In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Mike Borruso chats with Elspeth Kirkman, chief program officer at Nesta, about her new book, Decisionscape: How Thinking Like an Artist Can Improve Our Decision Making (MIT Press, March 2024). Kirkman draws parallels between how artists create and how we make choices in our everyday lives. The book challenges us to understand why we make certain decisions and calls for us to trade our biases for fresh, new perspectives. An edited version of the conversation follows, and you can also watch the full video at the end of this page.
Why did you write this book?
The world of decision science is disconnected from other fields from which it could learn. My academic background is in the humanities, and I set out to bring together insights from the arts that could help sharpen our understanding of why and how people make decisions, what they value, and how decision making manifests in our society.
What can decision makers learn from artists about perspective?
In the book, I showcased four things an artist does deliberately—things that others don’t necessarily do intentionally—when we form our perspectives in decision making. What if we were more like artists in how we approach our decisions?
Artists use distance and diminution to draw big things in the foreground and small things in the background. Psychologically, we operate similarly. We tend to downplay anything that seems distant, be it a future event or something happening to a stranger, and ignore its significance in our decision-making process.
The next piece is viewpoint. Just as an artist considers the best vantage point for a viewer to appreciate their work, we too should acknowledge that we all perceive things differently. Recognizing this can help us avoid making hasty judgment errors in our decision making.
We operate and make decisions within bounds that are entirely invisible to us. What unspoken rules could we break if we knew what the rules were?
The third piece is composition. When an artist is working, they’ll consider what the whole picture will look like. They may be drawing a pear or grapes in immense detail, but details and the big picture aren’t always congruent. At times, the details differ from the sum of their parts, and when we make decisions, they can also be different in that way. We can often break decisions down, take their small aspects, and think about them in isolation. When you aggregate all those aspects, you may realize your decision isn’t right, and you’ll come up with something different.
I call the final piece frame. It’s not a purposeful thing that an artist does, but it is art as a cultural product. It’s a reflection of the time in which art was created and the values and expectations the artist held based on the society in which they were operating in. It changes what they draw, what the subject is, and what the style is.
Our decisions are like that, too. We operate and make decisions within bounds that are entirely invisible to us. What unspoken rules could we break if we knew what the rules were? We don’t make unbound decisions that aren’t deliberate. Additionally, it’s not always worth addressing something that’s not urgent, not in your face, and not in the media the same way you would as something in the distant future. It’s about selecting your bounds.
What is a ‘decisionscape’?
A decisionscape is the cognizant equivalent of an artist’s canvas. If an artist draws something objective, the art isn’t focused on one particular point, etcetera. Your decisionscape is the mental equivalent; it’s what you put into consideration, how you foreground and background things, and where you put the focus of your attention.
How can one’s biases affect their decisionscape?
We all have biases, which result from how our brains are wired and the culture we’ve been immersed in. Individually, we also have biases based on who we are and how we grew up. Biases aren’t necessarily harmful. Typically, they help us make shortcuts in our decision-making processes that serve us well most of the time. It’s not always worth the mental energy it takes to access every micro-detail of a decision.
We have certain biases and “rules of thumb”—it could be to “go with the path of least resistance” or “follow the crowd wherever possible.” These rules tend to serve us well. Conversely, when our biases are wrong in undermining ways, they cause us to make far worse decisions than we may have made otherwise.
One of my favorite examples in the book is how temporal landmarks distort judgment. This is how we relate to time and how we use time to structure days, weeks, months, and years. Additionally, I include an analysis of government spending that shows that a dollar at the start of the financial year is worth a very different amount compared with a dollar at the end of the financial year.
We’re saying, “I’ll spend it tomorrow, spend it tomorrow, spend it tomorrow.” Then, it begins to loom at the end of the financial year. You know that you must use it, or you’ll lose it. Suddenly, you’re spending at five times the rate you would normally spend to meet that deadline. It is an entirely artificial construct that we’ve allowed, for good reason, to dictate how we make decisions; it has distorting effects at the national level.
What’s the most harmful bias in your experience?
The bias with the most significant effect is when you do nothing. It’s what we tend to go with. People don’t often engage with choice, and that’s why they end up doing nothing. An example is the change in retirement savings legislation by the UK government. Previously, when starting a new job, individuals would fill out paperwork to be enrolled in their workplace pension program. Now, with the change, a person isn’t required to fill out paperwork to be enrolled but must do so to opt out. This had a dramatic effect. Currently, millions more people are saving for retirement than there were before this legislation went into practice. This showcases that people have enough to do when starting a new job and that filling out a form regarding their pension selection isn’t at the top of the list. Instead, they default to what’s preselected for them.
How can leaders who aren’t policy makers minimize people’s negative biases?
There are various things that leaders can do to minimize negative biases, such as inviting diverse viewpoints and perspectives and ensuring there are “cool off” periods for decisions. For example, if you set deadlines in a way such that everything is happening at once, it’s frantic, and you’ll have to make impactful decisions in quick succession. It’s like the previous financial year-end example.
Instead, you can spread out your decisions to ensure that you lock in your working hypothesis, which is based on all the information you have. Premortems are also good activities to do at the start of a new project. In a premortem, you gather your team to imagine a future outcome. Additionally, you and your team can assess what went wrong and note how things didn’t go as planned. If a project was a disaster, write the story of how it went bad and draw a line through the catastrophe to help make the small decisions for today.
In the book, I write about good construal levels; it’s how concrete and tangible something has to be to have big, visionary, strategic ideas about it. For those with a low construal level, it’s hard for them to understand how those more extensive details work. Instead, they may stick to budget planning or a granular type of activity. Conversely, someone with a high construal level can work on major strategic ideas, see the details, and forecast what could go wrong.
Why is it easier to rewire processes than people?
Rewiring people instead of processes is an uphill battle. Trying to change people isn’t going to work. For example, take a coworker who is impulsive. Simply asking them, “Could you not be impulsive?” isn’t the best approach. The best interventional decision making is when people don’t notice anything has changed. For something like obesity and health, the overriding message is telling people to go on a diet. Instructing people to start a diet often doesn’t work. If it does work, that messaging can be potentially harmful. What is helpful includes actions like slightly changing the formulation and processing of food so that it’s marginally healthier or changing the way food is placed on store shelves and the portion sizes. People are less sensitive to those types of changes, and they can have large effects over time without anyone noticing anything different.
Rewiring people instead of processes is an uphill battle. Trying to change people isn’t going to work.
How does expressive writing help people make decisions?
Expressive writing is quite interesting. James Pennebaker is its originator; it’s a writing style that includes writing without talking, without thinking too hard, without criticizing what you’re writing, and just letting your hands and words flow. You do this type of writing periodically over a few weeks, and it begins to have a powerful psychological effect. No one reads your writing, but you’ll start to process your thoughts and feelings more effectively.
Once your writing is complete, you have the freedom to dispose of it as you wish. In some studies, individuals have chosen to keep their writings, observing how they evolve over time. They notice a shift toward more constructive, coherent, and succinct expressions, which is a testament to their personal growth.
The shift in pronoun use is one of the most exciting features of expressive writing. In James Pennebaker’s book [The Secret Life of Pronouns], he writes that people tend to start with first-person pronouns. It’s all about them. As people continue to express themselves in writing, this begins to change. You can see a person letting go of how they write about things; they become psychologically distant. “It’s not about me anymore; it’s about the situation.” When it is about them, the question is, “What can I do to improve?” Expressive writing affects well-being, healing, various health trials, unemployment, and other outcomes you wouldn’t expect it to reach.
What’s the role of pattern recognition in decision making?
Pattern recognition is why our brains are amazing. It’s interesting because AI has caused humans to have a slight existential crisis and question whether we’re great at pattern recognition. Simple, coded rules help us make decisions using pattern recognition. We’re equipped to identify types of problems based on archetypes and shapes. We say, “When I see problems with this shape, I tend to apply this rule.” Our brains look for patterns to simplify decision making. It can also mean we look for patterns when there may not be one for a particular issue.
Alternatively, we may encounter a pattern and draw probable but incorrect conclusions. This explains why we buy into conspiracy theories or walk around our living room looking for our phone and not realizing it’s in our hands. It doesn’t fit the pattern we’re looking for.
How does the way we classify colors affect decision making?
Color is a continuum. If you pick a pixel randomly on a computer, you’ll see a number value for the color instead of a color name. We insert names to identify colors. We say, “There’s a boundary between red and orange. On one side, the pixel is red; on the other, it’s orange.” That’s just one example of something that feels like a real-world rule, but it’s constructed in our shared imagination.
In various languages, color boundaries are drawn in various places. Scientists run experiments that change how we see color rather than just how we categorize it. Imagine that you’re looking at a row of pixels. You can take pixels that are 100 pixels apart and put them on either side of the color boundary. Take a purple and blue pixel, for example; people can discern the color difference much more easily than if you selected two pairs of blue that are 100 pixels apart. That 100-pixel difference is what your eye should be able to notice, but we’ve put color names on each pixel. Those names enable us to better understand the difference between the two colors.
What surprised you the most while writing this book?
A lot of things surprised me, but I was most surprised that the book didn’t look exactly like the plan I submitted at the beginning. I doubt that it’s a unique experience. I believe that everyone who’s ever written a book has encountered the same thought.
Another surprise I encountered while writing and researching was that “a hammer can look like a nail.” It was interesting to uncover the various spheres, disciplines, and areas of life in which I could see parallels. The book covers a range of topics—it could discuss reality TV at one point and then jump to how the Greeks talk about color, etcetera. There’s something for everyone. One of my ambitions was to bring together disciplines that generally don’t talk to each other; that felt like a success.
The book’s art analogy leans on European Renaissance ideas. Can other movements help decision makers?
It’s hard to master excellent decision making, but organizations that are great decision makers have broken the rules a bit. It would be ideal for an organization to have prespecified policies, and everything would go according to plan, but life doesn’t work that way.
There’s an art to clearly planning ahead, but true innovation often requires a deliberate departure or rejection of the older way of doing things. This courageous act of going against one’s own rules can lead to new and exciting possibilities.
In Decisionscape, I discuss perspective. There’s the story of how to represent the illusion of depth, and you realize that depth is only one way of using art.
There’s an art to clearly planning ahead, but true innovation often requires a deliberate departure or rejection of the older way of doing things.
I talk about how Chinese art, the Italian Renaissance, and linear perspective took the world by storm. During the time, people naively questioned why Chinese artists weren’t obsessed with realism and humanism. Chinese artists were certainly capable of creating realistic art, but their purpose was not to re-create the world. Instead, they sought to depict something beyond one person’s perspective. This unique approach, paralleling projection, is what gave rise to Chinese art, allowing viewers to see much more than what a single human eye could perceive.
It’s weird to look at that kind of art because it can be uncanny if you’re unfamiliar with it. You can’t see why it’s unrealistic, but you know you wouldn’t be able to see all the details by yourself. What’s so interesting is that when you think about the emergence of cubism that came later, you could see the same thing from different perspectives by taking the picture apart and rearranging it.
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