19/10/2017 Winning the Brain Game Summary | Matthew E.

May

Book
Winning the Brain Game
Fixing the 7 Fatal Flaws of Thinking
Matthew E. May
McGraw-Hill, 2016
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When youre trying to puzzle out a

problem, your thinking can fail in
seven predictable ways.

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Rating

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9 Applicability
7 Innovation
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Recommendation
When you try to puzzle out a problem, your thinking can fail in seven predictable ways, such as leaping to conclusions, failing to ask
the right questions and self-censoring. Strategy and innovation consultant Matthew E. May, an award winning author, says you
can avoid becoming stuck in automatic thought patterns or prejudices if you recognize these relatively familiar, common cognitive
errors and frame your problems carefully. May condenses research about thought patterns into straightforward, basic advice that
can help you avoid sabotaging yourself. getAbstract recommends his lessons to executives and managers at all levels who are
relatively new to the field of cognitive errors.

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19/10/2017 Winning the Brain Game Summary | Matthew E. May

In this summary, you will learn

How peoples thinking often fails in predictable ways,
What seven cognitive flaws impede sound problem solving, and
How to combat these flaws and counteract fallacious thinking processes.

Take-Aways
When you try to puzzle out a problem, your thinking can fail in seven predictable ways. These cognitive errors are:
Leaping occurs when you jump to conclusions. Most people think of solutions before they fully understand the problem.
Fixation is an umbrella term for internal biases, mental shortcuts, rigidity and linear thinking, as well as go-to mind-sets,
blind spots, paradigms and models.
Overthinking makes problems worse by applying too much analysis.
Satisficing is seeking the easiest solution and using it instead of finding a better one.
Downgrading is the inclination to give up and set a lower goal. Instead, jump-start your thinking and keep seeking
effective solutions.
When a solution is not invented here, peoples first instinct is to reject it.
Self-censoring means denying your own creativity and ideas.
Thinking fall into two cognitive models: Fast thinking helps you deal with standard tasks or activities, such as walking or
catching a ball.
Slow thinking, which is more difficult, helps you tackle difficult, unusual issues.

SolvingProblems
In 2005, author Matthew E. May worked with 12 bomb technicians from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to help them
prepare for new forms of terrorism. The approaches the LAPD once used to counter terrorism had stopped working well because
the nature of terrorism had changed: Modern terrorists often function without leaders and act unpredictably.

The LAPDs bomb technicians saw themselves as skilled in solving problems. They believed they learned quickly. May invited them
to see themselves as innovators. He taught them that various approaches to perceiving a problem in a new light and then solving it
have certain things in common. These processes follow a structured pattern of questioning, framing, hypothesizing, ideating,
testing and reflecting.

May presented the technicians with a business problem he had previously offered to similar groups. He thought the bomb
technicians would repeat the solutions other people had attempted that failed to solve the problem. Then he asked the technicians
to see themselves as the owners of a fancy health club. As a perk, the club provides a bottle of popular, expensive shampoo in each
shower stall. The clubs leaders then discover that members steal 33% of the shampoo bottles. That costs the club money and
creates an inconvenience for other members.

May asked the techs to think of a solution that fell within certain constraints. The suggestion must stop people from stealing the
shampoo. Each shower stall still must have a full-size bottle of shampoo not a smaller, more expendable bottle. The solution
couldnt be burdensome for club members. It should cost little to implement and be easy to administer. The problem needed an
elegant solution the answer that achieves the most output with the least input.

Confronted with such problems, most peoples thinking and actions fail in predictable ways. The ways peoples thinking stumbles
fall into seven categories of flawed thinking, each of which can cause an excellent idea to fail:

1.Leaping
The bomb technicians approach to problem solving resembled the strategies most people use. They suggested myriad alternatives,
but spent little time formulating a hypothesis. They never asked why people took the shampoo bottles. Lacking that answer, they
jumped to conclusions.

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19/10/2017 Winning the Brain Game Summary | Matthew E. May

Grasping at convenient answers rarely works. In fact, it prevents you from coming up with well-considered solutions. To explain
why people leap, psychologists and neuroscientists suggest that individuals think in two main ways referred to as System 1 and
System 2. Author Daniel Kahnemans book, Thinking Fast and Slow, defines these systems in terms that psychologists Keith
Stanovich and Richard West suggested.

Fast thinking helps you deal with standard tasks, such as your normal activities like walking. It also helps with skills you learned in
your youth, such as catching a ball. The knowledge and assurance youve gained from experience informs your fast thinking. You
use it when faced with something unexpected. Most mental leaping mistakes occur when people use fast thinking.

You use slow thinking to tackle difficult issues that you dont encounter regularly. Slow thinking means considering your options in
a conscious, painstaking way. Slow thinking can help prevent you from making mistakes, and it keeps you on track. But slow
thinking often takes too much effort. Most of your life, youve preferred to use fast thinking. As a result, you use slow thinking only
when you feel forced into it.

Learn to stop jumping to conclusions by making your slow thinking emulate fast thinking. Turning off your natural inclination to
leap is virtually impossible. But you can address this tendency by redirecting the impulse to jump to a conclusion toward a more
fruitful path.

Framestorming the most useful tactic for slowing down your leap to conclusions combines framing and brainstorming. It
uses the same principles as brainstorming, that is, coming up with lots of ideas without initially evaluating them. Framestorming
concentrates on inventing questions not answers. Framestorming has the power to make your slow thinking seem like fast thinking.
Youll see that the way you frame a problem can make all the difference in solving it. To framestorm, follow three steps:

1. Cuethelanguageofframes To come up with a good frame, devise a specific, applicable question. In AMoreBeautiful
Question, Warren Berger suggests that in your quest for good answers, you must learn to ask proper questions.
2. Generatequestions Try to devise as many why, what if and how questions as possible.
3. Pickthetwobestquestions Once you write potential framing questions, select the two most appropriate and useful.
Then try to answer them.

2.Fixation
Fixation is an omnibus category that describes all typical human internal biases. People use these mental shortcuts to facilitate daily
living, but these assumptions also make it harder for them to change their mind or act flexibly. In this way, fixation and leaping to
conclusions are aligned.

To avoid becoming stuck in your prejudices, spend more time and attention on framing problems correctly. For instance, when the
bomb technicians thought about the shampoo in the health club, they initially considered the bottle only as a whole object.
Removing the top of the shampoo bottle solved the problem. Members wouldnt put open shampoo bottles into their gym bags.

You can think in a stronger way. To defeat fixation, take apart fixed ideas using a problem probing technique called inversion,
illustrated by the four steps Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz suggests to patients who have obsessive-compulsive disorder. To help them defeat
deceptive brain messages, he teaches them to relabel, reframe, refocus and revalue issues.

One potent method for inverting automatic thinking is called opposite world. It consists of flipping the most important elements
of a problem to their opposite. For instance, consider fundamentally altering a process, like having a restaurant tell you what to eat,
or eliminating a critical element in a problem, like the cap on a shampoo bottle or the keypad of a mobile phone, and then
conjecture about what might happen. Once you define a number of opposites, use each one to framestorm or brainstorm. Follow a
three-step approach:

1. Listthedefiningattributes What elements make up the problem?

2. Foreachelement,listtheextremeoppositeorreverse Stanford University teacher Tina Seelig, author of WhatI
WishIKnewWhenIWas20, helps students overcome problem blindness by reversing the elements of a traditional circus.
Instead of clowns, think no clowns, or no tents or no programming for kids. Or consider AirBnB, which inverts the
traditional hotel concept since it doesnt own property. Or consider Uber, a taxi service that doesnt own cars.
3. Framestormorbrainstorm Use the opposites as your starting point.

3.Overthinking
Overthinking is the human way of creating problems that might not exist in the first place. Its different facets include
overanalyzing, overplanning and adding needless expense and complexity. Human beings evolved as collectors and hoarders.
When it comes to problem solving, this often means they assume that the problem has more difficulties than it actually might
contain. People thus spend more time and effort than necessary attacking the problem.

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19/10/2017 Winning the Brain Game Summary | Matthew E. May

Combat overthinking with prototesting, a tactic that combines prototyping and testing. In general terms, when you build a
prototype, you follow your hunches about how it will work in the future. Instead, uncover your assumptions and test them using the
most basic, least expensive tactics to check your automatic conclusions.

People who venture into unmapped territory like taking risks. But if you want to survive, you must uncover the purpose behind your
plans. If you dont, your assumptions can become vulnerabilities that cause your plans to fail. Uncovering your assumptions can be
challenging. For instance, your premises may so intertwine that you cant separate and analyze them. The best way to identify
buried assumptions is to ask, What must be true? Dont try to pinpoint everything youre assuming. Ferret out the fixed ideas that
pose the greatest amount of risk to your plan. Then test their veracity.

4.Satisficing
Nobel laureate Herbert Simon devised the term satisficing part satisfying and part sufficing to describe the human tendency
to seek an option that requires the least effort and then to stop looking for a better solution.

Rotman School of Management professor Roger Martin suggests a way out of this delaying tactic. He proposes constructing better
alternatives by deciding to work harder to create solutions. Or, you can decide not to fall for simple choices just because they came
to you easily. Martin suggests using a process of synthesis to integrate the outstanding features of two divergent and yet satisfying
options. This approach can derail the normal human tendency to satisfice.

5.Downgrading
Most people dont like to lose and will do anything to avoid accepting failure, including reducing their goals to something
achievable. Instead, persist in looking for heroic solutions by attempting to sell the upside and downplay the downside.

Research into brainstorming shows that people usually run out of ideas after about 20 minutes. However, top performers persist in
their quest for answers. Despite psychological resistance, they push onward and continue to explore unconventional ideas.

Use a technique called jump-starting to combat your tendency to downgrade. Just as you jump-start a car to get it going by
hooking it up to another cars battery, look for a second source of power to kick your thinking back into action and strengthen
your resolve. For instance, construct a hopeful story depicting how your situation would change if you could solve your problem.
Then think in reverse and create a story about how you solved your dilemma by using the three stages of inquiry: the what, the what
if and the how.

6.NotInventedHere
People generally dont trust someone elses suggestions or answers. Few people spend any time thinking about why their previous
attempts to rectify a problem failed. Instead, they feel compelled to take action. This leads to an emphasis on doing something
anything rather than analyzing the roots of a challenge. Insisting on using your own idea just because you dont want to listen to
anyone else creates hazards for you and your organization.

Procter & Gamble launched a program to boost innovation in 2000. CEO A.G. Lafley, now retired, specified that 50% of P&G
innovations must come from outside the organization. Using a strategy similar to P&Gs approach can help you overcome the not-
invented-here syndrome by opening your mind to let in, leverage and recycle the ideas and solutions of others.

7.SelfCensoring
You indulge in self-censoring when you deny your own thoughts. This formidable flaw attacks and undermines your creativity.
Combat it with an approach that philosopher Adam Smith suggested about 150 years ago the Impartial Spectator. Act as if you
are an outsider considering your situation. With that new attitude, you can jettison prejudices and fears.

h MatthewE.May writes on strategy and innovation. He also wrote TheLawsofSubtraction:6SimpleRulesforWinninginthe

d InPursuitofElegance:WhytheBestIdeasHaveSomethingMissing, written with Guy Kawasaki.

personal use of dborah27@gmail.com

TheentireMars

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19/10/2017 Winning the Brain Game Summary | Matthew E. May

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