted to talk about decision making was awareness and being aware of the decisions you make and why you're making those decisions and why it is that you find yourself thinking about this decision context that you've told yourself you have.

00:10:38 Susy Kenefick

Have. Yeah. Now I'm not sure I 100% agree with Doctor Brennan on this idea that your gut instinct is maybe going to mislead you. Cause I think gut instinct is really, really important. But I think on a fundamental level.  

What the 37% concept, really means is that you do need to do some level of data collection. You can't just start off with a good instinct to make a decision on that basis. I think we need to really look at all the possibilities and look at the options open to us. But I think what the rule maybe does suggest is we don't need to do quite as much data collection and analysis as we think we do. So a very shorthand way of describing it might be to say that if you have a number of options available to you.

You really just need to look at 37% of them to get enough of the data sample, and within that sample you probably know enough about what it is that you're looking for.

00:11:23 Áine Maguire

Yeah. Well, going back to 37%, which I think is relevant here, one of the things that I noticed was doing a bit of research around it was it's used a lot in online dating, dating coaches talk about that. If you've looked at 37% of the available pool of whichever type of person you're looking to date

00:11:34 Susy Kenefick

That's right.

00:11:43 Áine Maguire

Right, what they say is not that you you've seen them all. So that's all there is. But it's, you know, enough about what works for you to then make a decision about what sort of person you want to date or who you want to date. And I thought that was very interesting. So I think that's a good, a good way of showing the economy of using rules like the 37% to help you with decision making.

00:12:07 Susy Kenefick

Well, I think it says something as well. I mean, I think that's certainly in the in the context of online dating, once you've seen 37%, you've most definitely seen enough, but it probably doesn't say something. Maybe too much. Yeah, I'm not sure if they're. They're the idea that there aren't better options out there. I think that's certainly the case. Maybe in that example, but it probably says something as well about two different types of decision makers that we might.

00:12:17 Áine Maguire

Maybe too much.

00:12:31 Susy Kenefick

Encounter and we do see this in our coaching work and you see this every day even with your friends, in your family, is there are optimizers and there are maximisers. In your family, is there are optimizers and there are maximisers. OK.

00:12:39 Áine Maguire

Yes, and dating coaches talk about.

00:12:41 Áine Maguire

That too, don't they?

00:12:41 Susy Kenefick

Absolutely, yeah. And optimizers might be the people who would be most likely to adhere to the 37% rule. They'd say, look, I've been out there, I've sampled a few people I've got a sense of what I like, what I don't like. I'm probably ready to make a decision.

So when the next good person who comes along satisfies a lot of my criteria and is, roughly speaking, somebody I'm relatively excited about. You know, having seen what's available to me, I'm willing to invest in that and make a commitment.

And, but maximisers are different. Maximisers are the ones who maybe we might call them romantic if we're talking about the dating, you know, environment.  That they, they're kind of always thinking there's something better out there for me. And I think it's really important when you are approaching your own decision making in life to know, as you say an awareness is key is to know whether you're a Maximiser or an optimizer? Because if you are a maximizer, I think that's something that's really important to be conscious of because you might be more difficult to satisfy in your decision making than optimizers.

00:13:37 Áine Maguire

Yes, I think that's a very good thing. And I my build on that is that I suppose the other thing that you come across is satisficers and umm, I mean I actually would like to be a satisficers. The next time I come back, I don't think I am one now.  Maybe we probably all are all about some things like so if I was buying a car, you know, I really don't care.  Does it, does it, do you put the key in does it go?  You know how, much does it take petrol or diesel. That's what I want to know. So I'm very satisfied, in fact I'd quite like to wake up tomorrow and find that somebody has bought a new car and put it outside my house for me.

But other decisions I would want to do a lot more research and to find out what the options are, but I think satisficers are people who can say there's a car. It's in the price range I want to pay, it's available and I'm going to buy it and life, I think, must be a dream for those kind of people so. I mean, I think the downside is if you make decisions too quickly, if there are far reaching decisions you have to live with the consequences. But I think life must be so much easier to go through if you're a satisficer.

00:14:40 Susy Kenefick

I think you're right about that and as you talk, it makes me realise I'm definitely not a satisficer. I mean, maybe in some context, yes, but in others know. And in fact I think I actually have strategies that I apply to try and reduce the number of options available to me and I can give you some examples of that. Yeah. For example, I don't eat meat, which is for lots of different reasons. But what I do find is when I go to a restaurant, it really helps with the selection process because the menu becomes so much more reduced. And there's only a couple of options that I can actually go for, so that makes life a lot easier.
And yeah, and I have definitely in the past, back when I used to be a carnivore where I had choice paralysis, looking at a menu and, you know, having that idea of like decision regret or, you know, order envy when you see somebody else at the table get something you think.

00:15:24 Áine Maguire

Yes

00:15:24 Susy Kenefick

Looks better than yours.

00:15:26 Susy Kenefick

And there's also something that I find incredibly difficult to purchase. Is a greeting card, and I really have no idea why, and I don't know. Is it because I think that the message on the front might say something about my by level of affection or nostalgia for the person to whom I'm giving the greeting card? But if I go into hallmark or one of those shops where they have a huge selection of cards, I find I simply cannot make a decision. You know? Should it be sweet and saccharine? Should it be thoughtful? Should it be funny? Should it have, you know, something rude on it? I don't know. I just cannot make that decision. And then how much do you spend, you know, at the end of the day? So what I do in order to mitigate against that choice process is it's just buy all my greeting cards like a corner shop or a petrol station where there is absolutely no choice.

00:16:07 Áine Maguire

Oh well, I'm going to make admissions here. I just buy a sort of bulk pack of greeting cards and use them then throughout the year  for everything. So except for special birthdays. So, but so yes, maybe I'm trying to avoid the same decision paralysis as you. Yeah, I mean, what I would say to that is and I think this is probably something else that's come to me as a learning from this podcast is there's there aren't good and bad decisions there are only consequences and hopefully there are consequences that lead to things for people and consequences that you're prepared to live with.  An you know, I think we we put a lot of particularly maybe in business, we put a lot of or in organisational life we put a lot of store by you know data and making good decisions.

00:16:54 Áine Maguire

And then we say, you know, I'm actually in sport as well. We say, you know ex made the wrong decision there or you know that was the wrong decision.

But how could it be the wrong decision? because it was a decision that had to be made. So not making a decision I think is usually the wrong decision. You, you know, you might find yourself in a position where you have to make a decision and it's about how it looked to you at the time and what the available insights were to you at the time. So You know, it's not necessarily. I'm not sure there are good and bad decisions. I think there are as we're talking about that now there are processes or what we now call hacks for making decisions. And what I think is interesting in, in, in the people we meet in this series.

Is the different styles that they have the different ways they have making decisions and how those decisions worked out for them. And I think there's definitely a lot of learning in that for all of us.

00:17:51 Susy Kenefick

Yeah, and  I think we would see that a lot on our coaching work as well with clients. Uh, because oftentimes somebody will come to you saying I've got this decision, I I'm contemplating making and I don't know what the, what the right answer is and they say sometimes a lot of a lot of the time it's about moving them away from this idea that it's right or it's wrong because ultimately none of us have a crystal ball and none of us know what the outcome of any decision is going to be. We can only do what we can do with the information available to us, so it's often more so about and I think we see this with the guests that we talked to you on the podcast, it's more about.

You know, this is what coaching is fundamentally about is helping that person learn more about themselves because really the only right decision is the one that feels authentic to you and is the one that is driven by your sense of your own values, your understanding of what's important to you.

You know, you feeling as though you're making the decision that is right for you relative to what you know about yourself and relative to your awareness around, you know, what, what's going to make you happy, what's going to interest you? What's going to motivate you ultimately? And that's, I think far more important than this idea that you can just crunch all the numbers and all the data and get something right or wrong because there's a lot of fear in decision making and I think it's not just the fear around making the decision, but oftentimes as you say, it's the fear about getting the decision wrong and sometimes really there aren't any consequences to that other than OK, well, maybe I have to make another set of decisions now.

00:19:14 Áine Maguire

Yeah. I mean, I think that's true. And I think that's probably brings coaching into the discussion in the sense that coaching is all about helping people to clarify what are the things they are going to think about. Of the many things I could think about, from what kind of greeting card to buy to what I want to do with the rest of my life, and all the many decisions in between the point about coaching is that people come out usually with a sense of these are the things that are going on for me that I really want to focus on or that I need to focus on. So I think that's that coaching and decision making are highly related because you know what you might get from working with the coach is a clarity about what are things you should think about or you want to think about. That might not be, you know, accessible to you might not be easy to think about or maybe just sort of bubbling beneath the surface.

Amid all the myriad of decisions from, you know, what you want to eat in a restaurant, to what you wear tomorrow, etcetera, that kind of cloud up our everyday.

00:20:22 Susy Kenefick

About but maybe just finally and before we wrap up, I was wondering was there anything in particular that you think you learned about decision making from our guests? Maybe how factors like? Gender probably, for example or age. And then we looked a lot of those at those kind of demographic. Factors but yeah, any reflections on that from you?

00:20:41 Áine Maguire

You. Yeah, two things. One, I think it's clear to me that as you know, more about yourself. You're better place to make braver decisions, but that they're more considered. And then on the gender piece, I did want to talk about that because I think gender and decision making is a whole topic. Maybe we'll do a podcast about that separately. But I think particularly in business there, you know there's more risk for women making decisions. And so as a result of it, you tend to see a more analytical style, where you see, particularly in business women leaders getting a lot of information and also a more community collaborative style where there's more tendency to make decisions that are that suit everybody that that fit everybody's needs or that are more collaboratively made and I think they are they're amazing traits, and they can they contribute so much at both in organisational life and in personal life, to be more collaborative around decision making is what gives organisations energy.  But often there's a price to be paid for that in terms of the perception, because I think as a society we have a perception that decision making is firm and swift and hard. And I think when you when you listen to how people make really important decisions about their lives, you realise that's not the case, that what good decisions are iterated rather than executed.

So that's my final thought.

00:22:00 Susy Kenefick

Yeah. No, I think you've touched on something there with gender and I don't want to be accused of making massive generalisations, but certainly from what we heard from people, perhaps you could say that maybe when it came to women making decisions that was a bit more fear, a bit more trepidation, a bit more consideration around all of it, trying to make, make sure that they were pleasing all the different Stakeholders,

Maybe that they had to consider in the context of that decision and perhaps with men it is a little bit more  decisive and maybe that comes from what you referred to earlier as the confidence piece as well. Maybe there's more confidence there or maybe it just comes back to the gender stereotype of feeling the need to be perceived as being decisive and emphatic when it comes to something. Whereas women, you know, they tend to be the caretakers that they like to take lots of different things into account, but I think maybe in in conclusion to all of that what I would say is important.

Is irrespective of your gender because as we know that there are generalisations there, it's important to be aware of what your decision making style is. And again that comes down to your values. You know your sense of self, who you are and how you operate. And when it comes to making big decisions, knowing what your decision making style I think is really critical. It's to know what that is. Want to know how that influences, how you make your choices.

00:23:11 Áine Maguire

Well thanks so much for that

00:23:16 Susy Kenefick

Thank you.

00:23:16 Susy Kenefick

(ending music playing quietly behind for final wrap up).

Thank you for listening to the 37%. If you want to know more about us, what we do and how we might be able to help you with the key decision you're considering, check out our website at www.persuasion.ie.