Continuing the theme of career and personal change, here’s an excellent book for anyone contemplating the possibility of a new career: Career Detection: Finding and Managing Your Career by Brian McIvor. It covers everything from identifying your transferable skills and benchmarking your expertise to dealing with rejection and creative alternatives to the CV. It’s part of a series of management books specifically designed with busy managers in mind.

You can even try before you buy, by downloading a sample chapter. Brian has over 30 years experience as a management skills training specialist, plus a long association with the Open University Business School, which is how we met. His areas of expertise include:

• Career planning and development
• Interpersonal and communication skills
• Corporate communications including corporate video and multimedia

For more details, see Brian’s website here.

Image: thinkpublic reused under Creative Commons Licence.

Doing some research today I stumbled upon this lecture ‘The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less‘ by a leading expert on choice and its relationship to well-being, Barry Schwartz.

According to Schwartz, Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, a little choice is good for you, it can increase your sense of control, but contrary to what we might logically think, having more choice is not better. In fact having too many options to choose from causes a number of problems such as:

* the inability to make a decision at all,
* making a bad decision,
* opportunity cost – worrying about ‘the one that got away’,
* expecting perfection – and getting disappointed instead.

All of these decrease your sense of satisfaction and well-being.

I’m sure you can relate this to your personal lives, but what about the world of work? Schwartz quotes six companies which are already applying the ‘paradox of choice’ principles in their businesses:

* Procter & Gamble (who also featured in this posting)
* CostCo
* Trader Joe’s
* Tesco
* Aldi
* Greek Diners in NYC

According to Schwartz, these companies are already wise to the risk that the customer may choose nothing if faced with too many options, therefore they deliberately offer a more limited selection than they could otherwise do.

It’s an interesting dilemma to be facing, whatever industry you’re in, and it’s one that’s going to get increasingly relevant as consumers become more affluent.

In the developed world, choice is taken for granted, it’s generally considered to be A Good Thing. Naturally you might therefore assume that having more choice was A Better Thing, but would you be right?

Next time you go supermarket shopping, take a few minutes to have a long hard look at the shelves in each food aisle – how many types of coffee, breakfast cereal and butter are there? Research by psychologist Barry Schwartz suggests that more choice isn’t necessarily beneficial, especially if you’re a maximiser.

Basically a maximiser is someone who, having decided to buy e.g. a digital camera researches all the models extensively on the internet to compare features and prices, talks to the assistants at the local camera shop, reads Which?, asks friends for their recommendations and buys copies of every photography magazine that they can find, before creating a spreadsheet listing their Top 10 favourite models and weighting all the required functions, the price and guarantee terms before they decide which to buy.

I kid you not, I have known someone do this.

The problem is that this person wasn’t actually happy with the camera they ended up buying; they worried that it wasn’t as good as the alternatives that they didn’t choose. They wondered whether they should have waited before buying anything when a newer, more up-to-date model came on the market a month later… This is what Schwartz refers to as “maximising”, i.e. trying to make the best choice out of the tens or hundreds of available options, when in reality not only is this extremely difficult to achieve, but one is left feeling regretful about ‘the one(s) that got away’.

Satisficers, on the other hand, are those people who accept a ‘good enough’ choice. If they were buying a digital camera, they might decide on the price range and the must-have features, then buy the first camera that fitted this bill. So maybe they might not get the very best model, but their decision is made more quickly and relatively painlessly.

Is the research on how people react to choice relevant to business? Over 10 years ago when Procter & Gamble reduced the number of varieties of Head and Shoulders shampoo it offered, its sales increased. It has been suggested that this sales growth reflected consumers’ positive reaction to optimised choice. Similarly, in the discussion on the pros and cons of choice on this BBC Radio 4 programme today* it was mentioned that Asda threatened to delist some well-known brands, because consumers don’t want duplication. Tyranny of choice was mentioned by one of Asda’s executive directors. So it would seem that the theory of choice and over-choice is being taken seriously by businesses.

You may not be surprised to hear that whilst maximising behaviour carries some benefits, it is also associated with regret, perfectionism, depression and lower well-being. We’ll be discussing the pros and cons of maximising and satisficing, as well as some techniques for overcoming the ‘tyranny of choice’ in later posts.

* If you’re interested in listening to the section on the paradox of choice in this R4 programme, it’s almost 26 minutes in.