PDF Summary:Smarter Faster Better, by Charles Duhigg

Many of us wish that we could become more productive, or increase the productivity of our organization. However, it’s not always clear how to do this. You may believe that you simply need to work longer hours or push yourself to work harder. But doing so won’t necessarily increase your productivity. Instead, you need to make smarter decisions about how you motivate yourself, focus, set goals, and use data effectively.

Smarter Faster Better explores the choices we can make to boost personal and organizational productivity. Learn how to build a productive team, how combining different types of goals can increase your productivity, and how the makers of Disney’s Frozen avoided box-office disaster by innovating productively.

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Bayesian Cognition

Bayesian cognition involves using your assumptions about the world and how it operates to make accurate predictions. Your brain forms these assumptions based on experiences that you internalize and patterns that you notice. When you’re faced with a situation that seems to fit a previously observed pattern, you can apply your assumptions to predict, hopefully accurately, how this situation will progress.

It’s important to note that Bayesian cognition only helps to make your predictions more accurate if your assumptions are accurate. If you base a prediction on a flawed assumption, it follows that the prediction will be flawed, too.

For example, a study required a group of students to predict how much longer an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh would rule if he’d already been on the throne for 11 years. Many students assumed that a pharaoh’s lifespan—and therefore his total time on the throne—would follow the same pattern as the lifespan of a European king from a later period. However, this assumption was flawed. In reality, pharaohs had much lower life expectancies than these kings. Therefore, their rules were much shorter. The students’ incorrect assumption led to bad predictions: They predicted that the pharaoh would rule for on average another 23 years. Meanwhile, the data suggested that he would only rule for another 12 years.

You can increase the accuracy of your assumptions by seeking out as much information about the world as possible. In particular, you should make sure to look out for examples of failure. The brain tends to ignore information about how we and others have failed, and it instead focuses on examples of success. This can lead to your assumptions being unrealistically skewed towards success. You need to actively work to counterbalance this cognitive bias if you want your assumptions, and therefore your predictions, to be accurate.

Principle #5: Become a Productive Innovator

An innovator is someone who formulates fresh and exciting ideas. You may not think of yourself as an innovator, but innovation is likely a crucial aspect of your job. If you make your creative process more productive, you’ll increase your overall productivity. But what makes a productive innovator?

To innovate in a productive way, you need to come up with ideas in a timely manner without compromising on quality. Implementing four principles can help you to do this.

#1: Combine Old Ideas in New Ways

Firstly, you can combine old ideas in new ways. For instance, Benjamin Spock combined two existing ideas—traditional childcare methods and Freudian psychological theories—to innovate his best-selling work, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.

This is much quicker than trying to come up with completely new ideas. However, it still retains the creative element that distinguishes innovation from simply copying someone else’s ideas.

#2: Use Your Past Experiences and Emotions to Validate and Generate Ideas

Secondly, you can use your past experiences and emotions to validate and generate ideas. You can use your emotions to check whether the old ideas you’re using are of a high quality, or if they’re just tired clichés. How you feel about those ideas—whether they feel fresh or just predictable—will help you to decide whether they’re usable or not.

For example, the creator of West Side Story, Jerome Robbins, instructed his co-writers to completely re-write the show’s opening because after reading it, he felt that it was too predictable and, therefore, boring. The opening scene went from being a traditional discussion between characters to an iconic and revolutionary communication of ideas through dance.

You can also use your past emotions and experiences as inspiration for new ideas. These ideas are almost guaranteed to feel genuine; after all, they’re based on your real life.

#3: Embrace Frustration and Anxiety as Fuel for New Ideas

The third principle you can follow is embracing frustration and anxiety as fuel for new ideas. For instance, if you’re feeling frustrated about a certain area of your life, innovate a solution to relieve this irritation. You might just come up with the next big idea.

Needing to innovate quickly can leave us feeling anxious. This anxiety can cause us to enter a state called “creative desperation.” In this state, we spend our time frantically searching for a good idea. We desperately formulate unusual combinations of old ideas in the hope that we strike gold. By doing this, we might just stumble upon an amazing idea that we would have otherwise ignored.

#4: Remain Open to Alternative Ideas

The final principle that can help you to innovate productively is remaining open to alternative ideas. When you’ve finally innovated an amazing new concept, you may shut yourself off to new ideas. You might become so focused on the idea you’ve already come up with that you refuse to consider that there might be a better approach out there. This can cause problems if you’re only midway through the creative process and need to keep innovating to meet your goal.

You can force yourself to remain open to alternative concepts by making an effort to re-examine your ideas. In doing so, you recognize that there may be a way to make your idea even better. You should also try to retain emotional distance from your ideas to prevent yourself from becoming too attached to them.

Finally, in a team environment, you may be able to restart the innovation process by slightly adjusting the dynamic of the team. By moving people into slightly different roles, you force them to look at ideas from a new perspective. This creates the conditions for innovation to thrive once more.

Principle #6: Use Data Productively

The final principle that can help you to improve your personal productivity is using data productively. In our technologically advanced society, we’re surrounded by data almost all of the time. However, simply having access to this data doesn’t guarantee we’ll use it productively. We may even become so overwhelmed by the amount of data out there that we stop taking it in. We enter a state of information blindness.

To avoid information overload and interact productively with the data that you need and that interests you, you need to do something with it. This could mean writing out the information by hand, plotting it on a graph, or explaining the information to another person.

Interacting with data in this way is sometimes called “creating disfluency.” Disfluency involves adding extra effort to the process of absorbing information, thus making the process a bit more difficult. Adding this effort and difficulty requires you to consider the data more deeply and pay extra attention to it. You process the data in a thorough way, leading to the information sticking in your brain.

Using Data to Solve Problems and Make Better Decisions

Another way to use data productively is to use it to solve problems and make decisions. You can do this using the engineering design process.

The engineering design process requires you to consider all of the available data before making a decision or solving a problem. You can then use this data to formulate different approaches to your dilemma. Finally, you can evaluate which approach is likely to see the greatest success.

Using the process helps you to break free of one of the brain’s unhelpful automatic processes: trying to streamline decision making as much as possible. The brain loves to simplify things and often uses a limited frame of reference to view decisions and problems. It tries to resolve these issues based on just one or two variables. In contrast, the engineering design process encourages you to analyze all of the different variables that may affect your choice, a process similar to probabilistic thinking. You’re more likely to make a good decision if you use this thorough approach.

Improving Organizational Productivity

Principle #7: Build a Productive Team

An important aspect of organizational productivity is building productive teams. In a team situation, making sure you’re personally productive isn’t always enough for you to achieve your goals. The team as a whole needs to be productive. But how can you build a productive team?

Research suggests that the membership of a team is not all that important when it comes to productivity. The “who” doesn’t really matter. Instead, a team’s productivity is influenced by the norms that its members adopt.

Norms are the unspoken and unwritten rules that we abide by. Studies have shown that certain norms are more likely to foster productive teamwork. In particular, creating a norm of psychological safety is crucial.

If a team is psychologically safe, its members feel that they can speak their minds and share their ideas without fear of retribution. They feel that mistakes won’t be harshly criticized, and that dissenting views won’t be silenced.

Creating an atmosphere of psychological safety is usually the onus of a team’s leader. The leader must ensure that two conditions are in place:

• All team members equally participate in discussions.
• Team members are sensitive to the emotions of their colleagues and acknowledge these emotions appropriately.

Team leaders can create these conditions by modeling appropriate behaviors themselves. For instance, if a team member has been particularly quiet in a group discussion, they can encourage that person to speak and thus participate equally. Likewise, the leader should monitor and respond to team members’ emotions. Leading by example will hopefully allow psychological safety to flourish.

Principle #8: Manage a Productive Workforce

Managing a productive workforce is another important facet of organizational productivity. According to Duhigg, workers become more productive when they believe two things: that they have the authority to make decisions, and that their managers trust them and want them to succeed. It’s the responsibility of managers to create a company culture in which these two statements are true.

One technique that managers can implement to create such a culture is lean manufacturing. In lean manufacturing, the person closest to a problem is given the authority to make decisions on how to solve it. This is true of all workers, from janitors to executives. Everyone is given a small amount of control and responsibility. In short, all workers have the authority to make decisions, even if these decisions are relatively small. Therefore, lean manufacturing satisfies the first element of Duhigg's metric.

However, implementing lean manufacturing isn’t always simple. Even if every worker is given a small amount of control, they may not feel comfortable enough to use it. They may fear punishment if they make a bad choice or act against the wishes of their superiors. To help workers feel comfortable enough to implement the practices of lean manufacturing, managers should also try to create a commitment culture.

What Is a Commitment Culture?

As the name suggests, this is a company culture in which employers make clear their commitment to each employee’s growth and success. In return, each employee shows commitment to their employer. This mutual commitment breeds an atmosphere of trust: employers trust employees to work effectively and diligently, while employees trust that employers have their backs and won’t punish them needlessly. In such an atmosphere, lean manufacturing can flourish.

But how can you create a commitment culture? Implementing lean manufacturing can in itself help to lay the groundwork for such a culture. Giving each employee some degree of decision-making power shows that you value them and their expertise. It also demonstrates that you trust them to make good decisions.

Other steps that managers can take to create a commitment culture include investing in employee training; offering generous employee benefits; and refusing to lay off employees unless strictly necessary.